One of the books Amazon sent me was David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I started reading it over breakfast this morning, and took the tram in to work so that I didn’t have to stop. Here’s an excerpt from the first page, followed by some thoughts (there’s a long post brewing about Vellum, also, but that will have to wait until I finish my second time through it).

Through rotting kelp, sea cocoa-nuts & bamboo, the tracks led me to their maker, a white man, his trowzers & Pea-jacket rolled up, sporting a kempt beard & an oversized Beaver, shovelling & sifting the cindery sand with a tea-spoon so intently that he noticed me only after I had hailed him from ten yards away. Thus it was, I made the acquaintance of Dr Henry Goose, surgeon to the London nobility. […]

Had the doctor misplaced anything on that dismal shore? Could I render assistance? Dr Goose shook his head, knotted loose his ‘kerchief & displayed its contents with clear pride. ‘Teeth, sir, are the enamelled grails of the quest in hand. In days gone by this Arcadian strand was a cannibals’ banqueting hall, yes, where the strong engorged themselves on the weak. The teeth, they spat out, as you or I would expel cherry stones. But these base molars, sir, shall be transmuted to gold & how? An artisan of Piccadilly who fashions denture-sets for the nobility pays handsomely for human gnashers. Do you know the price a quarter pound will earn, sir?’

I confessed I did not.

‘Nor shall I enlighten you, sir, for ’tis a professional secret!’

All right, so I’m a sucker for the grotesque. But I call that an auspicious beginning.

I’m also surprised and delighted to find that this episode takes place in New Zealand — specifically, on the Chatham Islands, around the 1830s or ’40s. I picked this early (at least the NZ connection) by a number of familiar or semi-familiar Māori words in the descriptions. I’m sort of in two minds about this; I’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated by Borges to despise the overuse of “local colour”, but when it’s my local colour it gives me a wee warm glow inside. It’s a hard life we expats live.

Actually the story so far has also prompted me to seek out some of the real history of the Chathams. It’s presented here as very much the shameful side of the New Zealand colonisation, as more or less a genocide by the Māori against the Moriori with the complicity of the Pakeha. This is the opinion of only one of the characters, who also describes the Moriori as “noble savages” and generally fails to make a particularly strong case, but it does make me realise how little I know about the period, especially about relations with the Moriori. (For non-Kiwis: the Chathams are a group of islands to the east of the rest of NZ. Their inhabitants were called the Moriori, as distinct from the Māori who were living on the two main islands when the Pakeha –Europeans– arrived.) Care to enlighten me, E?

Actually, I already had to do some research to construct this entry. The dates come from the comment by the narrator that the Union Jack was planted on the Chathams “just fifty years ago”. Wikipedia does the rest… and leaves me strongly suspecting that the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840, Mum will be proud –if a little suspicious– to know I remembered that!) is going to feature somehow in the narrative.

All this from the first 14 pages! An auspicious beginning indeed.