Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Innovative and inspiring, if a bit grueling
Though the film adaptation of Cloud Atlas got its fair share of bad reviews, I rather liked it, so when the 2004 novel by David Mitchell came up as a Kindle Daily Deal, I snatched it up. By the time I got around to reading it, a couple of years had passed since I had seen the film, so I had forgotten the details of the plot, and the novel was by no means predictable. Cloud Atlas is a truly unique reading experience, primarily due to its unusual structure. The book consists of six intertwined stories that take place in six different time periods, from the nineteenth century to a post-apocalyptic future. These narratives are nested within one another, arranged in an ABCDEFEDCBA pattern. The links between the stories are varied and often fleeting. The protagonist of one story might read a book or enjoy a work of art created by his or her predecessor in an earlier narrative. One repeated but only briefly mentioned symbol hints at reincarnation, but that concept is never overtly explored.

Because two of the book’s six narratives take place in the future, Cloud Atlas is classified as a science fiction novel, but it certainly doesn’t read like one. In the mid-nineteenth century, American lawyer Adam Ewing takes passage on a ship through the Chatham Islands near New Zealand, where he witnesses British colonialism and the enslavement of the Indigenous population. In 1931, Robert Frobisher, a young man hoping to carve out a career as a composer, takes up residence in the Belgian home of an established mentor and becomes intimately involved in his host family’s personal lives. In a mystery novel set in 1970s California, journalist Luisa Rey investigates corruption at a nuclear power plant. In present-day Britain, aging publisher Timothy Cavendish finds himself, through a series of comical circumstances, imprisoned in a home for the elderly. In a dystopian Korea of the future, Sonmi-451, a clone manufactured for the food service industry, begins to awaken to her own humanity. On one of the Hawaiian islands, centuries in the future, a man named Zachry and his fellow survivors in a post-apocalyptic society struggle to eke out a peaceful agrarian existence while suffering the attacks of a warlike, cannibalistic tribe.

No matter the time period, Mitchell proves himself an author of rare talent and eloquence. The problem with Cloud Atlas is that each of the six narratives overstays its welcome. The book is not six connected short stories but rather six complete novellas. Once you enter each world, you might be stuck there for an hour and a half of reading. This is too long for even the better of the narratives (the future scenes and the mystery novel), and can prove quite tedious in the case of the book’s worst entries (the stories of Timothy Cavendish and Robert Frobisher). In Mitchell’s world, almost every narrator is a veritable James Joyce of thesaurus-wringing verbosity. Overall, however, the impressive achievement of the whole outweighs the faults of its parts. If there is a point to all this interconnection, it lies in the fact that each of the six protagonists is struggling in his or her own way to achieve personal freedom and social justice. Thus, as a whole Cloud Atlas amounts to an epic centuries-long affirmation of the human spirit that leaves the reader astonished and inspired.
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