I was bought the subject of today's blog nearly ten years ago. I got about twenty pages into it, stopped reading, and it sat on my bookshelf at my Dad's house until the beginning of August when I went home, needed something to read on the train and picked it up again. This is going to sound ridiculous but I think that that very act of not reading, and then returning to Cloud Atlas, made my experience of the book that much more spine-tingling (come on now: it wouldn't be my blog if I didn't unleash a super-sized hyperbole in the first paragraph). Let me explain why.
Cloud Atlas is a big, fat, interesting book written by a very clever writer (it's not the David Mitchell by the way, although I'm sure he could write books as well). The premise is gargantuan: Mitchell layers together and then pulls apart six narratives spanning several centuries, from the early/mid 19th Century to some point in the distant future with characters that are connected by seemingly more than chance (no spoilers but keep an eye out for a comet-shaped birthmark). Does the structure always hold together seamlessly? No, some of the segues between the narratives feel a bit forced. Should every A Level English student give it a read? Absolutely: it's a tour de force of narrative structures. Fundamentally Cloud Atlas is an ideas book- a terrible phrase but very appropriate, and for a book that wants to make you think, no bad thing.
I love to be swept away by a good, straightforward tale, and there are certainly moments when I did get swept away, but this is definitely a book that, even as it focussed on one storyline, keeps an eye on the wider point of the novel: that everything and everyone is connected. But because of the structure of the novel, as a reader this is an idea that you are drawn into rather than confronted with on the first page. This is how the novel links together.
The first section is the journal of an American, sent on business to the mid-Pacific. This journal is then picked up (literally, in a library) in the early 1930s in Holland by a aristocratic (although destitute) composer, Robert Frobisher writing to his friend. Frobisher's Cloud Atlas Sextet is heard in a based-on-a-true-story novel by the novel's protagonist Luisa Rey, who is trying to expose the dangerous truth of a nuclear facility using the research conducted by Frobisher's friend, Sixsmith. This novel is being read by an ageing editor, Timothy Cavendish, who's farcical life is made into a film. This film is seen by Somni-451 (who's identity I won't spoil) who's interview is then held in biblical esteem by Zachry, who lives in post-apocalyptic Hawaii. Zachry's section forms the heart of the novel, after which the narratives unfurl themselves in the reverse order.
The reason I've explained this is to give a sense of just how much of a mind-bend this book is when you start to think about it as a whole. But individually the sections are not pretentious or deliberately abstract at all- Zachry's section in particular is incredibly well written in melodic dialect. In fact, it would be interesting to re-read both parts of each section together- so that the book becomes a series of short stories through time. Because that is what it essentially is. But what Mitchell does is so much more than that because of the way that each of his stories and characters slot together. And because of his authorial bravery he can ask several colossal questions- what is the nature of the soul? Should we take our own reality for granted? Can we view our own place in the world, and in time, with any real degree of comprehension?
And just as these questions are posed to the reader, so the reader is asked to consider where their own life falls- between wonder and terror, hope and desolation- Mitchell's characters often career between the two. Even if sometimes Mitchell's authorial head pokes above his narrative structures, the journey is wild, goose-bumpy, mind-blowing. And when I finished Cloud Atlas this evening, I felt like my own little story, the seventeen year old who put the book back on the shelf, and the twenty-six year old who picked it up again had completed. Which was nice. But even if you don't leave it nine years between the start and finish, read and enjoy this book. It's a helluva ride.
