Cloud Atlas

Read the book – don’t see the movie. For those of you who saw The Wachowski’s film treatment of David Mitchell’s novel [Cloud Atlas], there is so much more waiting for you in its pages. Don’t misunderstand, the film was a grand gesture, taking a book that many people deemed unfilmable and giving it a visual treatment. It was epic, visually stunning, and challenging. But in the attempt to give Mitchell’s voice to the film, the Wachowski’s opted to slide in and out of the six nested stories rather than tell them in the order that Mitchell does. The result is herky-jerky at best, making it difficult to sink into any of the characters or stories, like the reader does

For the uninitiated, Mitchell’s novel offers six stories show more set in wildly different times and locales. Each account is told in a distinct voice that is consistent with the time and place of the story. He links each of the stories through some slight connection: a character that recurs or a manuscript from one character finds its way into the hands of a character from a different story. But the connections are deeper for Mitchell than these surface links. One person from each story bears an unusual birthmark in the shape of a comet. The suggestion is that these are reincarnated souls, living successive lives in different times, vaguely aware of their previous lives and connected to them in some way. Each of their stories is interrupted mid-stream for another, in one case, in the middle of a sentence.

Mitchell starts with Adam Ewing, a San Francisan sailing the Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century, who is the unwitting victim of a deceitful doctor. The doctor falsely diagnoses Ewing with a parasite so that he can slowly poison the man and rob him. Ewing journals the journey. Robert Frobisher, a young, down-on-his-luck musician and composer from the 1930’s, interrupts Ewing’s account. Frobisher seeks out a reclusive master composer and auditions as his amanuensis. He soon learns that their partnership is not at all equal, and begins composing his own work alone, the Clous Atlas Sextet. During his time in the composer’s home, Frobisher finds Ewing’s journal and reads it. He then sends his sextet, along with Ewing’s journal, to his friend, Sixsmith, to whom Frobisher’s story is told in the form of letters. Sixsmith reappears in the next story, a noirish mystery featuring Luisa Rey, a slightly radical journalist for a kiss-and-tell rag. In 1975, Rey meets Sixsmith, now an engineer, in an elevator, and he sets her onto a conspiracy surrounding the opening of a nuclear reactor. After Sixsmith is murdered, Rey collects Frobisher’s letters to him from Sixsmith’s motel room, and reads them, learning that she and Frobisher share the comet-like birthmark. Rey’s story makes its way to Timothy Cavendish, a publisher of no particular account. Cavendish reads Rey’s story as a submission for publication while he is on the run from the hoodlum brothers of another seedy author who believes that Cavendish owes him money. Mistakenly imprisoned in a Nurse Ratched-run nursing home, Cavendish must lead his cohorts on a daring and comical escape, one that he decides to chronicle in his own memoir. Somni-451, a fabricated clone in a dystopian world, recounts watching a film version of Cavendish’s story, while she is interrogated. Somni reveals her awakening at the hands of rebels who seek to abolish a corporate government that has enslaved the world in a forced consumer state. Further into the future, Zachary describes the world that resulted from Somni’s revolution, a world stripped of most civilization. Somni’s interrogation features prominently in Zachary’s world, as she has become a deity of sorts, and her interrogation a morality tale, encapsulating the principles of righteousness.

Zachary’s tale is the only one that isn’t interrupted, serving as a fulcrum to push the narrative back through the others, back to the beginning. In the conclusion of Ewing’s journal, as he describes his attacker’s confession, Mitchell’s theme is the most clear. The doctor tells Ewing, “The weak are meat, the strong do eat.” The victimization of each of the comet-marked souls in Mithchell’s novel is never more clear than with Ewing. It is a much more direct and intimate feast for the doctor. The constant predation of the human world was Mitchell’s point all along. While each of these characters are fed upon though, they also survive, each chipping away at the chains and offering the next incarnation a chance at survival.

Bottom Line: A story that transcends time and place, yet is firmly rooted in several times and places.

5 bones!!!!!
A favorite for the year. show less

Reading Cloud Atlas is like doing a jigsaw puzzle: bits and pieces, fragments, clues coming together to create a surprising whole when completed. The trick is to scrutinize each puzzle piece and yet not lose track of the big picture. So I felt with David Mitchell's "nesting dolls" book, a collection of six stories that interlock one within the other. I had to analyze the text for clues and at the same time hang on for the ride that was the plot. Not a book you polish off in a single sitting, but a satisfying and thought-provoking read that you can't leave behind when you close the book on the last page.

The structure of Mitchell's book is unusual. In the first half of the book you climb a mesa a step at a time as you read the first half show more of each story. The middle chapter is the only one to not be divided. The second half of the book you descend back to ground level, reading the second half of each story in reverse order. Thus the analogy of matroyshka's or nesting dolls.

The book also seems to be divided in terms of the author’s focus. In the first half, the question is one of "ascension", the name given to the process of becoming civilized through the acquisition of increasingly complex language. The first story is a diary excerpt, a written form intended for oneself. The second is a series of letters: correspondence being the written communication between two people. Each story increases its scope to include an increasingly wider audience until we reach the recording of history itself. In addition, each chapter uses successively more difficult language, until we read a projection of what language might look like in the future. This section was of the most interest for me because of the questions it raised, questions about the linkages between both language and intelligence, and language and civilization. The second half of the book is about the effect of power on microcosms and on civilization as a whole. I found the passages about truth in history to be interesting, but found the message about absolute power corrupting societies absolutely to be a bit heavy handed, especially at the very end of the book.

The interlocking plots of the six stories are by turns interesting, humorous, and depressing. Although I enjoyed the stories, it is the ideas and the language that will remain with me. Some of the images invoked in the first half are perfect, and I found myself reading them again just to enjoy the language.

The stationmaster's whistle blew on time, the locomotive strained like a gouty proctor on the pot before heaving itself into motion.

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

Overall, I enjoyed Cloud Atlas for the clever structure, interesting plot line(s), and above all for the questions it raised about language, power, and civilization. show less

Here is a clockwork puzzle of a novel, presenting five stories in sequence that each end prematurely until I was half expecting Italo Calvino to appear and begin addressing me in 2nd person. Not to worry, though - the endings come eventually. Stories are arranged chronologically, from historical fiction to science fiction, and gradually the linkages between them begin to appear. Much of the fun was in predicting what that linkage was going to be and how it would play out. For extra spice, each tale has been written in a different style: journal, letters, manuscript, film, interview, and oral history.

It's a technically virtuoso performance, intricate in its construction. Happily it is also nearly always straightforward and entertaining show more in its narrative. The novel concludes with some theory on civilization's cyclical development and collapse that Henry David Thoreau might have agreed with, after coming lightly laced with some eastern philosophy concerning reincarnation. It was a fun structure to encounter (once). Looking forward to the movie now that I have the novel under my belt. show less

There was a big hoopla about this novel when it came out and, as I often do when that happens, I put it aside to read when things had quieted down. Sometimes those volumes fall through the cracks but, I'm quite happy to say, this one didn't. This may not be the best book I read this year, but it has a good chance of making the Final Four (as it were). Not only is it entertaining, it's captivating; it's the type of book you don't want to put down. Sure, part of this is that there are chapter cliffhangers, but most of it is simply good writing portraying characters you care about with themes that engage your attention.

There has been a lot of talk about the matryoshka doll structure of the book: six novellas nested inside each other, the show more first five split in half to contain the succeeding ones. This was interesting but, evidently, less so to me than to many other readers.

What I found much more thought-provoking was the structure's fractal nature. Each novella could stand in its own right as a story about greed and lust for power. Then, each novella referenced the chronologically preceding one as a side plot to tie them together into a larger novel that enriched those themes by adding a dimension of time and recurrence. Finally, there was a meta-story that Mitchell told, not in the plot lines themselves, but in the patterns drawn by those plots, that drove home Santayana's maxim about the fate of those who do not learn from history.

By speaking to us on so many levels simultaneously...by having each protagonist's tale echoed in the larger whole...Mitchell's message hums in the background of our minds even as we move between characters, stories and eras. It's very intelligently done.

If I have any quibbles about the book, it's that Mitchell got a little heavy-handed by the end. He seemed to lack confidence that the reader would catch what he was trying to say and resorted to having his first/last protagonist speechify to us. I felt a little let down and a little put off by this. I would rather he had just trusted his own, considerable powers of writing and a measure of intelligence on the part of his reader. What he wanted to say came through loud and clear long before that point.

Absolutely recommended. show less

“Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my
year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano,
clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language
of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted
by its successor; in the second, each interruption is
recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't
know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.” (445)

This was a clever and enjoyable meditation on the nature of identity and subjecthood (cultural, economic, physical, emotional, political). One could even get really "meta" and discuss narrative's role in formulating subjects across the page for the reader. The characters in this novel are all rooted, not in show more reality, but on the foundations of past narrative. One of the opinions the novel has (working against Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence") is that we might retell our own stories, and thus, reappropriate power over our very own subjecthood:

"If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass." (508)

Were moments a little schmaltzy? A few, but overall the novel pulls off it's uniqueness and surpasses mere gimmick. I recommend the book. I imagine a lot of the philosophical themes and emotional effects will not translate well to the film version, though I'm hopeful. show less

"Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies."

What an ending to a fantastic story, told through separate narratives, written by different (fictional) authors, in a wild array of styles and dialects. From the 19th century colonial pacific, to early 20th century Belgium, to 1980s California, to futuristic capitalist South-Korean dystopia, to post-apocalyptic Hawaii, and back through time, all the while unveiling old mysteries and revealing new ones.

This book puts forth an argument, constantly, against greed, corruption, racism, and generally, human nature gone wrong. Individuals fight their little fights, their actions at times seeming futile; yet in the end, change starts within oneself. On the final pages of Cloud Atlas, Adam Ewing show more realizes this.

As the book ends where it begins, Ewing decides to become an abolitionist. He knows that he will be discouraged by his friends and family, who will call him a naive idealist:

"Only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!"

Yet Adam has seen far too much, and he's discovered a poignant truth:

"Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?" show less

It's a hugely ambitious book: Mitchell takes multiple short tales that span centuries and genres, then packs them together like Russian dolls and on top of all that, tenuously links them. It is almost like watching a man juggling 7 flaming chainsaws whilst blind-folded and standing on one leg, it looks great but you are pretty sure it's all going to end horribly. But no Mitchell astoundingly and seamlessly pulls this off: there are no bad stories, no hiccups in flow, no irritating transition between stories. It is an extremely satisfying book.

So how to actual summarise the story? well.. (warning contains minior spoilers).

The book opens as diary, written in 17th century in a Caribbean back water, by an American traveller stranded and show more waiting for ship repairs. We read of his prudish horror at the godlessness of sailors, his is musing on natives, his awfully polite Victorian dinner conversation and follow his adventurous misguided wanderings. All slightly tongue in cheek and much fun and I was thoroughly enjoying his naive adventures until the tale stop abruptly. In mid sentence no less and we realise this is just a referenced text in a series of 19th century letters from a poverty stricken composer to his old lover, which is enjoyable decadent romp until it stops and we realise these letters are being read by an investigative journalist involved in a deadly conspiracy in the 60s which in turn stops and we realise .... and on and on marching into further and further into the future.

It is a giddy, dizzying novel and one that makes you actually feel time stretching out all around you, which for me was the highlight of the book. In addition because of the nature of the structure a mirror effect is created as the stories are reflected and reframed in each other and later on themselves, enhancing and renewing the story. If you also consider the beautiful unreality gained by each tale being solely a story found in the next and the book becomes something special. A surreal house of cards that could almost be true but isn't.. a musing on possibilities and legacies. Of course post-modern techniques and philosophical ponderings aside this book works from a pure piece of great storytelling and because of that I highly recommend this book to well absolutely everyone. show less