Last week I saw an item on one of the online news services about the balloons sent aloft by Japan in the latter stages of World War Two. These balloons were of paper made from the bark of Mulberry trees, the same trees that silkworms eat. The balloons were inflated with lighter than air gas and sent aloft to be carried by prevailing upper air winds from Japan to the north American continent. The balloons carried incendiary/explosive bombs and a system for dropping ballast to keep them aloft on their journey. The article included video of American planes' gun cameras as they shot a balloon down and aerial pictures of a balloon flaccid and spent in a fallow crop field in the interior of the country. These balloons were responsible for the only civilian casualties on United States soil in World War II. Five children and the new pastor's wife on a CMA church picnic near Bly in southern Oregon found and inadvertently triggered the explosives. The War Department had known of the balloons but did not want to panic the population with the news that Japanese warfare was reaching America.
Liam Callanan's novel, The Cloud Atlas, weaves a mystical fabric on the structure of the history of the balloons. It is voiced by an Alaskan priest holding vigil for Yup'ik shaman who has been his adversary, teacher, friend and sharer of personal history. Stories unfold, move separately and together through the years from the war to the present like the winds carrying the balloons and the clouds. While I was reading the Cloud Atlas I was impatient for the stories, to resolve, to have a more familiar structure. but now a few days past I see the people and the stories in the moving air, sometimes solid, sometimes spirit, and I am very satisfied.
I only wonder from where and why that story online came and why it appeared now, just as I read this book.
The Cloud Atlas, Liam Callanan, is on the shelves in contemporary fiction at Anchor Books and Coffee. When you are seeking refuge from the gray-black solid, water bearing clouds of November, we have a warm dry place from which to travel on the written word.
