Book Review: Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (Part I)

 

Cloud AtlasDavid Mitchell

Review – Part 1

Cloud Atlas is a very unusual book, and deserves an unusual review.

Cloud Atlas is separated into six individual stories, vastly separated in time and place and genre, with only the remotest links between them.

It opens in the 18^th century with the diary entries of Adam Ewing, an American notary in the South Pacific, confronting the realities of the slave trade while being secretly poisoned by a ‘friend’.  The story is cut off, mid-story, mid-sentence, and we find ourselves reading letters from Robert Frosbisher.

Frobisher is a scheming, amoral, irresponsible young English musician in the early 19^th century who attaches himself to a composer’s family to further his own goal of writing a great symphony and becoming a famous composer. He is a nasty and selfish man and yet likeable as a sexy, incorrigible scoundrel.

His letters, too, end abruptly, and the reader is suddenly introduced to Luisa Rey, an idealistic journalist in the 1970s in a fictional city fighting to expose a corporate conspiracy to deliberately cause a nuclear reactor meltdown in order to maximize oil profits.

Luisa leaves us, having been driven off a bridge by a corporate henchman and is replaced by Timothy Cavendish. Cavendish is a funny, nervous little publisher with very few principles in the present time who finds himself incarcerated against his will in a nursing home replete with Nurse Ratchett-types and no hope of escape.

Cavendish’s story is interrupted by an “orison”, a kind of legal testament given by Somni-451, a service clone in future Asia. We are introduced to her life as a clone, and the bewildering experience of becoming a focal point for a revolutionary movement she doesn’t understand.

Again, her story is ended without completion to bring us to Zach’ry, a young man in post-apocalyptic Hawai’i who becomes embroiled in an outsider’s attempt to save the remnants of her people. Zach’ry’s story is the only story offered whole, without interruption.

Then the book resumes with the closing half of the preceding stories in reverse order. We learn the fate of Somni-451, if Timothy escapes the nursing home, if Luisa survives her plunge and saves her city, if Frobisher succeeds in his games, if Ewing survives his ‘friend’.

What is initially curious, and frustrating, is that there seems to be no solid common thread in the stories. They are set far apart in time, space, and genre, and there is no obvious, underlying theme tying them all together. The only clear link is the clumsy detail that each of the main characters has a comet birthmark. I suspect this comet birthmark had a lot to do with my friend’s review of Cloud Atlas:

"What a load of pretentious rubbish that book was...makes me cringe just thinking about the time in my life I spend reading it that I will never get back."

However, I disagree. In Part II of this review, I will explain why Cloud Atlas is a literary treasure, and offer up my theory on the birthmark issue (spoiler alert: it has nothing to do with reincarnation).