I can’t say I had a burning desire to re-read Kurt Vonnegut earlier this month; rather, there was this slim paperback by him – Cat’s Cradle – on my shelves, sitting between fellow Americans Updike and Wharton, that I thought would be an easy lightweight read for the longish journey I was about to undertake. So I took it, and re-read it, mostly while travelling.
Well, I had no problem getting through the 179 pages of this – what, exactly? Science fiction? Fantasy? Whatever … It has an easy, readable style, and short chapters, over a hundred of them. And I have to say that while it wasn’t as good as the only other Vonnegut I’ve read – Slaughterhouse Five, perhaps his best-known novel – it did have some nice passages. But overall, I was not enthused. What I remember from my first reading (in 1985) was the idea of ice-nine, an invention of Dr Felix Hoenikker, the (fictional) father of the atomic bomb: as its name implies, it’s a kind of ice –but one formed from water that freezes at a much higher temperature, so endangering anything it comes into contact with.
It takes a while to get to ice-nine, even though my Penguin paperback’s blurb describes Cat’s Cradle as ‘the story of ice-nine and just what it meant when the stuff got loose’. Rather, the first-person narrator’s principal focus is tracking down Hoenikker’s adult children, at the same time giving us some information about Bokononism, an invented religion whose ‘bittersweet lies’, we learn on the novel’s first page, were ‘unknown beyond the gravel beaches and coral knives that ring this little island … of San Lorenzo’.
It’s on this fictional Caribbean island (a crowd of whose ‘oatmeal-coloured’ inhabitants are condescendingly described: ‘Every person had teeth missing. Many legs were bowed or swollen’) that the story ends up, and where the narrator discovers the aforesaid religion. Thus Vonnegut is able to display his well-known scepticism about religion, or at least about institutionalised Christianity. For instance: ‘It was the belief of Bokonon that good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping the tension between the two high at all times’ (chapter 47).
To my mind, there’s too much about San Lorenzo and not enough about ice-nine – but rather than go on about my disappointments, let me conclude with a passage that seems to display Vonnegut’s strengths:
Frank gave me a straight answer. He snapped his fingers. I could see him dissociating himself from the causes of the mess; identifying himself, with growing pride and energy, with the purifiers, the world-savers, the cleaners-up.
‘Brooms, dustpans, blowtorch, hot plate, buckets,’ he commanded, snapping, snapping, snapping his fingers. (chapter 109)
I’ve already decided what my next re-reading task will be – and I’m pretty sure I’m going to enjoy it more than Cat’s Cradle …
Old geezer re-reading 