Firstly, let me just say that Cloud Atlas is one of my favourite books of all time. It was the book that introduced me to the wonderful world of David Mitchell. It is a novel, particularly at the time of publication, unlike any other. In truth it is six novellas that are all connected in a multitude of differing ways.

The structure, again, was quite unique upon first reading. The six different storylines are broken up into halves. So that there are twelve chapters, or sections. The first will stop abruptly and then will not continue until the very last chapter. The second will pause and not continue until the second-last chapter. It sounds quite bizarre, but it works brilliantly. You may find yourself forgetting characters and plot points with this unique structure, but the story is so engaging, so rewarding, that it is no chore to go back and reference the first half, or indeed read it again. And Mitchell usually exits the first half in the fashion of a good old cliff hanger, creating a desire in the reader to read the second half. He even ends the first half of the first story mid-sentence.

A major factor in the enjoyment is to reread sections, discover the connections that are everywhere. Some easily found. Most are objects of interest in one story, discovered by the protagonist in another. But others are furtively hiding, waiting for discovery.

Each section is not only its own storyline but its own genre as well.

The first storyline is structured in the format of a Journal. The journal belongs to an American, Adam Ewing. Ewing is returning to his homeland, America, but he is currently marooned on the Chatham Islands, an archipelago about 800 miles east of New Zealand, waiting for the ship he is travelling on to be repaired and victualled. In his first entry he finds a Dr Henry Goose who is collecting human teeth left over from an ancient cannibal’s feast, which he is planning on selling. The teeth are made into sets of dentures, but he is not doing it for money, rather revenge and redemption on a certain Marchioness who, five years ago, destroyed his reputation, shunning him from society. Ewing thinks the doctor a little mad.

The doctor is waiting for a ship to return to London, however when Ewing’s ship is ready and sets sail Dr Goose decides to travel with Ewing and the seeds of a friendship start to sprout. But is the good doctor really his friend? Perhaps Ewing’s first impression was true.

This first story is historical fiction, and we learn of the peaceful indigenous Moriori, who were all but wiped off the face of their island in an act of genocide by the belligerent Mauri.

The second storyline switches structure again and takes an epistolary form. The protagonist, Robert Frobisher, a music student, is insolvent and has a myriad of collectors after him. He starts the story escaping from a group of them, climbing out his hotel window and shimmying down a pipe. Of course, he has not paid his bill. He also has a rather inflated ego, and is bitter at his state of penury,

“What value are education, breeding and talent if one doesn’t have a pot to piss in?”

His plan to solve his problem and escape his penurious state is to become an amanuensis for a famous composer, Vyvyan Ayrs. Due to illness Ayrs’ eyesight is failing, and he has not written anything new, barely able to hold a pen. Frobisher, upon meeting him for the first time finds a frail old man in a wheelchair and smells blood in the water and turns on the charm. He convinces Ayrs that he needs an amanuensis and to start writing again. It is Frobisher who composes the Cloud Atlas Sextet, the music that flows through the storylines. The beauty of the sextet is that it is written in the same structure as the novel.

The third story introduces us to Luisa Rey, and Sixsmith, the recipient of the letters that Frobisher is writing to in the previous story. Luisa Ray, who is writing 300-word fluff columns for a magazine called Spyglass, would very much like to follow in the footsteps of her father who was a famous foreign correspondent who covered the Vietnam War. When she gets stuck in an elevator with Sixsmith, she may just get her chance. Rufus Sixsmith is a scientist overseeing a new nuclear power plant. He knows that it is not safe and wants to go public with his findings. But before he can tell his story to Luisa, he is found dead at his hotel, a suspected suicide. Luisa smells foul play and a prize story. But now she is in danger herself.

The fourth story is darkly comical and takes a new structure again. The protagonist is a publisher, Timothy Cavendish. He is writing his memoir in longhand, and what a memoir it is. When he titles it “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish”, you know it’s going to be interesting. Cavendish’s troubles start when one of his author’s decides to throw a critic, known for his scathing reviews, to his death, from a twelve-story rooftop garden award ceremony. This murder results in the author becoming instantly infamous, and sales of his latest book, a memoir which had not even been on a shelf yet, skyrocketing. Cavendish’s problems begin when the author’s brothers come looking for the money the book has made. His brothers are little more than crooked thugs and Cavendish’s life is in mortal danger. The problem is there is no money to pay them. The money was used to pay off long standing debts.

The fifth story changes genre and structure again. Science Fiction the genre, and an interview the structure. The reader is propelled into a dystopic future where consumerism is God. Brands and products prayed to like deities. In this future, clones are grown to serve. The protagonist here, Sonmi-451 is a clone produced to serve at a fast-food restaurant. Her whole existence is serving and sleep. Twelve years they spend serving in the restaurant without ever leaving its walls. After their twelve years finish, they are promised they can retire to Hawaii and live a beautiful dream life. But the dream is in fact a nightmare.

The sixth and last story is also set in a dystopic future. A virus has wiped out most of the population and mankind has entered another dark age with technology lost. Not just technology but language itself, resulting in concentration needed to understand the vernacular at times. Small groups of people have survived, but they have no means of travelling long distances and are scattered across the globe. There is a group who travel via a ship, the Prescients, who still have the old world’s technology, but they are outrunning the virus, looking for survivors and sanctuary. The story takes place in the Pacific Islands, precisely where the very first story takes place.

A wonderful touch is that in each story there is a character who has the same birthmark, on the same area of their body, in the shape of a comet. Does this mean that the protagonist in each story is actually the same soul or spirit reincarnated? It boggles the mind.

The novel draws the reader to the infinite connections that exist between everything on this planet. People, families, objects, thoughts. Infinite connections that many times remain through generations and the passage of time. These connections are all around us, again, many times without us realising. In essence, our world is an ongoing story. Countries and cities, chapters in the story. Episodes in history affecting periods in the present. An event in the present that will connect and affect a period years in the future. And that is why I love this book so much. It’s incredible to think that as you sit in a park having lunch under a tree, that it’s possible that an ancestor, two, three hundred years ago may have been fighting a duel or writing a poem under the very same tree. More than possible, probable. Unlimited connections.

“Your life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops.”

There is so much going on with this novel, that my review does not come close to doing it justice. It is truly a masterpiece.

This was the third book in the David Mitchellathon, with the wonderful Nat K and I reading all of David’s books in chronological order. Please check out her review when she posts it. Once again, it will be much better than mine.

All autumn, with the release date of movie adaptation of Cloud Atlas fast approaching, interest in the novel among my Goodreads friends has been high. I have not seen many subdued reactions. Fans of Mitchell discuss his ability adeptly to assume so many different voices and styles, the intricacy of the novel’s structure, and the relevance of its themes for today. Detractors have dismissed Cloud Atlas as gimmicky, a work by a much-hyped writer who is showing off his style but neglecting to anchor it in themes of substance. And some readers simply found his shifts in voice tedious.



I recently re-read Cloud Atlass, bearing in mind both reactions to the novel. I also remembered my first time reading it. I was mesmerized by Mitchell’s ability to pay homage to six very different genres and voices in the six novellas that make up Cloud Atlas. I delighted in tracing connections and interconnections among the different sections of the novel. I was entranced by Mitchell’s high wire act.

Mitchell structures Cloud Atlas as follows: six novellas are organized in chronological order. The first five break off abruptly in the middle of their respective stories. The sixth novella, “Sloosha’s Crossin’,” appears in its entirety in the center of the novel. After its conclusion, Mitchell moves in reverse chronological order through the remaining five novellas, bringing each to a conclusion, but also providing numerous points of connection and resonance among all six novellas.

The novellas are as follows:

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing: tracing the travels of Adam Ewing, a notary, who is sailing to Australia and New Zealand in the 1850s, and who comes face to face with human greed on individual and communal levels;
Letters from Zedelghem: the composer Robert Frobisher writing to his friend, Rufus Sixsmith, about his experiences in post-World War I Belgium as he seeks fame and fortune while negotiating a precarious relationship with a famous composer at the end of his career;
Halflives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery: Luisa Rey, a young investigative reporter, seeks to carry out her father’s legacy while combating the corporate greed and corruption of Seaboard Power Inc. in Reagan-era California;
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish: a vanity publisher gains and loses a fortune, and loses his freedom, in England;
An Orison of Sonmi-451: Sonmi-451, a genetically modified being or fabricant, shares her memories of her quest for knowledge and her fight against government-sanctioned murder in the name of corporate greed;
Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After: Zachry, a Pacific Islander who is a member of the Valleymen, tells about his experiences with Meronym, a Prescient, as they seek past knowledge and combat the savagery of the Kona and devastation by plague in the future.

With my second reading of the novel, I delved deeper than focusing on its structure. I focused on themes. Did Mitchell have the content to support his style and technique, or was Cloud Atlas all style and no substance? After a careful re-reading, I concluded that Mitchell’s approach to writing Cloud Atlas is successful, not simply as an exercise in writing style, but because the style and structure support his exploration of central themes, of critical importance to 21st-century readers.




Knowledge in Cloud Atlas: History, Language, Belief, Memory, and Forgetting

In a 2004 interview in the Washington Post, David Mitchell provided some insight into his main interests in writing Cloud Atlas. After reading a reference to the Moriori in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Mitchell became fascinated with the tribe, who lived in the Chatham Islands of New Zealand. He researched them and visited the Chatham Islands as well. The Moriori appear in Cloud Atlas, as Ewing meets them and attempts to come to terms with the many forces that overpower them: Western missionaries in search of souls, whalers in search of profit, and Maori exercising their power over the Moriori through force. However, as Mitchell describes, the Moriori’s influence appears throughout the novel, as a main influence for a central theme: “Knowledge can be forgotten as easily as, perhaps more easily than, it can be accrued. As a people, the Moriori ‘forgot’ the existence of any other land and people but their own.” This led to Mitchell’s first theme in Cloud Atlas: how does knowledge transform over time, from generation to generation? How are we shaped, not only by what we remember from the past, but also by what we forget or rework? Why is it so important for us to be able to tell stories about the past, and to know the conclusion of those stories? Mitchell’s interest was fueled in part by his being a father, and wondering what the future would hold for his child, but also by his interest in history.


Moriori people, 1877



Spirit Grove- Hapupu, Chatham Islands

As a novelist, Mitchell explores these questions while also paying homage to different genres of writing, and in some cases specific books that were particularly inspiring to him. (See the Washington Post interview linked above for a list of these influences.) However, these voices are not simply an opportunity for him to demonstrate his ability to shapeshift as a writer. A quotation from this interview gave me insights into the significance of the different voices that he adopts in Cloud Atlas: “I learned that language is to the human experience what spectography is to light: Every word holds a tiny infinity of nuances, a genealogy, a social set of possible users, and that although a writer must sometimes pretend to use language lightly, he should never actually do so -- the stuff is near sacred.” He is not simply showing off his chops as a writer when he adopts six different voices in Cloud Atlas--instead, he is creating new worlds, painting pictures of cultures with words. In doing so, he considers the knowledge these cultures retained and the knowledge they lost from the past. If you read closely and carefully, you can see how language is shifting over time, particularly in the novel’s central section, “Sloosha’s Crossin’.” Some readers found this section to be painful to read, but I loved the challenge of diving into Zachry’s language, identifying unfamiliar words, and considering what social factors led to their creation. I felt like an ethnographer, listening carefully to stories told by an informant from a very different world, and finding clues to recreate that world. That quest to understand, and the impact of discovering points I had in common with Zachry, speak to a larger theme -- continuity in some aspects of human culture over time, and the necessity of preserving and understanding the past as much as possible, even as it recedes from us in time.

The title of the novel, Cloud Atlas, itself ties back to Mitchell’s conception of history. We think of an atlas as a book that guides us through unfamiliar terrain and captures the contours of mountains and valleys, the depths of seas and lakes. An atlas of clouds suggests something much more ephemeral -- clouds are constantly moving, shifting, transforming, and eventually dissipating into the ether. Mitchell’s conception of history is built on a sense of constant movement and change. Even as we try to capture the past in works of history, literature, and art, we change and transform its meaning to fit our present.

In the Luisa Rey story, the engineer Isaac Sachs outlines this view of history as he takes notes during a plane ride:.
• …. The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent.
• The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.)
• Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up—a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone.
• Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows—the actual pas —from another such simulacrum—the actual future?
• One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each “shell” (the present) encased inside a nest of “shells” (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of “now” likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future.

Throughout Cloud Atlas, Mitchell develops this depiction of the interplay of the actual and virtual past and the actual and virtual future in shaping the present. In doing so, he leaves the door open for societies to shape their actual futures through this process of creation and reinterpretation. However, one important limitation on their ability to do so for the better is the ubiquitous influence of power dynamics across human societies, past, present, and future.


The Will to Power in Cloud Atlas

This interest in history leads another of Mitchell’s themes in Cloud Atlas: the centrality of acquisitiveness, of the drive to acquire and possess, to the human experience throughout time. He takes a broad approach to exploring this force, as explained in his Washington Post interview: “Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting. (This needn't be as bleak as it sounds -- a consequence of getting can be giving, which presumably is what love is about.) Once I had these two ideas for novellas, I looked for other variations on the theme of predatory behavior -- in the political, economic and personal arenas.”

Mitchell is not alone in focusing on wanting, getting, and giving as main factors forming human relationships, and shaping history. Anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss in The Gift have explored the role of gift exchange in fostering relationships, and in determining power dynamics, in human societies. Historians have looked at these elements from a broader perspective, particularly in studies of colonialism in the early modern and modern world. Investigative reporters uncover instances of the abuse of power, as measured by wealth and influence. Wherever we turn, our past and present are shaped by power relations and the desire to possess -- wealth, political influence, land, beautiful objects, and people. What does this mean for our future?

In Cloud Atlas, Mitchell explores power in many manifestations. “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” provides a deep exploration of the intersections of colonial interests and local power struggles and how they affected the lives of the Moriori, whose commitment to peaceful interactions with their neighbors were no protection against the combined forces of missionaries, whalers, and the Maori: “What moral to draw? Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.”


Portrait of New Zealand man


Reception of Captain Cook in Hapaee


Robert Frobisher confronts power on two scales: on an individual level, he experiences the combined forces of sexual power and greed in his interactions with Vyvyan Ayrs and his wife Jocasta. As Ayrs tells him in a final confrontation: “Any society’s upper crust is riddled with immorality-- how else d’you think they keep their power?” He also explores power in a world-scale through attempts to come to terms with World War One:

“What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions, and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation-state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be..... Our will to power, our science, and those very faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out!”




Sonmi-451 provides another perspective on the evolution of conflict and wars, showing that the basic dynamics are not different in her future:

Rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion. My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only “rights,” the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful. In corpocracy, this means the Juche. What is willed by the Juche is the tidy xtermination of a fabricant underclass.

Meronym provides a cautionary perspective on the future that may await us in our zeal to acquire power in all its forms:

The Prescient answered, Old Uns tripped their own Fall.
Oh, her words was a rope o’ smoke. But Old Uns’d got the Smart!
I mem’ry she answered, Yay, Old Uns’ Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o humans, yay, a hunger for more.
More what? I asked. Old Uns’d got ev’rythin.
Oh, more gear, more food, faster speeds, longer lifes, easier lifes, more power, yay. Now the Hole World is big, but it weren’t big nuff for that hunger what made Old Uns rip out the skies an boil up the seas an poison soil with crazed atoms an donkey ’bout with rotted seeds so new plagues was borned an babbits was freakbirthed. Fin’ly, bit’ly, then quicksharp, states busted into bar’bric tribes an the Civ’lize Days ended, ’cept for a few folds’n’pockets here’n’there, where its last embers glimmer.


Image from Riddley Walker, inspiration for Sloosha’s Crossin’

Is there any form of power than can combat corporate and governmental power and greed? Luisa Rey presents another form of power: that of public outrage, driven by the media, which can provide a counterweight to greed that acts against the public interest. However, what happens when the media is co-opted by the same corporate powers which it should be scrutinizing?:

Van Zandt’s bookshelf-lined office is as neat as Grelsch’s is chaotic. Luisa’s host is finishing up. “The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged. The world’s Alberto Grimaldis can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness, and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers. They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying ‘guest fees’ to leader writers, or just buying the media up. The media—and not just The Washington Post—is where democracies conduct their civil wars.”


The Individual and the Forces of History: Is There Hope For Our Future?

After considering the kaleidoscope of human power and greed in Cloud Atlas, are we left with any hope for the future, or is Mitchell leaving us with a pessimistic prognosis? Cloud Atlas provides a staggering exploration of different manifestations of power and greed over centuries of human history: colonialism, missionary activity, 19th-century whaling, the modern quest for fame and fortune, and corporate greed, to name a few.



In spite of these dark depictions of the negative influence of the human quest for power, Mitchell does provide some hope that individuals can and do make a difference. Luisa Rey and her allies uncover the publicize the deception and danger of Seaboard Power Inc.. Zachry and Meronym band together and manage to survive plague and attacks from the Kona. Sonmi-451 sacrifices herself for the good of the fabricants, and lives on in the religious practices of the Old Uns and the studies of the Prescients. Fittingly, Mitchell gives Adam Ewing the last word, as he reflects on his experiences after his rescue from poisoning and drowning:

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. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.
A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.
[W]hat is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Just as Mitchell channels his concerns about his son's future through Ewing's words, so does he provide us with a clear sense of how critical our individual choices are in shaping our own children's future. Individuals are not swept aside by the forces of history--one by one, we make up these forces. The actual future of our species and our planet is in our hands. Will we act for a just world, or sit back and contribute to the demise of our planet through inaction, or greed, or cowardice? These pivotal questions, and this critical choice, give Cloud Atlas its power.

1. Counting
I don’t remember exactly when I learnt to count. It feels like one of my earliest memories, and one of my most profound. Things started to make sense right there and then. That mountain of peas on my plate felt a lot less menacing when I could count that there were only 36 of them. My collection of Dinky Toys was all the more impressive when I realized I had a whopping 24 miniature cars to play with. My enjoyment of candies increased when I realised 5 became 4 and 4 become 0 real quick. I enjoyed counting. I would count cars, trees, birds, buildings, pens, clouds, ants, marbles, blades of grass and the freckles on my father’s arm. I counted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and beyond. And I counted on a world of possibilities that are as infinite as they are manageable.

2. Drawing
The holidays were over and the grey clouds of September carried the overpowering smell of the school’s soup with them. It’s a smell that was embedded in the classroom’s walls, in my books, in my clothes. A smell that could only be shaken off by a warm summer breeze and rolling around in the grass. Presently I found myself in a school made of concrete, holding down the grass and keeping out the breeze. The first assignment the teacher gave us was to look back on that beautiful summer and draw our best memory. The smell of soup filled my nostrils. Pea soup. It wasn’t always pea soup but it always smelled like pea soup. And the thing with soup is that there’s no telling how many peas were in there. How could I recall anything of summer in this environment of grey walls and brownish green soup? The teacher was hovering over me when I had just started drawing. I had begun like I always began: a smiling sun in the top left corner. “The sun doesn’t have a face.”, the teacher told me flatly. The foundation of every drawing I had made crumbled and so did my childhood. But I had a drawing to finish. A drawing of happier times where the sun was still allowed to smile, a drawing of times that suddenly seemed miles away.

3. Caring
Summers in my childhood street were beautiful. The street was a loop, shaped very much like a “b”, with houses on all sides. Only cars who had to be there would pass by, so the street belonged to us, us being me and a friend who was visiting. We had met each other on holidays in Rhodes, and given that we were the only two Flemish kids there, at an age where our differences didn’t matter as much as the games we could play together, we got along really well. His parents dropped him off for a week every summer since then. Christopher was a lot more adventurous than I was and whenever he came around we explored new areas, climbed trees, built camps and stole apples. One summer we were at a little creek, at the tip of the “b”, and heard the sound of frogs. “Did you ever catch a frog?”, Christopher asked. I hadn’t. I didn’t like little living things. They scared me, as I pictured them jumping into my eye or crawling under my skin. I had seen Christopher catch huge bugs in Rhodes that were resting on trees, insects that terrified me and would haunt many of my nightmares. But I never wanted to show him my weakness in this regard. “I’ll show you how to catch a frog.”, he said. And I told him “ok”, with a heart that felt like the size of a pea.

4. Joking
Language camps were my parents’ favourite thing to send me off to. It was a great way for me to make new friends, learn another language and get out of the house without them needing to worry. The first language camp I went to was on a farm that was called “The Falcon”. The idea was to have the children speak in English to each other all the time, and thus learn new vocabulary as they were playing. So getting out of the house? Check! Learning another language? Check! Making new friends? Kcehc… I had just started wearing glasses and was still pretty insecure about them, with camp being the first time I’d be wearing them in public. I thought things would be fine because I knew a friend who was going as well, so at least I’d have him to hang around with. Sadly, he abandoned me the first day, even before my parents’ car drove out of sight. He had a really cool cap from the Charlotte Hornets, green and purple, with the visor bent into a “U”. I had a cap too. It was white, aside from the rims that were yellowed by months of perspiration, and had the logo of a cheap beer brand. The visor was as flat as an ironing board. Who could blame him for looking for other friends with cooler caps? I was mocked and ridiculed within the first hour of being at camp, even before rooms were appointed. Eventually I got to share my room with an asthmatic kid, who was my only competitor for being the camp’s social outcast. While I sympathised with his condition, his loud snoring at night made it difficult for me to be genuinely warm to him. And after he pulled down my pants in the middle of a football game, with the entire camp (girls included) watching, difficult became impossible.
One of the highlights of the camp was the camp fire. At that time the children were asked to prepare something, like a dance or a sketch, to show in front of the others. Groups were eagerly formed and as the other kids were practicing their singing and their acrobatics, I found myself alone and without ideas. Until I saw an empty bucket with the label of a brand of mayonnaise.

5. Writing
High school was pretty good to me. I had a nice group of friends, my grades were okay, and I didn’t have to exert myself too much in order to obtain them. One teacher tried to change all that. Mr. Vekeman, who gave courses for Dutch, didn’t like me. In fact, he hated me. He had noticed that I was lazy and that I didn’t pay attention. While that was true, the problem was that he took all of this personally. As if my lack of devotion for Dutch somehow brought to light his own failure at being an interesting person.
One day he gave us an assignment: to write an essay on the topic of “responsibility”. He showed an example of a particular type of essay, the one where a fictional story is interspersed with social commentary, both feeding in to each other. It looked pretty cool. Finally an assignment I liked!
I started writing about a guy left home alone, his parents leaving on a holiday. He organised a big party instead of doing his homework. This story ran parallel with some remarks on how responsibility is obtained or bestowed and the ways in which one can wriggle out of them. Of course, the whole thing blew up in that guy’s face, allowing me the conclusion that the vomit of his drunken friends in the pool was what brought home the importance of responsibility. The lesson that it was only when you took your responsibility that the luxury of swimming without finding a stray pea in your course would be yours. I handed in the essay with confidence and discussed it with my friends. They smirked. They told me I hadn’t understood the assignment correctly. We were supposed to write a normal essay, without all the fiction that our teacher deemed ridiculous. He had given us an example in class, not because he liked it, but to show us how it should never be done. An example which I followed. A style that my teacher despised and would find in an essay with my name on it.

6. Reviewing
I’m on Goodreads, present day. I’ve just read Cloud Atlas, a wonderful achievement by a gifted author. A book that is difficult to summarize because of its scope. It’s a tale that spans six different times, places and genres . There are many lines that connect these tales, but the first one worth noting is the brilliance of David Mitchell. It takes daring to write a book like this, and skill. He’s got both. First of all, there’s his mastery of English language. Just consider the following quotes:

”A ringing phone flips Luisa’s dreams over and she lands in a moonlit room."

I wouln't be surprised if David Mitchell has a similarly shaped birthmark as Charles Dickens had.

”The cold sank its fangs into my exposed neck and frisked me for uninsulated patches.”

Not convinced?

” Hot glass office buildings where the blooms of youth harden into aged cacti like my penny-pinching brother.”

Okay, just one more:

” The memory cracked on the hard rim of my heart and the yolk dribbled out.”

This book uses many different styles. Some stories are presented in the form of a letter, others are a journal, still others are an interview. Given that it spans different centuries, language itself is transformed. The chapters set in the 19th century made me grab my dictionary once in a while, while the stories set into the future are an experiment much in the same vain as “A Clockwork Orange” or “Riddley Walker” are. The language that Mitchell foresees for the future is less pleasing to both the ear and the eye than Burgess’ Nadsat. The stories set in the future registered a bit less in my mind for that reason.

Aside from his mastery of language and his propensity of delivering powerful aphorisms, Mitchell can enter the mind of any character one can imagine. He knows the workings of an ageing publisher as well as those of a gifted musical composer, he describes the life of a mass-produced clone as well as that of a 19th century notary traveling on the Pacific.

Six stories are contained in Cloud Atlas. The way they are connected is usually very subtle, though the author sometimes can’t help himself and waves a certain birthmark in your face. The blurb at the back says it’s about power, and true enough, many insights from many different perspectives are given on the nature, pitfalls and omnipresence of power and mankind's thirst for it. But I think that the true essence of this book, for me, can better be summarised with the author’s own words:

"Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds and contrary tides. I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds. "

Aside from this central and ethereal theme, the stories in Cloud Atlas each have their own plot. There’s one about an escape from a retirement home, which is my favourite. It’s got the perfect mix of humour, tension and philosophical musings. The protagonist, Timothy Cavendish, is a bit embittered and looks at the world around him with a very sceptical, but nonetheless thoroughly perceiving eye. His ghastly ordeal is the best thing I’ve read this year and that story alone is worth reading this book. The letters from Zedelghem castle, located in a little Belgian town, were also a highlight with the usage of refined language and a rather direct protagonist.

What cost this book a star is the story about the first Luisa Rey mystery. It’s got a good villain and one good line (the one about dreams flipping over), but other than that it brings the book down. First of all: it’s not a mystery. The story, pulled by its hairs as it is, is riddled with plotholes and clichés. The fact that locker n0909 at the airport, wherein Sixsmith hides a version of his report moments before his death, is never again mentioned and is replaced by a report on some yacht, literally angered me.. Was this a conscious choice by the author, employing the superficial, no-attention-to-detail “Hollywood”-style to give yet another flavour to Cloud Atlas? Probably, but that doesn’t mean I should like it.

But the overall experience of Cloud Atlas: Mesmerizing. Inspiring. Amazing. What really makes this book shine is its structure, the prose of an author who swims in English like an otter in a pond, and, of course, the grand idea of trying to make, draw and write an atlas of clouds, and succeeding.

5. Writing
A couple of days had passed and I had almost succeeded in forgetting about that essay. The sword that was dangling above my head had disappeared over the weekend, but come Monday morning that very same sword shot through the stars on a course straight for the top of my head. I could feel its heated presence in the air and was just wishing it would all be over soon when the teacher came into the class with a bundle of papers. THE bundle of papers. My essay, my biggest failure to date, was in there. Mr. Vekeman had a sorrowful look on his face. He was displeased. He started handing out the essays without having spoken a word. Slowly. I looked at my classmates’ reactions and saw despair written on their faces. The only sound in the class was the ruffling of papers and little gasps of disappointment. Of shock. Everyone around me had had their essays handed back to them. Some had gotten zero out of twenty. But where was my essay?
The teacher stood in front of the class with one paper in his hand.
“Now I will read the essay of the one person who managed to get it right. The one person who got the maximum score.”
He started to read.
I beamed with pride.
My classmates looked at me and smiled.
They liked it too.

4. Joking
The preparations for the camp fire were well under way. The firewood had been stacked, the music installation was set up, the tables where the hotdogs would be prepared were in place. Most kids were already returning to their rooms to get dressed for the big night. The shadows were getting longer, the breeze was getting cooler as I set to work on the bucket. I had made the children laugh already once during that football game, and I resolved to do it again, only this time not at anyone’s expense. I felt ready. I giggled at the scenario that played out in my head. I felt ready. I pictured Lea’s blush and playful look as I was gracefully accepting the laughter and applause. I felt ready.
The show was already well underway when I started to get nervous. Kids had been dancing and singing, sure, but there were also some that had been funny. Funny was my plan! And suddenly, after some kids were done impersonating Andrea Bocelli, it was my turn. Me and my bucket of mayonnaise. There I stood, in front of the very same audience who had seen my p-p, an audience that might as well have been a mouth to hell. I began.
“Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present to you this new brand of paint!”
I showed them the side of the bucket that I had covered with a piece of paper, with the word PAINT scribbled on it.
“It is the thing to get in your homes, ladies and gentlemen. It can be used in your living rooms, garages, kitchens, for your garden shacks, for walls and ceilings alike! Get this paint now! It’s water resistant! It’s whiter with a delicate touch of yellow! It’s wonderful!”
Timing was everything. I turned around the bucket, showing people the label of mayonnaise.
“AND IT TASTES SO GOOD!!”

And then, there was silence.
A silence I will never forget.

3. Caring
We went into the creek in search for the frogs. A part of me was hoping the little amphibians would be too quick for us, too clever, but after what seemed like only a couple of seconds Christopher had already caught one. “Look, it’s a big one!”, he said. I looked and expressed my high esteem for his frog-catching talents, hoping he would free the animal soon. He did. But he wasn’t done yet. He would teach me to catch one for myself. I was taught to combine luring with patience and swiftness. The trick is not to grab them, but to just make them jump into your hands. I went about it rather half-heartedly, but that day I learnt never to underestimate a frog’s eagerness to be caught. Without really trying I had caught a frog. Not entirely according to procedure, as it was dangling from my hands with one of its legs stuck between my fingers, but got it I did! I showed it to Christopher and quickly threw it away. “What are you doing? We’re taking them home! To show to your mother! We can build them a little park in a Tupperware box, they’ll have the time of their lives!” Back to square one. I was dreading the return journey with a frog in my hands, so I expertly managed to not catch one. To no avail. Christopher quickly caught two and gave me one to carry. “Be careful so that it doesn’t jump away.” he said. The frog was placed gently on the palm of my hand. I put my other hand over it and thus we walked back home, talking about the things we’d build and the fun the frogs would have. Having a frog in my hand wasn’t all that bad. After a while it stopped feeling so cold and it didn’t move around as much as I expected. I started to feel connected with the little creature. My little friend would be a hero among frogs, with plenty of stories to tell about Tupperwarepark. By the time we got home I felt like a Crocodile Dundee in the making. Excitedly I shouted to my mom to get us a box. She hurried out and asked us what we were up to. Proudly we showed our catch. A beautiful frog in Christopher’s hand. A squished pancake of peas in mine.

2. Drawing
I erased the sun’s smile. I drew some faceless clouds and faceless trees, a little house and a breeze. How did I draw a breeze? I just drew some flowers that tilted to the left. I drew children playing with a ball. Not because I played with a ball that summer, but because drawing a kid playing with miniature cars was too difficult. The cars would come out too big or the stance of the kid too awkward, so I decided to just keep it out of the drawing. Looking at those happy kids playing with that ball, I kind of got angry. Stupid kids. Stupid ball. What could ruin their dull everyday day? I pondered. And then I drew a bee. A big, fat bee that was caught in the middle of their ball throwing shenanigans. A big, angry bee that would enact its vengeance on those big blue eyes. A fat, crazy bee that would turn those hapless smiles upside down. The vengeance didn’t take place in the drawing. But it took place in my mind. And on the classroom window. You see, the teacher had the idea of having every kid copy something from their own drawing and paint it on the window. The teacher saw many drawings with children playing with balls, with houses and trees and even flowers in the breeze, but he only saw one with a bee. And so it was me who got to draw a big, fat bee in the summer scenery of the classroom window. A bee that would stay there for the rest of the year. “Who needs a smiling sun, high up in the sky?”, I thought, “When there’s so many reasons to smile right inside my head.”

1. Counting
I don’t remember when I started to tire of counting. The numbers seemed to lose their magic as they got bigger. Three houses seemed so much more interesting than hundreds of buildings. The five apple trees in our garden paled in comparison with the forests I saw on TV. My little world of twenty-sixes, seventeens and fours divided by twos seemed so insignificant. What’s the good of counting if it never stops before it gets boring, or if it never stops at all? What’s the sense of having a number like 76983? There’s just too much to handle. I’ve only got two hands and one head, so how can I be expected to count all those stars above? So I stopped looking up, and I looked down. Down at my hands. I put my hands on the table and looked at the back of my left hand. My pinkie was one. My thumb was five. 1-2-3-4-5. My right hand became 5-4-3-2-1. I made my thumbs overlap. 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1. Who needs infinity? Now this was counting that I could handle. Symmetrical. Harmonious. Leaving for a trip and coming back home. Counting that I enjoyed. Counting that I could never tire of. Counting up towards a crescendo and counting down to a blissful conclusion of peace.

I am very much impressed with the innovation of David Mitchell in "Cloud Atlas" insofar as he invents a new timeline for his articulate narrative style. Rather than a straightforward time line like most novels or a flashback style like Proust or Faulkner, or even the reverse timeline of "Time's Arrow" by Martin Amis, Mitchell offers us a pyramid of time for his narrative perspective. The first chapter is finished by the last; the second chapter ends in the second to last chapter; the third chapter completes itself in the third chapter from the finish and so on. Initially, the book seems to be a random sequence of short stories and I recommend that you patiently read it as such if you are frustrated in search of the story line: I assure you that it's there. For me the story line is always secondary to a compelling writing style, particularly one distinguished by narrative invention, which to me is usually the mark of an exceptional writer who seeks to improve the genre through innovation. Isn't this how the novel evolves as a genre, after all? After a couple hundred pages the story lines more clearly intertwine and we see the connections among the tales. They seem as random as clouds drifting like the souls of men and women whose lives encounter fitful storms, violent hurricanes, periods of sunshine and tranquility, building in their foreboding and forbidding billows. The connector is the anti-thesis of the cloud: the will to power of men and women. Nietzsche's philosophy becomes the foil to the ethereal drift of spirits whose passage Mitchell maps in his atlas. For it is the will to power of some who create human misery, suffering, pain, disease and poverty on a grand scale. "Another war is always coming. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks wars? The will to power: the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence or actual violence is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it: the nation-state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. Nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall be. War is one of humanity's two eternal companions." (The second is diamonds, it seems.) So the sins of the egomaniacs who rule us often drive the balance of humanity mad with senseless pursuits, arrogance, wealth and unfettered egomania. We cannot escape it, even now: never. The senselessly selfish act of one person with a will to power brings pain and even death to those who don't possess or seek it: those with lesser technology, money, weapons, assets. Yet this process drives humanity and the history of the long suffering human race. "Because of this (the will to power): -- 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." It is an eminently sensible observation. But there's more: "If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw, if we believe divers races and creeds can share this world peaceably... 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. I am not deceived. It is the hardest world to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword." Seem familiar? Tough stuff this. Mitchell's pyramid of tales serves to illustrate his point about the futility of violence and its painful lessons which humanity can never seem to outgrow and which ultimately places both humanity and civilization at risk of extinction. This is an important novel: I encourage you patiently to read it as your patience will be amply rewarded.

See comments for a raise-the-eyebrows and dimple-the-cheeks discussion.

Synopsis: A good 'epic' drama on the basic principles of Karma. A lecture, illustrated through the rebirth of a certain cast of characters, each birth altered by past birth, inextricably linked - a repeating microcosm; a beautiful composition playing out within the cosmic grand symphony. David Mitchell does manage to convey the beauty of the concept... a bit grandiloquently, but then the concept demands it.

Gimmicky? Yes.

Cool? Again, yes.



Postscript: This reviewer could have attempted a greater examination into the operation of Karma and Dharma. Postponed for the time being. Other aspects, such as the rhetorical/narrative devices and historical conception, has been well analyzed by other reviewers.

The only disagreement that this reviewer has with some of these analyses is that they have been insufficiently thorough in exploring the techniques of narration/rhetoric. In particular, they seem to have neglected stylistic matters, concentrating too much on parataxis, or the balance of elements in an argument, rather than on true syntaxis, or the composition of extended arguments whose elaborate and constantly varied structure should echo the turns taken by the core idea being expressed.

In Cloud Atlas, what we see is a unique blend of the theoretical and the practical, for the stories are virtuoso pieces designed not for a particular plot alone but to serve as models to be variously employed towards illustrating the single grand idea of Karma (as well, no doubt, as to stand in their own right as autonomous works of fiction). Hence this reviewer's preoccupation with the concept of Karma in the short synopsis above. Since this postscript is now much longer than the review, I leave the rest of this too for later. For clarification, the book is no longer a 5-star read for this reviewer, but will let the original rating stand.

Hey readers...



Look at the book you're reading...



...now back to me.



Now back at the book you're reading...



...now back at me.



Sadly, that book was (probably) not written by me. But if you'd check out my book, Cloud Atlas, you'd know that I could have written it if I just wanted to. Look back at the book...



...and now back up. Who's that?



That's me, the author of Cloud Atlas, which is the book you could have been reading. What's in your hand?



It's Cloud Atlas, which is a historical novel about a pacific voyage all the way back in the 1800's. Back at me.



Now back at Cloud Atlas. Look, it's now a thriller.



And look again. Cloud Atlas is now science fiction.



Anything is possible when a book contains several stories inside...



...and I am the author.



Cloud Atlas is arguably David Mitchell's (all right, I'll stop pretending - that's him in the pictures) most famous novel - and if it isn't, it certailnly will be after the Wachowskis will turn it into a big budged movie - the trailer is not that bad looking. The novel itself is critically acclaimed - it won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and even nominated for two of the prestigious awards given to works of science fiction - the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke award.

So what should we, the readers, make of Cloud Atlas? By now, probably everyone interested in reading it has heard that it's composed of six different storylines, all of which interact with each other in some way. The single most impressive thing about the novel is the fact that the author adapts a unique narrative voice for each of these sections, making Cloud Atlas a feat of literary ventriloquism. The six storylines are also different in structure, setting and timelines.

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing opens the novel: set around 1850, the journal is a first person account of a south Pacific journey of the naive Adam Ewing, who finds himself ashore on the Chattam Islands near New Zealand. He falls sick, and seeks help from a suspicious doctor who looks at his money with hungry eyes, and also learns a bit of the native history: the enslavement of the Moriori by the Maori.

Letters from Zedelghem is the next sequence, and as the title suggests it's epistolary. The titular letters are written by Robert Frobisher to Rufus Sixmith. Frobisher is a completely broke English musician who buys his daily bread by being a hired hand for a Belgian composer - Ayrs. Despite the implications that Sixmith is his lover, Frobisher starts an affair with Ayr's wife and it does not help that Ayrs also has a young daughter.

Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery is the next section which tells the tale of Louisa Rey, a journalist who follows the lead that some nuclear plants are unsafe and can blow up the world: of course there are people who do not wish for this information to be made public. Dressed up as a thriller, it is definitely the most fast paced section of the novel and does a convincig job at passing as a grocery store rack paperback novel.

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is probably my favorite section: 65 year old Timothy Cavendish is a vanity publisher who gets himself into trouble with one of his clients (who happens to be a gangster) and has to lay low for a while; His brother arranges a safe place for him to go to. Only when he arrives he discovers that the hideaway is a nursing home; Cavendish is an extremely likeable old codger and lots of hilarity ensues as he attempts to break free. It gets downhill from here.

An Orison of Sonmi~451 is the least inspired section: a derivative dystopian fare, totally by the book. Overused dystopian tropes abound: Far future, immensely opressive totalitarian society, corporate overlords, genetically engingered slaves (cannibalism!), neologisms and simple spelling changes such as "xcitement, xpendable, xtra". etc. To top the cake it is set in futuristic Korea, complete with "the Beloved Chairman" who is in control of All Things. Not very, um, subtle, you know.

Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After or Trainspotting in Space continues with the science fiction theme, and is set in post-apocalyptic Hawaii. Humanity has been almost completely wiped out during "The Fall". Zachry, the protagonist, is an old man recounting his teenage years, when he met Meronym, a member of a former advanced civilization. The section overuses apostrophes to an almost ridiculous extent, making me regret ever complaining about the simplicity of spelling changes in the Somni section. The style hangs over the content unmercifully, like a sharp sword, ready to drop at any moment to cut your reading enjoyment - and does exactly that, all the time.

After Slosha we return to the preceding stories yet again, this time in the reverse order, going back in time: Beginning with futuristic tale of Somni and ending with the concluding entries of the journal of Adam Ewing, in the 1850's.

So what is the big deal? The structure. On the back cover is Michael Chabon's appraisal of the novel as "series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book" and as the Wachowski's boldly emphasize in all caps in the trailer for the upcoming film, "EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED". However, I found these connections to be sketchy at best: For example, Ewing's journal is conveniently found by Frobisher at a bookshelf of his Belgian employer; Rufus Sixmith, the addressee of Frobisher's letters just happens to be a whistleblower collaborating with Louisa Rey; Louisa Rey's story is a manuscript that Cavendish is offered for publication; Cavendish's goofy adventure is a Disney romp watched by Somni in the far future, and Somni herself is a goddess worshipped by Zachry, who knows her story from a futuristic recording device. There are further attempts to stitch these stories together - a recurring birthmark, one character seemingly remembering a piece of music from another time, the recurrence of the number six - six stories, a character named...Sixmith who is...66 years old, etc. If the "nested dolls" analogy passed you by, the author has Isaac Sachs, an engineer (how appropriate!) explain the magic:

"“One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each ‘shell’ (the present) encased inside a nest of ‘shells’ (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of ‘now’ likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future.”"

But that is not all. Frobisher's musical masterpiece to be is called The Cloud Atlas Sextet, which he describes as:

"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."

...which is obviously how Cloud Atlas, the novel, is structured. It seems to me as if the author did not trust his readers and had to spell out his game in fear of being misunderstood, or worse: the trick going unnoticed. He also seems to see critics coming, and in the next sentence Frobisher thinks about his work: "Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.”" The concept is laid out for the reader in its entirety at one moment: when the author namecalls the reincarnation, having Timothy Cavendish discount the notion of Louisa Rey being Robert Frobisher reincarnated - he has the same birthmark as them both.. Sometimes it's done in an almost humorous way: Timothy Cavendish mutters that "Soylent Green is people", and that some geeks must be "Cloning humans for shady Koreans" - which is exactly what happens in the Somni section.

Revolutionary or Gimmicky? For this jury Cloud Atlas does not have what it takes to be revolutionary, meaning something...well, revolutionary. The structure of the novel appears to be complex at the first glance, but during actual reading shows itself as not overly complex, and the author makes sure that the reader will understand it. The stories themselves are not strong enough to stand on their own: the Louisa Rey mystery is intentionally bland, but the Orison of Somni 451 is formulaic to the bone, where all characters are reduced to familiar stereotypes: The tyranical Big Brother regime and the opressed sentient beings who should not be capable of complex thought but are, which dates back to Yevgeny Zamyatin's brillian novel We, which has been written in...1921, going through more famous examples - Brave New World, 1984, movies such as the original Planet of the Apes, THX1138, etc etc etc. To give the author credit the dystopian formula has been firmly estabilished (and exploited - currently especially on the young adult market) and it's quite difficult (if not downright impossible) to come up with any innovations: especially if there's a set limit on the lenght of the piece which hardly allows for any worldbuilding, forcing the author to work with the barest minimum.

The recurring theme ofCloud Atlas is enslavement and exploitation of human beings. Ewing is exposed to enslavement of one tribe by another and is forced to decide the fate of a person; penniless Frobisher is forced to leave England for Belgium, where he is drawn into a net cast by an aging composer, who wants to exploit his talent; Louisa Rey is fighting the capitalist ubermench who do not care about the dangers of a nuclear reactor. Tinmothy Cavendish has to escape from dangerous people and literally becomes enslaved in a home for the elderly; Sonmi is a genetically enginereed fabricant who was made to be used. Throughout the ages, the weaker are controlled, abused and exploited by the stronger, who want even more riches and strenght.

is it a new topic? No. Does Cloud Atlas offer a new look at it? alas, the answer also has to be no. The book opposes the notion of survival of the fittest, where "the weak are the meat that the strong eat" - and this is obviously wrong. But in the year 2004 (when it was published) did we not know that already? The dangers of capitalism and the money-oriented western civilization, its contemporary face being the Louisa Rey sections and the gloomy vision of the future shown in the Orison of Somni; the post-colonial white guilt for which the vessel is the character of Adam Ewing. Adam Ewing seems to exist to only espouse this notion; after being rescued by a Noble Savage he is told about the bloodthirst of the White Race by the Doctor (who is the Evil character since this is how he was estabilished to be). The morality play hits home and Ewing decides that the way the world is is Wrong and there is worth in striving for a seemingly impossible Change where everyone is Free. This storyline is not bad by default, but it is hardly original and there is hardly any place for ambiguity; I was surprised at the comparisons with Benito Cereno, which is probably my favorite work by Melville (along with the brilliant Bartleby, the Scrivener - which is also about individualism and freedom, but in a completely different manner). The genius of Melville's work lies in its ambiguity: it has been praised and criticized because of it, as various readers read it either as a racist work in support of slavery, while other readers read it as an anti-slavery text in support of abolition. There is little if any of this in Adam Ewing's journal; of course it's wrong to own another human being as property, and most of the humanity came to agree on this...after we stole land from one another and replaced their people with ours, colonized and governed them against their will and exploited them in slave labor. Melville's work was written in 1856, when abolition was a controversial (and dangerous) issue; even though Adam Ewing's journal is set in that time period, we can't forget that it was created in the 2000's. There is not enough originality or exceptionality to it, and solely by attempting to stress the human freedom it borders dangerously on the banal repetition of something done earlier and better.

The author is at his best in the narratives of Frobisher and Cavendish, where he handles two drastically different characters with skill and verve. Both are Englishmen, though of different times and of different age and profession: Frobisher is young, cynical, cunning, brash and unapologetic; Cavendish is elderly, sheepish, slow and silly. It is in these two narratives where the author's talent really shines; he writes with panache and flamboyance, and his whimsical humor is contrasted with rawness and emotion. Frobisher's egoism and frustration are off-putting, and yet the reader cannot help but feel some sympathy for his character and wish him good in creating the work of his life; Cavendish's geriatric adventure is surprisingly rollicking and full of charm. It is their stories which work the best in this book, and are the most affecting and memorable.

On the whole, Cloud Atlas reads more as an exercise in trying to write stories in different genres and styles, and then weaving them together; ultimately, it does not really work. The majority of the stories are not strong enough to stand on their own, and there is not enough to bind them together; even the two stories I enjoyed suffer from being just a part of the whole which doesn't really work. It lacks the profundity and depth it needs to be an important work; a more vicious critic would say that the author arranged his stories like matryoshkas to hide his inability to offer meaningful and perceptive insights into the human nature. I doubt that Cloud Atlas is such a case, and because of this I can't wish it would have been all that it was said to be, profound and meaningful, offering a fresh approach to the subject which is so important. But what can you say about things on which so many said so much over the centuries? Like clouds, Cloud Atlas eventually disperses, leaving in memory snapshots of its elements, and not the whole.

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...

Cloud Atlas is a clown car. Clown after clown keeps popping out of this one car, and each one has a different trick; some tricks are shiny, but in the end it's still tricks.

There are six stories juggled together here. Are the short stories interrelated? No, not really. There are matching birthmarks, which Mitchell calls "a symbol really of the universality of human nature," which isn't a relationship unless you consider all stories about humans interrelated. He goes on to say, "The book's theme is predacity, the way individuals prey on individuals, groups on groups, nations on nations, tribes on tribes. So I just take this theme and in a sense reincarnate that theme in another context." So...y'know, predacity is just conflict, which is just storytelling. "Something happens." That's our theme.

Here's what happens:
1. In The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, in 1850 some dude is on a boat to California. Dr. Goose invents a ghastly disease and poisons him in order to steal his stuff. He's saved by this one slave and learns that slavery is bad.

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.

I pulled this whole quote out because it sounds like a high school diversity workshop: it is treacly bullshit and as a mission statement it's sophomoric.

2. Letters from Zedelghem: in the best story, the composer Frobisher in 1931 leeches himself onto the more famous publisher Ayrs, who in turn leeches onto his talent. Frobisher fucks his wife, falls in love with his daughter, writes his one brilliant piece and kills himself.

3. Our most conventional story, Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, finds this lady trying to expose an unsafe power plant in 1975. Everyone tries to kill her but she succeeds. "It's like panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold." Uh huh.

4. In The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, set around now and with a nod to Martin Amis, the titular asshole is imprisoned in a nursing home but manages to escape. That reminds me, I read this during ten days in suburbia watching "ads" on "TV" and we kept seeing one for A Place For Mom that we were very entertained by.

5. We move into the future with An Orison of Soon-Mi, and this really impresses a lot of people, that we're swooping from 1850 forward into the fuuuuuuture, and if that sounds impressive to you then maybe you'll like this book better than I did; I don't care. It's just another trick. Anyway, this clone lady realizes that she's a slave. It turns out that her whole rebellion was plotted by the government in order to foment prejudice against clones, which seems clever until you think about it for like a minute. Then she gets executed.

6. In the middle, shittiest and longest uninterrupted story, Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After, we're in a boring post-apocalyptic Hawaii where everyone has started speaking in difficult and annoying slang. A lady who lives on, I'm gonna guess an aircraft carrier, makes friends with this one kid. There are magic prophesies - seriously, magic. One-dimensional bad guys attack. Some kid gets raped, in case we weren't sure they were bad guys.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

There's some more claptrap for you, and there's not much to this collection of short stories. Platitudes and gimmicks. High school reading. It's a clown car. My, that's a lot of clowns! And each one silly.

On re-reading in 2012...

I admit, the surpringsingly-and-terrifyingly-not-awful trailer for the upcoming movie adaptation of this book sent me plunging back into its hexapalindromic universe to re-solidify my own mental renditions of Frobisher's bicycle, Sonmi's soap packs, and Lousia's imaginary California, among other things. I emerge even more impressed with Mitchell's mimetic acrobatics, the book's deft allusive integument ("Is not ascent their sole salvation?" p. 512), the acrimonious satire ("if consumers are satisfied with their lives at any meaningful level [...] plutocracy is finished" p. 348), and, ultimately, the nakedly deliberate messages about humanity's will to power and our capacity for empathy re-re-re-re-re-reiterated in the second half. I kept wishing Lousia or Cavendish or someone one would say "Be excellent to each other. Party on, dudes!" but not wishing in a snarky cynical judgy kind of way! Because I actually think Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is pretty... excellent (and come to think of it, is also a story set in multiple time periods with strong musical undertones and a message of peace, love, and happiness...). This book grants me one of the greatest pleasures a book can: it restores profundity to a hackneyed truth. If you're not into Mitchell's prose, characters, or fancy-schmancy structure, though, you might just end up with the hackneyed bit.

One thing that still confuses me about this book is the role of the Frobisher story. The other five all deal directly with humanity's inclination toward subjugation that Dr. Goose summed up with his law, "the weak are meat the strong do eat," but the Zedelgem story is different. Robert is stealing from Ayrs in a very material way, but this theft is ancillary. His manipulation of Ayrs and the Crommelyncks, while selfish, is also not entirely one-sided. Ayrs and Frobisher are playing each other, almost equally, and not entirely for the purpose of self-aggrandizement but in the service of music, which they both seem to perceive as a force beyond their own persons. Jocasta is similarly playing Robert for pleasure but also for her husband. I suppose these battles of wills provide the tension that keeps the story flowing, but they still seem WAY different than Maori slave-makers and brainwashed fast food servant clones, and different in kind, not just in scale. I like the fact that it's different (I think the moral refrains in the latter half might have become a bit tiresome without it), but I wonder if there's a reason for its uniqueness. Perhaps Mitchell planned to play up the manipulation aspect but couldn't bring himself to fully damn a man with a quest so similar to his own.

Old review from 2006

This, Sir, is a Novel. I don't think I've read anything so surprisingly excellent since Jonathan Strange Mr Norell. Actually, I have. What I meant to say is that I've read nothing so marvelously epic since then. As usual, my attempts to explain it to people have met with polite nods and changed subjects, but let me try: the book is like 6 perfect little novellas, arranged as Russian matroyshka dolls, and as you read, you bore in, and bore back out. Each doll is a different period in time, the outermost being in the early 19th century, the latest being somewhere around 2200 (I think). Four of the six are out and out genre pieces: historical maritime fiction, crime novel, dystopian scifi, and post-apocalyptic scifi, with all their various tropes rendered with loving affection. But they are just written, so, well that they are simply irresistible. I only wish I could find single genre novels that were as perfectly crafted as a single portion of this book. The pieces placed in the 1930s and the present day are also wonderful, but certainly aren't the type of fare I normally seek out.

But yes, exceedingly well written. What's it about? Well, there's the the journal of an American notary returning home from the Chatham Islands aboard a morally suspect ship in the 1830s; a young quasi-rake of a composer cuckolding an older colleague while helping him write new works, who documents his dalliances and mishaps in letters to his former lover; there's a true-story thriller about a Californian journalist in the 1970s attempting to out a corrupt and deadly energy company for squelching a safety report damning their new nuclear energy plant; the soon-to-be-filmed chronicles of a publisher in the present day whose attempts to escape the extortionist cronies of his gangster star author land him in a Draconian nursing home from which he cannot escape; there's the not-too-distant future testimony of a Korean clone bred for service in a fast food joint but who, via the machinations of forces many and penumbral, gains full consciousness; and finally (in the sweet and creamy middle) the Huck Finnish tale of a post-apocalyptic Hawaiian "primitive" and the "civilized" researcher sent to study his society. Whew! The characters of each story find themselves reading their predecessor, and sometimes characters overlap a very, very little. Each story features a character with the same birth mark, and they all seem to experience deja vu from characters in other stories. See? Now it sounds corny. But I swear to you, it is cool.

I guess the book is primarily about the will to power. Slavery and subjugation, small personal cruelties, corporate greed. It's sort of like the anti-Fountainhead, except much more fun to read. I don't know. Dissecting fiction about giant apes comes much more naturally to me. Please read this book so, at the very least, you can explain it to me.

Tuesday, 16th June--

"I come to my journal as a Catholick to a confessor." The ache in my head was too grievous to ignore & proves that this experience though conjured by Literature enacted themselves upon me as real events. "I shall describe what befell me this day, steering as close to the facts as possible." I attempted such and began to Read, hoping that the cleverness contained in these Words might bestow comprehension & enlightenment upon me, but Alas! As I endeavored to comprehend, my eyelids were like a heavy burden & scraped against the eggshell skin of my eyeballs & instead I emerged into the heavy sleep of the savage neath the heavenly eye of the sky.

*****************

CHATEAU CAROL
17th--VI--2015

Reader,
It was with pleasure I began the section set in Zedelghem. The writer erudite, v. passionate about music. Composing for a symphony evoked phrases that sang. Penniless, on the run from creditors, R.F. inserts himself into a syphilic-ridden composer's household.

"Now, pay attention while I talk books." I suspect R.F. to be co-written by a critic; how else could one explain lines like, "Something shifty about the journal's authenticity--seems to structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn't ring quite true--but who would bother forging such a journal and why?"

It is as if the writer is reading my mind. I tell you, this part was v.good. Am captivated by writer's passion for his music, reminds me of a fair-haired muse from my years at the college--recommend you find a muse of your own.

******************

3
Luisa Rey and Sixsmith are in a discussion about Hitchcock films. Again I think that Mitchell is staring as his own navel when Sixsmith says, "A contrived puzzle, yes, but all thrillers would wither without contrivance."

*****************

"As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmoderinsm and chaos theory. I make no apology, however, for (re)starting my own narrative with my version of that shocking affair. You see, it paved my first good intention on the road to Hull, or rather Hull's hinterland, where my ghastly ordeal is fated to unfold."

This is truly the current version of doctor Ewing, full of himself in every sense of the word and convinced of both his importance and with a general air of intolerance for the less enlightened around him, yet crippled by a streak of cowardice. Again with the naval-gazing, and let me not begin on the contrived disaster. I had no idea I was really reading Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

*****************

"A more metaphysical question... were you happy, back in those days?"
As I was reading, you mean? "If, by happiness, you mean the absence of adversity," well, yes, I was the happiest reader in the society as was insisted by all the reviews giving this book five stars. "However, if happiness means the conquest of adversity, or a sense of purpose, or the xercise of one's will to power," then I admit that I was enduring this read for the mild curiosity of the puzzle presented. But I did not realize I would be reading Brave New World. I gleaned, however, that my xperience would not be welcomed among the Souled.

****************

"This ain't a smilesome yarnie, but you asked 'bout my life on Big Island, an' these is the mem'ries what are minnowin' out."

I memberin' readin' dialeck makin' me annoyed, unless yr name b'un Alice Walker


****************

I end, convinced that Mitchell is trying to be both the lecturer and Fool(critic) both writin' and readin' the work:

"Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextext for overlapping soloists'... 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."


I know which camp I fall into.




much, much obliged to Mimi for sharing a copy of the book with me.

First and foremost, this is a book about form. Four of the five stories are broken in half, each one ‘nesting’ (thanks, Chabon) inside the other until we get to the apex of the novel in one complete, contained story. It’s an intriguing project for many reasons. Firstly, there are the more formal experiments that are taking place: Mitchell sets up his stories to question a reader’s sense of how a story is told—how we deal with chronology, the ways in which readers organize elements of plot and character, and what obligation the author has to guide the reader through new information. (Mitchell tends to drop us in headlong—no preface for what sort of world we are entering or how it is related to the one which preceded it.)

But what is really interesting about the way Mitchell sets up his book is the way the characters and stories end up relating to each other. Each story makes an appearance in the next one, becoming a minor element in an ever-expanding, ever-widening plot arch. Mitchell has a lot of freedom with this given that his subject matter is somewhat fanciful and blankly fictional all the way through. Where in a stridently ‘factual’ and ‘realistic’ novel readers may find the process of one story becoming a book in the next, which then becomes a movie in the one after that, a bit convenient and cheesey—the feeling of invention in Cloud Atlas allows for such literary devices without seeming cheap. (I did think the final stretch was a bit silly—a little too Brave New World dystopia-laden for me, but otherwise was rather pleased with the linkages.) This is something that I believe fantasy and sci-fi writers generally are allowed more freedom with—look at the Harry Potter series—the woman literally pulls plot devices out of a hat, and more power to her. Because that is (at least to me) what really puts the spark in truly ‘fictional fiction.’ You don’t have to constantly tell yourself to Suspend Your Disbelief because you did so at the beginning.

The other thing that is interesting about this is that you start reconsidering the ‘What’ of the thing. If Character A is reading letters from Character B, but Character A is a fictional person in another novel—what is the ‘real’ story? Where did these ‘fake’ fictions get generated? As each story expands, it throws the last into question, merely by reframing our sense of ‘real’ and ‘not real.’ The fact that this matters to any of us when we set out to read a fictional novel is, perhaps, one of my biggest literary ticks.

One seemingly small thing that really irked me by the end of the book: I hate it when authors use their characters to make commentaries on the quality of their fiction. At worst, this is a cheap absolution for a writer who isn’t willing to really defend a choice he has made in a work, and at best it’s cute editorial winking that I don’t need. I know that such meta-commentary is part of the dialog, per se, but I fail to see its true usefulness. If you’ve put your story out there, it should stay out there, and it no longer needs your commentary. Don’t patronize me.

Lastly, in a novel that has ‘come unstuck in time,’ where events intermingle and expand and contract with a fluidity that you don’t often see, I was a little disappointed at the sentimentality that this connection seemed to inspire in the writing. Call me a cynic, but I think novels lose their punch when they try to Really Matter. Suffice to say that honing in on the 20/20 hindsight/unacknowledged foresight of history, on the inevitability of humanity’s ironic destruction is pretty unnecessary in a novel that has spent so much thoughtful, patient time and effort doing just that. Once we have the god’s eye view perspective of time repeating, further discussion almost strikes one as prosaic and simplistic. To my mind, just the fact that there is a connection is enough in and of itself.