Cat's Cradle

by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

call number: F Vonn

This is one of Vonnegut's early novels, written a few years before "Slaughterhouse-Five" but already showing many of his characteristic concerns and stylistic tics. Like most of Vonnegut's books, this one has a bad attitude, in this case directed at religion, with a few swipes at the military-industrial complex.

One of the narrative threads deals with a shadowy substance called ice-nine. Ice-nine was invented by a military contractor because a general "felt that one of the aspects of progress should be that Marines no longer had to fight in mud." Ice-nine is a special crystalline form of frozen water that remains solid at room temperature, and contact between it and wet water causes the wet water to crystallize also. Throwing even the smallest particle of ice-nine into a swamp or bog would cause the whole thing to solidify, and the Marines would march across the former obstacle. The narrator realizes immediately that if ice-nine ever was used, it would continue its crystallizing chain-reaction until all the water in the world was solid.

The other narrative thread deals with the hypothetical impoverished Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, and the hypothetical religion of Bokononism embraced by its natives. Two Americans, McCabe and Johnson, were shipwrecked on San Lorenzo long ago and invented the religion to soothe the people's misery. Johnson (pronounced "Bokonon" by the natives) is the religion's prophet, namesake, and front man. "Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies."

This is one of Vonnegut's funniest books, although most of the humor is in the form of one-liners (or at least one-paragraphers) rather than inherent in the characters or the situation. The tone of the book gradually turns grim towards the end, partly because it encompasses the near-end of the world caused by the escape of ice-nine, but it also just seems to run out of energy.