Cloud Atlas

Pros: brilliant writing, a set of interconnected stories with thought provoking messages

Con: each story is interrupted to tell the first half of the next, when you get back to it you've forgotten minor details that are important in understanding the novel as a whole

Cloud Atlas is a novel told through six interconnected stories. For example, the musician of the second story is reading the journal written by the man in the first. And the reporter of the third story reads the letters written by the musician and listens to his music. Each protagonist also bears a comet birthmark between their collarbones and shoulder blades, giving the idea that they might be the same person, living over and over again.

The novel begins with The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing. He's a notary on his way back to America from delivering papers to a client's heir in Australia. His ship has stopped at an island to resupply, and there Adam makes the acquaintance of Doctor Henry Goose.

In the second story a disinherited English musician ingratiates himself into a ailing Belgium's home, intent on helping this man finish his musical works, and bettering his own position.

Half-Lives: The First Luisa Ray Mystery shows her meeting a scientist working on a new atomic energy plant, and discovers that this so called safe energy might not be so safe after all.

I won't detail the other stories as it's fun discovering what comes next. My favourite of the novel however, was An Orison of Sonmi-451. It's basically a science fiction story showing how commercialism has overtaken the world and had resonances of Soylent Green, 1984 and Battle Royale. In fact, this is a novel that on the whole, reads easier if you're well versed in literature. I recognized a few other references, but I'm sure I missed a lot of others.

And as the stories start completing themselves, messages of when you save the lives of others you're really saving your own and how our actions, big or small, shape the world around us - even if we don't live to see the effects, come to the fore.

Ultimately, it's a fabulous novel. If you like thinking about the books you read, I'd highly recommend picking this one up.

Of the novel's six central characters, it was the second - Robert Frobisher - that I spent the most time reflecting upon after I finished it. I think that's because what Mitchel the author is trying to accomplish with the work is summarized best by Frobisher the composer's related aural descriptions and musical thinking. It's more than the obvious structural parallels between the novel and the fictional composer's masterwork; I find that the novel itself is best thought of as a musical piece.

This book is otherwise impossible to summarize. To provide a synopsis of the sextet of characters is to impart a bearing towards science fiction, but this is untrue. No more true than it is a period piece. It is all of these things, but not truly any of them. It is a microcosm of existence, which is absurdly ambitious notion... unless you were to think of it as a musical entity more than a literary one. Frobisher puts a point on the unconventional nature of it, either way (and Mitchell, through Frobisher, awards himself ample laurels for the feat). I'm not convinced that it was brilliant, but successful? Absolutely.

The individual stories are not themselves incredible. It is in aggregate that one can contemplate the whole picture that Mitchell wants us to consider. He is desperate for that contemplation, adding downright unsubtle passages at key moments in the lives of his characters. It's a bit like a painter painting the name of the work onto the canvas itself at times.

But this book has left me with more to process and consider after the fact than most I've read recently. As indelicate as Mitchell can be at points with his self-congratulation or thematic prompting, there is no overt thesis statement to be heard shouted from a soap box. Like a good thinking man's book, there are salient points to be extracted, mulled over, and set down to be looked at another time.

I'll warn the prospective reader: the transition between characters is jarring. Mitchell went to great lengths to attempt to write as authentically as possible according to the characters' situations, so the writing style from segment to segment varies wildly. For two of the characters – Cavendish and Zachary – this was frustrating. Cavendish's mode of narration is a sort of vernacular Londoner mode of speech, which was initially impenetrable. Zachary narrates in a heavy dialect with invented slang that actually made my head hurt for a few pages. One could also accuse some of the linguistic innovations of Sonmi's segments to be overly clever, but I found it seamless and consistent.

I'll keep it spoiler-free at the risk of being vague.

I recommend going into Cloud Atlas without knowing too much about Cloud Atlas. If you're already familiar with the novel's structure, then Mitchell's repeated, explicit attempts to bash the concept into your skull will be tedious. Nonetheless, there is a beauty to some of the more subtle and nuanced connections between the stories. I don't mean to bash the book with my two-star rating, as I do genuinely believe, in accordance with Goodreads rating guidelines, that “it was ok.”

There is a lot to chew on in Cloud Atlas: religion, immortality, oppression, discrimination, capitalism, metaphysics, and more. (Mitchell has some genuinely interesting ideas about some of these topics.) Plato, Nietzsche, Freud, and Solzhenitsyn are all there too, in addition to other thinkers whose influence I am perhaps too ignorant to notice. It's debatable whether the heavy thematic concepts are a good match for the pulpy or comedic tones of certain sections, but that might be a matter of personal preference. (In different ways Mitchell seems to paradoxically take his concept both too seriously and not seriously enough.) In contrast with my desire for greater subtlety in other aspects of the work, I wish that some examples of prejudice within Cloud Atlas had received more explicit challenges. While the characters' racism is generally addressed, some men in the story express a misogynistic sentiment that in my view Mitchell doesn't adequately explore, in my opinion.

A flawed work for sure, but at least a thought-provoking one. If this “genre” of interconnected storytelling had more time to mature, I wager that it could be a vehicle for some genuine masterworks, but the pool of writers capable of writing in such different styles as Mitchell does is probably rather small. Frustrating in some respects, and not a life-changing work of literature (at least not for me). Perhaps my expectations were too high, but it's a book that has stuck in my mind, and that has to count for something.