Cloud Atlas

[Chinahand]

I realize Cloud Atlas has been commented on in various places previously on here, but thought I'd add a thread as it’s an interesting book! Go on if you've already posted else where have another go!

 

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I read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell recently. I enjoyed it, but I have to admit that I found it slightly disappointing. It’s an ambitious book: it’s in the format of a (crab) canon; five stories, half told, then with a central chapter after which the five stories are continued in reverse order, so the first and last chapters concern the same plot, as do the second and second to last chapters and so on.

 

There are resonances of earlier stories throughout the book: a minor character in one may have a bit part in another, the schooner in first plot is an exhibit in the 3rd, birthmarks reoccur throughout. I did find most of the stories fascinating. The first two, the final canon and the central story were all pretty well plotted, so only two sections disappointed and even then not entirely. But in some ways the canon-form only felt like a conceit. Maybe I missed some clever underlying unifying theme, but all I noticed was that there were six stories with occasional, unremarkable connections between them, reasonably told.

 

I’m not sure if I want to go into the details of all the individual stories, adding too many spoilers can ruin a review. So therefore what do I have to say? There was a coldness in most of the stories, the book has a bleak view of humanity. People tricked, used and abused, or enslaved. The stories track through time from the 1850s-odd through to the present and out into two stories of future dystopias: one a Big Brother-like, technology/gene-controlling totalitarian state and one a post apocalyptic world that has basically returned to a state of nature with war-like tribes enslaving more sociable law based societies.

 

I found the Big Brother dystopia too predictable and the twist in the plot contrived. It was interesting that it was set in Korea, I presume a reference to North Korea, but I could only partially suspend my disbelief and that was even more strained by the twist in the end.

 

The two stories that disappointed the most were also too contrived, the first about an investigative journalist and a nuclear plant didn’t ring true and this was even more so in the next story about the imprisonment of an aging book publisher.

 

I’m not sure which was my favourite story? The first, the second, or the central post apocalyptic world? I think the second was in many ways the bleakest, but also had many levels – art, aging, love, sex, death. It was grippingly told, a real page turner. I also really did enjoy the central piece – the varieties of future cultures and how they have adapted to the collapse of worldwide civilization/culture was interesting. This was a much better imagined future world than the first Korean dystopia mentioned above with a spectrum of civilization surviving from the most primitively war-like to technology using traders.

 

But for all the well imagined worlds and page turning stories I’m still left unsure of the book. If it does have an underlying theme it seems a very negative one and I didn’t find it expressed very well. For despite the underlying bleakness of each story the hero or heroine mostly perseveres in the end, however the corruption and dystopia continues throughout the book and humanity and civilization seems to be under retreat throughout the book, so what is the point.

 

The only quotation I gained from the book was this: ‘Peace though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbours share your conscience.’ And the message of the book could almost seem to be that your neighbours do not share your conscience so beware! But then he gives most of the stories an uplifting ending, hope is carried on from one story to the next, one story inspiring the characters in another. That contradiction is I suppose a part of my disappointment and then the failure of two stories to inspire me and to ring true added to it.

 

For all that though, I can understand why the book was a short listed book. It is a good and provocative read, but at the same time I can understand the Booker judges passing it over when deciding on a prize winning book. It doesn’t quite hold together; however I did enjoy Mr Mitchell’s style and I’ll probably look up his other books after reading this; a reasonable read 7/10.

[Declan]

I think the connection between the stories is that the protagonist of each story reads, or watches a dramatisation of the previous stories. You can kind of draw a parrallel with Ghostwritten where all the connected stories are set in the present but the protagonists actions have an impact on the seemingly unconnected characters in the next story. So if there's a message in Ghostwritten it is that individuals lives are interconnected even if they live very different lives in very different parts of the world and that is expanded in Cloud Atlas in that stories and ideas can have an impact across the ages.

 

This interconnectedness is used throughout Mitchell's work, for example, the amanuensis's music turns up on Black Swan Green, a child from that book is a central character of one of the stories in Ghostwritten.