David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Cloud Atlas is made of six interconnected stories, presented like a series of matryoshka dolls, the first stopping in the middle to give way to the second, the second to the third, etc. Only the middle story is in one part, and the first one is of course the last to be completed.
The first story is the journal of naive Adam Ewing, a traveler on pacific islands, during colonial times. The journey is for him a path to awareness, as he becomes conscious of the perverse side of colonialism, and falls prey to an unscrupulous doctor of medicine…
In the second story, Robert Frobisher, an amoral and bisexual musician, become the amanuensis of a famous Belgian composer, unable to work because of syphilis. The story takes place in the 1930′s and is narrated in the form of letters, addressed to Frobisher’s friend and lover, Rufus Sixsmith. At one point, Frobisher finds Ewing’s journal, cut in mid-sentence and incomplete, in the composer’s library…
The third story introduces us to Luisa Rey, a journalist from a gossipy newspaper. She is trapped in an elevator with her neighbor Rufus Sixsmith, who has become a respected scientist in the late 70′s. Sixsmith wants to give her proof of a potential nuclear disaster, connected to Seabord, the company which employs him, to expose in her newspaper. Luisa accepts the challenge, and soon her life is threatened. During the course of her investigation, she finds the correspondence between Sixsmith and Frobisher…
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish presents us with a British publisher whose fortune changes when one of his writers kills a disapproving critic. When the murderer’s brothers claim a lot of money from the book sales, Cavendish escapes, and, after a misunderstanding, finds himself trapped in an elderly home… He has with him the unpublished manuscript of Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery…
The next story is set in the future, in Korea. A clone answers questions about her progressive emancipation to an archivist, for records. Through her tale, a new society, a "corpocracy" where clones are treated like slaves, is explained. At one point, Somni-451 (the clone), learns about the distant past, and views an old movie, The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. This part of Cloud Atlas reminded me a lot of a novel I read recently, Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After takes us in a post-apocalyptic future, in a tribe of Hawaii who lives without technology, much like in the past. Zachary, the narrator, is wary of a woman visitor coming from an island, Prescience, where technology seems to have survived…
David Mitchell offers us a real exercise in style, with stories ranging from adventure to science-fiction without forgetting the spy novel in between. The difference is also in types of narration, since we have a journal, a series of letters, an interview, a third-person narration, two first-person narrations, one written style and the other oral style. The voices are very different too, since characters comes from very different backgrounds. Of course, this mix of styles and voices is very demanding on the reader, mostly when, as the stories progress in time, the language itself adapts. The effect is really great in the clone story, where by synecdochic evolution a movie has become a "disney" and a coffee a "starbuck". Unfortunately, in the central story, the vernacular becomes quite unreadable (mostly for someone like me whose mother tongue is not English), and takes quite a time to get used to (but the story itself is very interesting). Of course jumping from one story to another means getting acquainted with new characters and surroundings, while delaying closure of the previous story, but I found the experience very rewarding if a trifle exhausting. "Revolutionary or gimmicky?" asks Forbisher of his own Cloud Atlas Sextet. For me, Cloud Atlas is definitely revolutionary! Gimmicky would be if the stories had no more connection than these successive mises-en-abime, but fortunately, the connection between them is bigger than that, and the themes resonate from one story to another, making Cloud Atlas more than the sum of its parts.
The themes that emerge from the novel are of course the notions of progress and civilization, and their darker sides, such as science without conscience or oppression of the weakest. It anticipates where our civilization is headed, if it goes on meddling with nature, or letting unlimited power into greedy hands. It questions the message of Christianity which orders man to dominate creation. Cloud Atlas shows that little decisions in a man’s life are never without consequences for the future, that the past, present, and future are linked in many more ways than we know. In its ending, a bit naive (but Mitchell is aware of it) and preachy, it asks us implicitly about the world we want children to inherit, and to take a stand in order to avoid the horrors described in Mitchell’s (fictional?) grim future. Mitchell also shows that everything passes, that man is but a "drop in a limitless ocean", but that some testimonies of man (such as works of art, or political and personal statements) can survive and act as witnesses of the past and sometimes forewarners of things to come…
A great novel, only if you are open-minded about what literature is or should be…
Rating: 4,5/5
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment