Cloud Atlas: A Novel
by David Mitchell
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Book Summary Information
Author: David MitchellEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2004-08-17
ISBN: 0375507256
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Cloud Atlas: A Novel
Book Review: Moving, brilliant, and revolutionary. Hyperbole? Hardly.
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm not sure where to begin talking about Cloud Atlas; my enthusiasm keeps bubbling over and upsetting everything I try to say before I can fairly begin. I could say that it's the best novel I've read in, god, I don't even know how long, or I could talk about how important I think the book is from a creative standpoint, how it could point the way towards a new and distinct literature of the 21st century. But that would require the marshalling of arguments and the accumulation of carefully-chosen examples, and all I really want to do is bounce on my heels excitedly and, like a nine-year-old, recount all the really cool stuff that happened - at length, and with voices and sound effects.
Okay. Deep breath. Let me see if I can get it together, here.
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850, with a story called "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing." Ewing, a penniless San Francisco lawyers' clerk, is returning home to his family from a business trip in Australia aboard a private schooner called the Prophetess, whose mercenary, devil-take-the-hindmost captain and crew are barely more than criminals. As his diary begins, the ship has put in for resupply at a tiny and desolate Pacific island whose native tribe, the Moriori, has been subjugated and largely exterminated by Maori from New Zealand (who learned the gentle art of conquest from their British overlords there).
Detested by the ship's crew for his weak constitution and standoffish manner, the sensitive and naive Ewing befriends a shady and eccentric British physician named Henry Goose - in exile on the island for some unspecified offense - and the two men bond over chess and discussions of philosophy. But when the Prophetess resumes its journey, Ewing discovers he has another companion - a Moriori slave who has escaped his captors and stowed away in the American's cabin, an act that could earn both of them a one-way trip overboard if discovered. The plot develops along the familiar lines sketched in similar stories by Melville and Joseph Conrad, but then the story stops, midsentence, and we find ourselves in
"Letters from Zedelghem", which takes place in 1931, the dreary post-WWI Europe of Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh. Composer Robert Frobisher - young, bisexual, charismatic, and more or less utterly amoral - escapes his numerous creditors in London first by jumping out a second-story luxury hotel window, then by fleeing to the Continent and charming his way into the household of a brilliant, dying maestro. Working as the man's amanuensis (writing sheet music from the old man's dictation) inspires Frobisher to begin his own magnum opus; he also avails himself of the remote mansion's many diversions, including the library (where he becomes fascinated by a book called "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" - unfortunately, the second half is missing) and the favors of the composer's wife and daughter. Frobisher's escapades are wittily and unapologetically recounted by him in letters to his old lover, physics student Rupert Sixsmith -
- whose murder in the early 1970s is the subject of "Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery." This story, written in the breathless style of a Robert Ludlum thriller, follows a plucky young reporter's investigation of her friend Dr. Sixsmith's murder, which leads her (in the slightly improbable way thrillers do) to a corporate coverup involving a dangerous nuclear power plant that could irradiate the entire West Coast. It also leads her on another, smaller quest: to find a rare recording of the beautiful "Cloud Atlas Sextet", composed by the obscure genius Robert Frobisher, who committed suicide in 1932. We leave Luisa hanging from a cliff - literally - and jump into the next story.
And so on, and so forth. There are three more tales - a comedy in present-day London, involving a proud and sarcastic old book publisher precipitated through a series of misadventures into a shady nursing home and the not-so-tender mercies of its staff, then a trip to 22nd-century Korea for a tour of a dystopian future society that references everything from Orwell to Bradbury to Blade Runner, and finally a glimpse of a distant postapocalyptic future, where history begins again as Stone Age tribes war for control of what was once known as Hawaii. Each story, except the last, stops halfway through - then we read the last story in its entirety, and then plunge backwards in time, reading the second half of each of the stories in reverse order, until we end where we began: in the Pacific Ocean, with Adam Ewing - who, it turns out, is not so naive as when we and he began.
"Revolutionary or gimmicky?" asks Frobisher about his "Cloud Atlas" symphony, and the question could fairly be (and has been) leveled at the book itself - but as for myself, I knew which side I would take before fifty pages had passed. The book is brilliant - or rather, not just brilliant, but incandescent. It works on so, so many levels. Artistically, there is absolutely no questioning Mitchell's talent. He successfully mimics (and in many cases surpasses) any number of literary voices, from the aforementioned Melville and Somerset Maugham, to classy potboiler authors like Martin Cruz Smith and John Le Carre, to modern satirists like Philip Roth and Martin Amis, to genre sf writers like Bradbury and Heinlein and Ursula K. Le Guin.
But this isn't all some bloodless postmodernist Frankenstein experiment - Mitchell isn't mocking or parodying these writers, but paying them reverent homage, and finding the common threads of art and humanity that link their writing and their subject matter. The revolutionary thing that Mitchell has done here - the floodgate he has cracked open - is to do exactly what all great novelists before him have done, namely to tell an important story with an important theme in a totally new way.
And it is an important theme. It's not just that Mitchell holds our eyes open and makes us look, really look, at the innumerable and numinous connections that link us to our dimly-remembered past and our unknown future - the webs of chance and fate and coincidence that rule us all - but that he makes us see the incredible urgency of our time - and of any time. Every story deals, to a greater or lesser degree, with war, with death, with imprisonment and escape, with coercion by violence and the exploitation of the weak by the strong, with morality versus expediency, with the politics of sex and race and class, and with our amazing capacity for both baseness and nobility. The novel's stunning last few pages constitute a call to action not just against merely temporal and temporary enemies like the George Bushes of the world, but against the real enemy, the eternal enemy - the relentless demons of human nature that have dogged our steps from the treetops to the caves to the fields to the cities, and who now hold in their claws the buttons for Armageddon.
And Mitchell doesn't fall into the polemicists' trap of offering a prescription, other than, of course, the univeral one of hope and charity and conscience and energy - energy most of all. The book left me electrified in a way I haven't felt in years. You know how every high-schooler - well, every smart high-schooler - has that one book, that one author - be it Kerouac or Burroughs or Ayn Rand (blecch) or Sylvia Plath or Tolkien or whoever - that defined those years for them and set (to one degree or another) the course of their lives to come? I'm sure you have a book like that - I know I do. Well, I'm twenty-five, and Cloud Atlas made me feel that way again - and that's all I can say, really.
Summary of Cloud Atlas: A Novel
From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta?s ?Best of Young British Novelists 2003? issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope.A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan?s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified ?dinery server? on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation -- the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other?s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.
In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity? s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.
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