Author: David Mitchell
ISBN: 0-340-83237-1
Published: Hodder and Stoughton (Scepter)
Date: 2004
Book quote:
“I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’that kayak. 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.”
________
Cloud Atlas is not one book, but six. Moreover, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, so attempting to review this is (to use a gross understatement) daunting.
The several books in question are as follows.
1. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, an 19th century notary who is on a journey aboard The Prophetess, captained by the barely-human Captain Molyneaux with the aid of his barbaric first mate Boerhaave. This story is abruptly (quite literally, we later find) cut in half. The first part opens the novel (Cloud Atlas), and the second part closes it. The script is discovered in Belgium by the narrator of the next book in the sequence. He journeys from a set of remote islands near New Zealand towards San Francisco, though we never see him get further than Hawaii.
2. The second novel comprises the 17 (9+8) letters from Robert Frobisher to Rufus Sixsmith, in Letters from Zedelghem. This too is cut into two halves, the second part coming just before the final instalment of the aforementioned Pacific Journal. Robert Frobisher is a talented, louche young composer who travels in the 1930s to Belgium, with the aim of becoming an amanuensis to the ageing composer Vyvyan Ayres. His letters to Sixsmith (his lover back in England) describe his work with Ayres, his affair with Ayres’s wife, and his own composition work. Frobisher’s first-person narrative is a sensory cornucopia, abounding above all in auditory imagery.
3. The third piece is Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery – itself apparently (we later discover) a manuscript submitted to a publisher. This of course is also cut into two. Louisa Rey, a reporter for a low-brow newspaper, meets an ageing Sixthmith in 1975 when she is stuck in a lift with him. On his instigation, she starts an investigation into a cover-up of negative safety reports on a new nuclear reactor. The consequences of her attentions and those of others result in extremely aggressive protective measures from Seaboard (the company building the reactor) and Luisa is soon running for her life. This piece is written as a fast-paced thriller.
4. The fourth book is The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. This is set more or less in the present day, and is a first-person narrative by an ageing vanity publisher, Timothy Cavendish. Cavendish stumbles upon fame and fortune accidentally when one of his (as ever) unsuccessful authors defenestrates a hostile critic of his novel and is locked up in jail. The book becomes a bestseller via the publicity, but Cavendish is incompetent with the finances and after a while his publisher’s brothers arrive to dust him down for half the proceeds. To avoid this, Cavendish flees, picking up one last manuscript that has been sent in for his consideration for review: Half-Lives: the First Louisa Rey Mystery. He goes to his brother for help, who seems (eventually) to offer it but in fact has him locked away in an old people’s home, from which he cannot escape. This narrative is cut in half at the point where Cavendish is in the home and suffers a stroke.
5. The fifth is An Orison of Sonmi -451. Sonmi-451 is a fabricant (genetically engineered clone) awaiting execution for insubordination. She is recording her experiences for posterity on an ‘orison’ – an egg-like object that captures her narrative and hologram. The setting is Korea (now called Nea So Copros) some time in the future, after the ‘skirmish’. We learn that there are dealands (rapidly expanding) where life is no longer possible due to irradiation and complete depletion of resources. Fabricants are made for every necessity – Sonmi is a type engineered for service in a fast-food diner, others work clearing up deadlands, processing food, manufacturing – anything the humans don’t want to do. The job of humans is to consume, spend, and earn. They have ‘souls’ implanted as chips in their fingers, and are constrained to ‘debit’ them each month to a certain amount, or they get exiled to the unprotected outer world where they soon die of radiation poisoning. Sonmi’s narrative is interrupted when she is watching an old film of the narrative that has gone before, The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish – the film itself being interrupted at the point where Cavendish’s narrative last stopped. Sonmi’s narrative is the transcript of the archivist’s questions to her and her answers.
6. The sixth narrative is Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After. Chronologically it’s the most forward in time of all the narratives. It’s also in the centre of Cloud Atlas and is narrated in a single sweep. The piece set at an unspecified time in the future, after the ‘Fall’. ‘Civ’lize’ has been wiped away, and scattered tribes inhabit the worlds in varying degrees of barbarity. The narration is made by an ageing Zach’ry, who recounts the events of his past to his son. The setting the big island of Hawaii. He tells of how a neighbouring tribe, the Kona, murdered most of his family, and then how the most advanced tribe, the ‘Prescients’ had one woman come over to live with them for a while, as an anthropological study. Zach’ry and the Prescient woman (Meronym) travel up to Mauna Kea, and find the old observatories – Zach’ry confronts his devils in the high atmosphere. The story ends in almost total devastation as Zach’ry’s tribe is wiped out by the Kona tribe, and the Meronym gets news that the Prescients have succumbed to a plague or disease and are almost extinct.
All of these except the inmost layer of the onion (and the one most forward in time) ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’’ are cut in half and stacked like a vast club-sandwich, so the transverse cut yields the pattern of:
1 2 3 4 5 (6) 5 4 3 2 1
Chronologically, the ‘older’ parts are on the outside of the novel, and the ‘newer’ parts on the inside. There are two comparisons which could be made with this. Organically, that would be the way a piece would grow, from the inside out (the youngest parts of the onion are at the core). It also reminds me of a description in the C.S. Lewis children’s series ‘Narnia’, where the equivalent of Heaven is depicted as an onion that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. The further up the mountain at the heart of the novel you go, the larger the landscape. I have a funny feeling this particular structure might have been in the author’s mind when crafting Cloud Atlas.
The pieces have been called ‘pastiches’ and are certainly (mostly) in recognisable styles, but they are all so consummately crafted they’ve long since transcended pastiche into a crystallisation of the art form. I have to admit I can’t offhand think of a style equivalent for ‘Letters from Zedelghem’ – perhaps that’s Mitchell’s own contribution, perhaps could be called Sensory Interpretative because that’s what it does. I was going to add ‘Prose’ on the end but it’s more akin to poetry, mostly. Otherwise there’s the 19th century diarist, the thriller, the modern comedy, the dystopian future with the corporatised language, and the post-apocalyptic narrative with both language and understanding in tatters. They’re too well done to be being mocked. They’re being revelled in. As much as the narration of Sonmi is chilling, Half-Lives is thrilling, and as for Timothy Cavendish – well that was so funny I nearly had hysterics and had to be brought a glass of water and a bunch of tissues.
Not knowing what I was letting myself in for, when Adam Ewing’s narrative stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, I thought (my copy being a library book) some pieces must have dropped out, and started nosing about for scraps, ironically, under the bed (you’ll have to read the book to find out the reference). It was only after careful checking of the page numbering that I carried on, entirely doubtful as to what was happening. Another few hundred pages and things started to clear – just a little.
Mitchell has apparently said that the theme of the book is ‘predacity’. This he’s explained as people and nations preying on each other – but as there’s no such word as ‘predacity’ (it’s predation), I wonder if it was a joke on ‘predating’ as well. For those are the two main themes: consumerism and the nature of Time.
The books influence and reflect each other. The one distinguishing mark that most of the protagonists bear, the comet-shaped birthmark, cements the notion that they are the same souls being reborn over and over. Somehow, the memories of their past lives surface occasionally. Sonmi remembers Louisa Rey’s car accident as she sails off an embankment. Louisa Rey remembers the sounds of ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’ composed by Robert Frobisher, although she has never heard it before. In Sloosha’s crossin’ Zach’ry wonders how all the dead people are going to be reborn into his tribe again when there are no more children to be born – but it is he who decides that Meronym is a reincarnation of Sonmi. However, while they are all linked, there are doubts about the reality of all of them – only the tale that’s being recounted at the time seems to have any weight, by virtue of its immediacy.
Adam Ewing’s journal has some notations and hints in it from his son, so it’s slightly dubious as to whether it was really written as a journal, and Robert Frobisher mentions this. The same issues surround the ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ narrative – most of it is in the first person by Zach’ry but at the end we’re suddenly confronted by his son telling the story after he’s dead, and reflecting on how much of it is true. As he says, “Most yarnin’s got a bit o’ true, some yarnin’s got some true, an’ a few yarnin’s got a lot o’ true. The stuff ‘bout Meronym and the Prescient was mostly true, I reck’n.” Robert Frobisher’s letters don’t seem to show any cause to be doubted, but for some reason I can’t fathom Sixthmith does not read the last eight letters, making them in a sense invisible until Louisa opens them forty years later. Louisa’s story is itself a piece of fiction sent to a vanity publisher. Sonmi’s orison is no doubt recording truth, but the details of the story reveal hidden ‘truth’ behind ‘truth’ and one is left with the feeling that all the ground has been taken away and we’re not quite sure where to stand.
So the past influences the present, but the future seems to as well, by implication of the structure of the book. The only sure point is the present, what is happening now. Clues and threads weave through the tapestry, like the ships in the book. The ‘Prophetess’ that Ewing sails on (and Louisa Rey passes by on her travels and experiences an unknown tingle at) is still metaphorically sailing as the miraculously preserved ship of the ‘Prescients’. Foresight is in a way the same as hindsight – both transcend into the spiritual world when they span generations.
The other theme, less originally, is consumerism. In the world of empire, Ewing ponders the fate of aboriginal tribes wiped out of existence. Dr Goose opines that as they can’t keep up with the whites, they’re being given a helping hand out by being slaughtered. In a Pacific island they stop at, their host for the evening explains to them how they are inculcating ‘industry’ to the islanders by getting them addicted to tobacco.
‘You must understand, sir, your typical Polynesian spurns industry because he’s got no reason to value money. “If I hungry,” says he, “I go pick me some, or catch me some. If I cold, I tell woman, ‘Weave!’”. Idle hands, Mr Ewing, & we both know what work the Devil finds for them. But by instilling in the slothful so-an’-sos a gentle craving for this harmless leaf, we give him an incentive to earn money, so he can buy his baccy – not liquor, mind, just baccy – from the Mission trading-post. Ingenious, wouldn’t you say?’
The white humans' lust to spoil the Polynesian idyll (idle) is echoed throughout. More and more items are created, themselves creating a desire for their possession widening in ever-more-futile circles. A typical example of this is the doll-fabricant in Sonmi’s narrative, made to be played with by human girls. But like all fashions the doll soon pales and the girl’s parents dispose of this living being by casting it off a high bridge. Later, we learn that the whole scene itself has been structured and set before Sonmi in order to produce a desire for revenge within her. The desire for revenge itself is in turn engineered to create an enemy-figure for the humans where there was none in the first place. In a final twist, although the enemy-figure is created through this elaborate chain of artificial manufacturing, it also brings forth the seeds of the illusion-makers and arch-consumer-planner’s downfall. Thus the ‘Smart’ that upholds ‘Civ’lise’ is indeed also its destroyer, as Zach’ry finds out.
To attempt at comprehensive review of this book on a mere single reading is folly, and this review is certainly many miles from comprehensive. Cloud Atlas is vastly intriguing and written by a talent so vast one gets the image of someone with a head at least the size of a watermelon writing it – else how could all those threads possibly be brought together like that? It’s stunning. However, I wonder how many of Mitchell’s readers quite understand what is going on. I certainly felt I had missed many links, even though I could feel them there, pulling me along. I know from remarks and reviews on less taxing books that the average reader simply isn’t capable of dealing with this degree of complexity. However, that is where the original sheer brilliance of the mastery of the various styles comes in. It doesn’t really matter. The core messages aren’t so hard to grasp, even if you don’t know where you’ve got them from. Anyone can sit back and simply enjoy the ride. And when someone figures out how exactly it’s made and what it’s going on about, please let me know.
