Cloud Atlas

I have no idea if the movie version of Cloud Atlas will be any good, but it was worth making just so we could get that excellent trailer. In fact, they probably shouldn’t even release the movie. Just use the trailer to promote the book. It worked on me because once I saw that thing I couldn’t get this read fast enough.

An American notary crosses the Pacific and encounters many unsavory characters in the mid-1800s. In 1931 a young man fleeing his creditors cons his way into the home of a respected composer. A female journalists tries to expose a dangerous conspiracy involving a nuclear reactor back in 1975. In the early 21st century an aging publisher finds himself in hot water after his biggest professional success. The near future has an Asian society based on corporations using genetically modified fabricants as slave labor, and the far future finds a young man in Hawaii living a primitive tribal lifestyle playing tour guide to a woman from a place that still has technology.

These are the six stories that David Mitchell links together. They’re nested one within another and also mirrored in the first and second half of the book. If that’s all that he accomplished here, then it’d just be a really clever way to structure a novel, but it’s the way that Mitchell hit six completely different tones yet uses the same themes in each that the book really shines.

I’m beyond impressed with the way he made each story feel like it’s own separate tale. If someone had told me that this was a book written by six different authors, I would have believed it, and each is intriguing in it’s own right. Themes of slavery and people being controlled in one way or another along with depictions of misused or corrupted power come up again and again, but whether it feels like serious dystopian sci-fi or a beach read thriller, Mitchell makes it all hang together until it really does feel like one epic tale. And the thoughts at the conclusion lead to one of the greatest ending lines I’ve ever read.

I don’t even think I need to see the movie now.

Is narrative linear?

We all know that we tell a story in a linear fashion – “begin at the beginning, go on till the end, then stop”-but isn’t the linearity imposed by us? Isn’t history a multitude of narratives taking place simultaneously, like a multi-piece orchestra?

And what about the narrator? Is the external narrative same as the internal one? Is the story paramount, or the teller? What would be Wuthering Heights, say, if narrated by Heathcliff?
Writers and filmmakers across generations have struggled with these questions. Many of the gifted have tried to break free from the linearity that the story form imposes upon the teller. Most have succeeded to a greater or lesser degree.

I would rank David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas among one of the great successes.

*

Cloud Atlas is packet of six nested narratives, rather like one of those Chinese dolls nested inside one another or (for the mathematically minded) a series of nested functions in a computer program. Each of the stories adopts a different tone of voice, purposefully parodying established literary forms. Thus, the first story is written as a journal, rather like Robinson Crusoe: the second is in epistolary format: the third is a pulp thriller: the fourth, a partially dystopian novelette full of black humour: the fifth is an out-and-out SF story and sixth, a story of the far future dystopia with its own language, rather like A Clockwork Orange. The second story starts in the middle of the first, the third in the middle of the second and so on till we reach the sixth, which is told at a stretch; once that finishes, we are again taken “out” through the stories in reverse order, from fifth to first.

The narratives are all linked, and they are progressive in time. The linkage is tenuous initially, but in the second half of the broken stories, the previous story has become all important to the protagonist of that one. Each of the earlier narratives is “read” by the protagonist of the subsequent one, and the author purposefully inserts a question mark on the authenticity, perhaps to stress the unreality of the fictional universe we are inhabiting – rather like the alienation techniques of avant-garde filmmakers and playwrights. While getting caught up in each story, we are reminded continuously that this is the narrative of a flawed human being like ourselves – and the narrator might be unreliable.

*

I will not dissect the stories in detail. Better reviewers than me have analysed the novel in detail on this site and elsewhere, and have explored the historical context of the novel in depth. Rather, I will concentrate on the overarching themes that run as a common thread through the connected narratives, and the structure of the book in general.

Man’s endless cupidity and greed, and the part it has played in human “progress”, can be seen as the underlying theme. In The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, the Western powers are in the nascent phases of their ruthless domination of the “savage” world; the so-called “White Man’s Burden” to “civilise” the Earth. In Half-lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, we can see the corporate behemoth this mission has given rise to – a juggernaut that crushes everything that stands in the path of its insatiable greed. In An Orison of Sonmi ~ 451, we are introduced to the future dystopia that is the ultimate result of the consumptive nightmare of our times, and one clone’s fight against the faceless corporate. In Sloosha’s Crossing’an’ Ev’rythin’ After , we see the ultimate result of our greed: a future society not very different from the ones of the Maori and Moriori in the first novella, where the strong enslave and plunder the weak and the rule of fang and claw hold sway.

But there is hope even in this bleak landscape: for the mythical ancestress of the Valleysmen is none other than Sonmi~451, the renegade clone from the previous novella. When her interrogator asks why she became a willing scapegoat, she answers:

To Corpocracy, to Unanimity, to the Ministry of the Testaments, to the Juche and to the Chairman, I quote Seneca’s warning to Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.

This is the fire that carries the revolutionary forward, from Prometheus via Spartacus right down to Che Guavera and Suu Kyi: the promise of a golden tomorrow. And even though in a way unanticipated by her, the image of Sonmi and the recorded interview has become a sort of rallying cry for the downtrodden Valleysmen.

As Adam Ewing, protagonist of the first novella, says (as he replies to the imagined taunt of his father-in-law that “…only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!”):

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

*

And it is one this standalone note that this strange book ends, like the Cloud Atlas sextet written by Robert Frobisher, the doomed protagonist of the second story. It should be noted that this particular novella stands out from the rest, as it is different in tone and content from the others. Here there is no establishment trampling upon the individual, rather it is the tale of an outsider, an individual who would find any system oppressive. This rather unlikeable person has the gift of art inside him, which allows him to endure the torture of mundane human existence, which is the only thing he can share with lesser individuals like us.

The shifting kaleidoscope of clouds creating their own eternal yet ephemeral dance formations in the sky of human existence – and the artist, working like a mad cartographer, to create for us an atlas of the clouds.

Some have claimed this to be a masterwork. Others say it’s unreadable. For my part, I have more sympathy with the latter view. Before reading the book, I deliberately hadn’t read any reader reviews, but I had seen the film trailer that seemed to promise a helter skelter race through the ages with the hint of reincarnation and sci-fi shootouts abounding. Well, disappointingly, that's not quite what I found between its pages.

I don’t mind having to do some thinking when I’m reading and, as a fan of Haruki Murakami’s books, I’m willing to suspend belief and go with the flow, even when I’m not sure where it’s going – or later, where it is I’ve arrived. My problem with this book was that I just didn’t enjoy the journey, or rather, I didn’t enjoy most of the journey.

Of the six stories – all told in a different style and each tale using a vocabulary of its own – I only really warmed to the account of the British composer evading creditors in 1930’s Belgium. I found all of the others a bit of a struggle. It is very clever in the way the stories interrupt each other and flow chronologically to halfway and are then completed in the second half of the book in reverse order. And they all are fully completed, with common references popping up and an overall picture forming… if you’ve managed to stay with it long enough. But was it worth the effort? And that's where it fails for me - my answer is no, not really.

I’m pretty sure I’m not really clever enough to have fully appreciated this complex offering. I also believe a second reading would (if I could face it) increase my appreciation of the book and allow me to draw out elements I’ve missed. But I’ve subsequently read in-depth reviews from people far more erudite than me, and I’ve yet to glean much more than I had already managed to absorb.

Readers will clearly have their own reaction to this book, and some will take more from it than others. I didn’t take very much, but I’m sure others will have a very different experience. Good luck to them, I’m filing this on my ‘too fanciful by far’ shelf.

[Review edited to add comments about the movie]
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I don’t think I have ever had six books on the go simultaneously, so I had a bit of trouble with the much-discussed structure of Cloud Atlas, with its six nested short stories. While the breaks did mostly come at logical or dramatic turns, I still found them a bit jarring, especially the shifts in writing style (though probably that was the intention,) and I had to keep returning to the first half of each one before reading on.

The first The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, beginning with Ewing’s 1825 adventures in the Chatham Islands started out well, but the florid language of his diary became tiresome after a while.

I liked the 2nd Letters from Zedelghem a lot more. The letters from the young composer Robert Frobisher to his friend and sometime lover Sixsmith in 1931, detailing his rise as amanuensis to the aging composer Vyvyan Ayres and subsequent descent into terminal despair, were evocative and well done.

The 3rd, Half-Lives, was the weakest I thought, with Luisa Rey on the trail of a nuclear power plant scandal in 1975, complete with bad-guy Bill Smoke and interminable made-for-Hollywood chase scenes. But then, with the sub-title that it was supposedly the first of many(?) Luisa Rey mysteries, it was clearly written as a pastiche of a pulp-fiction thriller.

I think I liked the droll present-day 4th Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish the best, where Mitchell allows the narrator a dig at his own novel:

“As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowing and tricksy devices, they belong in the 1980s with postmodernism and chaos theory”.

The dystopian future of the 5th, An Orison of Sonmi-451 didn’t do much for me either. The question-and-answer format with extended responses from the clone Sonmi were just too bloodless. But then clones would be emotionless, right? This recitation also degenerated into another baffling and rather pointless chase sequence, though it was revealed at the end that its very pointlessness was a setup by the fascist ruling Corpocracy of that era.

And in the 6th, post-apocalyptic world of Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ evrythin’ after – the only story that was unbroken (is that ironic, or what?) – there was yet another extended hunt and chase episode (whoo, does Mitchell ever loooove chase scenes!) But I thought that Zachry’s monologue, (actually it’s his son who is relating his father’s story even farther into the future) with its coarse, simplified language that reflected the primitive state that society had been reduced to, was also brilliantly crafted and evocative.

I was a bit surprised that there wasn’t more significance to the links between the stories though. Oh sure, there were multiple references from one to the other, but they were more or less incidental: eg, Adam Ewing’s ship preserved in the marina in Luisa Rey’s story, and Sixsmith is also an older scientist in the same story, which is sent to Cavendish to review; Sonmi is invoked as a goddess in the final narrative.
Then there was the comet-shaped birthmark that appeared in all six, but strangely, didn’t actually seem to connect anything.
There were a few foreshadowing references too: Ayres “dreamt of a nightmarish cafe ... the waitresses all had the same face” (of Sonmi), and in several earlier stories there are references to humanity destroying itself.
The strongest link was the piece of music “Cloud Atlas Sextet” that Robert Frobisher wrote and Ayres claimed as his own: it was conceived as a “sextet for overlapping soloists ... each solo is interrupted by its successor ...”. It appeared in various forms in all the later stories –eg, Luisa Ray says she is sure she’d heard the melody before. But - I wondered - if this story was actually the key to the whole novel, why didn’t it figure in Adam Ewing’s journal? (Or maybe it did, and I missed it?)

Then I read the whole thing all over again, but finishing each narrative in sequence. The effect was surprising: (I tend to forget much of what I read the first time, so the reason wasn’t that I knew what was coming!) No, it was that I found that the stories I liked grew on me while those I didn’t much like, I liked even less - they seemed to have more artifice and pointless incidents that didn’t really add much.

Basically I think I was expecting more connectedness. And I felt that the ending, the final pages of Adam Ewing’s journal, was quite weak, despite Ewing’s (long-winded as ever) concluding commentary on civilization.
So I also wondered - how would Cloud Atlas read if the nesting was reversed?
Starting with the end times, discovering how humanity had come to that, and ending on the same bleak note ... Zachry’s story, closing with the magical

... silvry egg what he named Orison in his yarns. Like Pa yarned, if you warm the egg in your hands, a beautsome ghost-girl appears an’ speaks in Old-Un tongue what no un alive und’stands nor never will, nay. It ain’t Smart you can use ‘cos it don’t kill Kona pirates nor fill empty guts ...
Sit down a beat or two.
Hold out your hands.
Look.

... that seemed to hit just the right note, far in the future where humanity’s fate is truly uncertain.

So I’m giving this 4 stars for a hugely inventive work though I think it is more like 3.5 for the bits that didn’t quite do it for me.
[Original review 20 May 2018]
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so, the movie:
It was long – very long – at nearly 3 hours, but that meant less than half an hour for each of the stories, far too short for any real involvement. And where the book broke the narratives in two, here the six were inter-cut with scene changes like a fast-paced action movie. Admittedly the transitions were very well done – a punch from one era landing on a character in another – but it was like watching six Hollywood trailers simultaneously and not feeling any great urge to watch any of them in full:

The sea voyage of Adam Ewing pared down to a few swashbuckling pirate-inspired scenes;

The sombre, serious, period-drama hinting at more gay themes than were actually explicit in the Frobisher story (though I thought that, and moving the action from Belgium to Edinburgh worked well);

The Hollywood thriller/chase that Mitchell must have written with just this movie in mind (It looked and felt exactly as I’d visualized it, which says a lot about how a stereotyped genre has infected my and probably everyone else’s imagination)

The British farce that was played for more yucks, like a TV sitcom, and less nuance than the book; but enjoyable anyway.

The futuristic cyber-clone movie where the producers just couldn’t keep their hands off the special effects – the techno-schlock of flying X-cars, shimmering highways and laser weaponry essentially drowning out Mitchell’s message about where corporate-controlled consumerism would lead us; two thumbs down for that one.

And finally the post-apocalypse, quite well done since it didn’t have to be simplified much. I was also quite chuffed to see that the producers had had the same thought as I did – to start and end far into the future rather than with Adam Ewing.
Though why they had it end on another planet was beyond me – it almost negated Mitchell’s bleak vision with one that suggested everything would turn out fine; one rainbow unicorn away from a hope-y fairytale ending.

What struck me though, was the sheer incomprehensibility and pointlessness of so many scenes if you hadn’t read the book first; the movie simply couldn’t stand on its own. Although cutting might have made the movie less unwieldy, really, to do justice to Cloud Atlas it needed to be a mini-series.

... and I'm glad now that I gave the book 4 stars, to distinguish it from a decidedly 3-star movie.

Overrated.

This book left me cold cold cold. I want books to make me feel something...that is, something other than boredom and indifference. I want to feel the people in the books I'm reading, to connect with them, to understand them and love them, hate them, sympathize with them, be confused by them, something, anything. I want there to be substance behind the smoke and mirrors. In Cloud Atlas the characters were flat and secondary to the the true protagonist: the book's structure. It felt like the characters were only there so that Mitchell could play around with themes and ideas and show off the design of his novel. Yes, it's a cool idea. Yes, it's ambitious. But you gotta back it up with the goods. Instead of getting lost in the stories, absorbed in the prose or reacting to the (slight and reaching) character overlaps, I was constantly aware that I was reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and I was on page x and he was trying to say this, that and the other. It was clinical. Formulaic. And ultimately unsuccessful in my humble and brutally honest opinion.

I can appreciate that Mitchell is creative, unique and (mostly) a good writer. I've read and enjoyed his previous two books and his other two books will be eventually pulled off my pile and read without bias. And It's not that I didn't get Cloud Atlas. I got it. Loud and Clear. Well sometimes loud and fuzzy (wtf Sloosha, seriously, just wft?!). I didn't miss the point. I'm not lacking the insight to recognize why some people have labeled this a so-called literary masterpiece. I just don't think it was all that good.

In a nutshell:
- I did not enjoy reading this.
- I was not impressed by the "connectivity" of the characters between chapters (I thought the connection between characters was executed much more successfully in Ghostwritten).
- The rocket shaped birthmarks were eye-rolling-ly lame. I don't care that you're trying to suggest we're all connected, or maybe these people are all reincarnations of each other, you can't think of anything better than a comet shaped birthmark?
- The Sloosha section was one of the most painful and annoying things I've ever read.
- I was bored for most of the book.

Shame...

Video review

If novel writing is architecture, this here is the Duomo di Milano.
Pulls off the inexplicable trick of offering six perfect stories, each one engaging, fun, heartbreaking and unforgettable, encasing them in a symmetrical structure whose constant intratextualities I could reread at nauseam.

I can best sum up the brilliance of the novel Cloud Atlas as: a self-contained meta-fictional, layered, narrative of ambitious and epic proportions.

I read that David Mitchell came up with his grandiose plot when thinking about designing a narrative along the lines of a Russian doll. And this is precisely the manner in which Cloud Atlas has been constructed. The novel is constructed of six interlinking stories; each save the sixth is broken into two halves so that we end up with a narrative like this:

1 The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (part 1)
2 Letters from Zedelghem (part 1)
3 Half Lives: The First Lousa Rey Mystery (part 1)
4 The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (part 1)
5 An Orison of Sonmi~451 (part 1)
6 Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After (complete story)
5An Orison of Sonmi~451 (part 2)
4The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (part 2)
3Half Lives: The First Lousa Rey Mystery (part 2)
2Letters from Zedelghem (part 2)
1The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (part 2)

This all seems impressive on paper, yet any skeptic would lack credibility if they did not question whether it truly works. And that is the truly impressive thing about this novel. The multi-layered narrative does work without seeming a clumsy plot device and every story flows together neatly. The second most impressive aspect is that David Mitchell can create a poignant and beautifully scripted tale without making it tedious to read. The book is entertaining, each story proving strong on its own and as part of a whole. Mitchell transcends ordinary conventions without seeming pretentious and rather than feeling jealous at his literary power I am held in awe.

Each story is set in a different genre so that rather than reading as belonging to one particular area Cloud Atlas reads as part of a whole range of genres. The first tale is set in journal form and is a historical fiction for the reader, set in a distant past in the Pacific. The second tale takes the form of letters to a close acquaintance describing the moral failings of its protagonist. The third tale is part crime noir and part journalistic tale. The fourth story is a humorous first person narrative in the style of a memoir. The fifth tale is a sci-fi set in the future in the style of an interview (I found that this was my personal favourite narrative thread). The sixth and final tale was a post-apocalyptic tale that took elements of The Road and A Clockwork Orange, turning them into something different. This final tale was my personal least favourite to read but I can recognise how it fit into the novel as a whole.

The power of this novel is in how each of these incredibly strong stories fit together to create one whole narrative (you could almost say that this overall story was the seventh tale). The ways in which these stories link is why I call this a meta-fictional tale. Each story references past stories (whether they appear as novels in subsequent stories, or are referenced through character names and events). There is also the hint of a kind of character reincarnation across all these stories with the protagonists sharing a kind of birthmark and similar traits.

The underlying questions and challenges this book is concerned with did not slip past my attention either. This book challenges many, many concepts: it challenges our concern as readers with time, space and genre; it challenges how fiction and reality are intertwined; it challenges what it is to be human; it even challenges that literary fiction can be incredibly entertaining as well as informative and inspiring. But perhaps the overall challenge that Mitchell provides is how human greed and selfishness - the natural order of things, hamartia, sin - ultimately leads to destruction. He urges humanity to be better than our greedy impulses.

"Why? Because of this - one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction."

The greatest compliment that I can give this book is that I would gladly read it again. I also now desire to read more of the brilliant combination of storytelling and writing that David Mitchell. I admit that many readers may find this challenging to grasp as a novel but once you push past the first areas of the novel it is incredibly fulfilling. Five well-earned stars for this novel and a definite feature on the 1001 books to read list.

"'...and only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!'
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

I surrender. I throw in the towel. I was not going to rate this novel because I did not read all of it, and I ordinarily think it unfair to rate a book as "do not like" if you didn't read the entire book. But this book was 509 pages in length and I read 293 pages. I gave it my best shot. 1 star for me. ☹

I tried two separate times to read it. I returned it to the library the first time after reading the first three “chapters” — “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” “Letters from Zedelghem,” and “Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery” — because I was having a hard time following it, and thought the writing was pretentious. But I returned to the novel knowing that so many GR folks liked it. I read the next chapter, “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish”, and it was sort of OK but again the writing, to me, was full of one-liners…. it seemed to me David Mitchell was saying “see what a clever writer I am!” with practically all sentences that were written in that chapter. Then I got to “An Orison of Sonmi-451” and that was torture. Language was used that were not real words (e.g., conurb, AdV, handsony). I did not even try to read the next chapter, “Shousha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After”, because the first paragraph contained gobble-dee-gook language and this chapter was 70 pages full of such language.

So then I was at that part of the novel where supposedly things were supposed to be tied in to prior chapters (supposedly what made the novel different and clever) and I thought maybe things would get clearer. Things only got worse. I had to bail early on in the second manifestation of “An Orison of Sonmi-451”…I just couldn’t take it anymore. Then I went to the second manifestation of “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” and after reading the first several pages just skipped to the last 3 pages to get its ending. Then I went to “Half Lives — The First Luisa Rey Mystery” and read that second manifestation in its entirety and I honestly do not know what Mitchell’s point was…there were so many twists and turns and unexpected events and killings that I just couldn’t understand why he was writing the way he was writing. Left unread were the last two second manifestations of “Letters from Zedelghem” and “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing”.

I admit it — I could not understand what point or points David Mitchell was making in this very long novel. Well-respected authors including David Eggers and Michael Chabon loved it. It was a Man Booker Prize finalist…book reviews from newspapers and magazines abounded on the back cover and the first few pages of the book extolling its brilliance.

I feel bad because I bailed on this novel two separate times, and because other people got it and I did not. However, I think I would have felt even worse had I tried to read this entire novel.

Reviews (uniformly positive):
https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
https://www.npr.org/2007/11/06/142507...
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/bo...