The six stories in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas do not nest like dolls or interweave or anything of that sort; they rather sit as nodes on an ascending/descending string with the faintest wisps to connect them. The genres/styles of these stories are jarringly different from one another and I'll add that each one is executed brilliantly - stunning that the same person can pull off Victorian, sci-fi, action thriller and pidgin tongue narratives, to mention a few, with such ease. These two facts - that staircase structure and the "watch how I can write" style shifting - for better or worse dominate the novel, like watching a restoration of a favorite film and missing the whole piece for the distraction of new brilliant hues. Or, rather hilariously, the way an overwrought and prosey flourished-sentence review might seem to steal from the subject at hand. Saying it short, I gazed at the stylistic fireworks more than I saw the narratives themselves (and I also carried an unsettling feeling that this was a very heady way to cram 6 short stories into publishable form. Just kidding).
The six stories:
The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing: The first person account of a San Franciscan's voyage home from islands in the New Zealand area. He leaves behind a staggeringly hierarchical indigenous situation for the power structure of life at sea. Life at sea is predictably rather un-puritanical, so Ewing takes comfort in the company of a doctor on board who is incidentally treating him for a worm of the brain. The first half of this journal is discovered by...
Letters from Zedelghem: Robert Frobisher, a penniless and disinherited English musician, finds work as an amanuensis for a famous composer in post-war Belgium and shares his experience in letters with his former lover Rufus Sixsmith. RF is several yards short of an honest man, and his schemes within his new household constantly threatened to oust him from the house where he revives the composer's career and composes his own work The Cloud Atlas Sextet, a piece consisting of (you guessed it) nested solos. His letters are read upon being found by...
Half-lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery: Luisa Rey, a young woman living in California in the 1970's and on the verge of following in her father's footsteps as an investigative journalist. Luisa meets Rufus Sixsmith by chance in a broken down elevator, and her chance encounter sends her on a Hollywood-worthy conspiracy mystery thriller. Her story is recorded and sent in novel form to...
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish: Timothy Cavendish, an elderly early 21st century British publisher who lucks his way into a bestseller only to be sent into hiding by thugs. His venture into hiding, um, imprisons him, and the paranoid nightmare of old age that follows is hilarious. His story is eventually converted into a movie or rather a video, where it is viewed by...
An Orison of Sonmi~451: Somni-451, a genetically engineered female McDonald's-equivalent employee in Nea So Copros, a "Corporocracy" vision of the dystopian near future (23rd century?). This highlight of the novel is an interview with the recently captured Sonmi, who "ascended" from his engineered state and joined a conspiracy against the Uniformity. She is to be executed for her crimes, and her story is viewed in video hologram form by...
Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After: Zach'ry and Meronym, an indigenous tribesman and civilized would-be settler, respectively, who live in a very distant future post-apocalyptic vision where man's will and hunger have collapsed upon themselves and driven us back to the very same hierarchical indigenous scene where Ewing started his journey. Meronym joins Zach'ry's tribe as one of the few remaining representatives of civilized culture that has become all-but-extinct via a bird-flu-like illness; she is searching for potential settling places when Zachry's tribe is overrun by another less-civil tribe, the Maori.
The final story is the only one we see start to finish; it ends with a gaze into the Orison which brings us back to Sonmi, who ends by viewing the rest of Timothy Cavendish, etc. These are great stories - each one stands fine on its own, with my only complaint being that the first-person "journal" and "letter" narratives stray badly from form - they turn into third person precise accounts rather quickly, as though maintaining a restricted first-person view was itself too restricted for the author. That's a minor cry; stories and characters are great, and though it is thematically very well-strung (the will to power, entrapment, betrayal, racism, and some odd take on deja vu and reincarnation), I found the literal, physical strings within the stories - the comet birthmarks, the CAS record, and the like - to stick out as unnecessary. So in terms of a review, this is a big scope novel with lots of stylistic wiz-bangadry, great voice-writing and very solid stories that doesn't quite achieve the grand unification it was attempting but coming short of that is still accomplishing a lot - i.e., very ambitious attempt that fell a tad short but was still great. If I had to give rough scores of the stories in and of themselves, I'd say roughly 65, 85, 70, 80, 95, 80, respectively.
Sweetness in the doom - Mitchell snagged some great moments between his characters in the midst of the societies or just individuals spelling their own dooms. The rise/fall motif worked exceedingly nicely in many instances, none better than the Zedelghem story (which, incidentally, has a crystalline perfect close). Really, this was just a package of a novel - ha ha - and so I'm left with a long list of remembered moments that just feel trapped in themselves - I get the feeling that this was exactly was Mitchell reached for, and I think he got it - it means that some of the novel is trapped as a cost, but it also makes for a solid, expertly-contained work of art.
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