What can I write about this novel that hasn’t already been written?(Check out the 4 pages of praises by various critics in he beginning of this book)
Nothing, but I wanted to voice a high recommendation for this novel because it is so terrific. I’m an avid reader of fiction, yet I’ve never read anything like this book, ever. David Mitchell the author uses several genres, a multitude of voices and characters and forms in his latest offering.
The book takes you on a roller coster ride from the past century to some 23rd century whose inhabitants live on soap. The ride is through 6 different stories somewhat interconnected. I felt completely engulfed by every story, strong enough to stand on its own, and mesmerized by the many levels that these narratives interconnect.
One has an expectation that as society advances it advances for the better, both in terms of human comfort and compassion. However, Mitchell’s cautionary writing reveals that ’’progress’’ is not easily defined, is not always for the best, but isn’t entirely for the worst either.
From the nineteenth century South Pacific, to 1930’s Belgium, to 1970’s San Francisco to modern day England, to a 22nd or 23rd century Korean superpower and finally to a post-apocalyptic Hawaii of the distant future, Mitchell spins together a dizzying array of characters, themes and settings into this one fascinating discussion.
What appears at first glance to be a novel is in fact six novellas whose interrelatedness is only hinted at during the book’s first half, then revealed fully and splendidly after the book’s middle, which is really the book’s end. Confused?
You’re supposed to be, at least for a little while:
It’s from this starting point of dislocation that Mitchell begins a virtuosic round trip through the strata of history and causality, exploring the permanence of man’s inhumanity to man and the impermanence of what we have come to call civilization.
The first story is about Adam Ewing a seafaring 1850s American notary, killing time on the Chatham Islands off New Zealand as he waits for his homeward ship to set sail. Engaging in the amateur anthropology of the visitor, the morally upright Ewing struggles to square his belief in the civilizing, beneficent aspects of colonialism with what he sees before him, ’’that casual brutality lighter races show the darker.’’
Then, in mid-sentence, Mitchell whisks us away from the scene, and suddenly we are reading the letters of one Robert Frobisher, a charmingly louche, happily bisexual British composer of the 1930s whose tendency to skip out on hotel bills has finally caught up with him.
Shortly thereafter, we take our leave of Frobisher just as abruptly as we were introduced to him, and Mitchell drops us down in 1970s California, at the opening chapter of a crime-fiction potboiler whose heroine, a plucky magazine journalist named Luisa Rey, is on the verge of uncovering a nefarious conspiracy.
In the next story we meet Timothy Cavendish, the curmudgeonly editor of a London vanity press, who is tricked into incarceration by his vengeful brother.
However, it is the final two stories that are the most remarkable. The first of these (the fifth overall) is ’’An Orison of Sonmi-451’’ which contains the first person recounting of the life and misadventures of a self-aware cloned servant in the Korean super-state.The second (the sixth, and only story told from start to finish) is the story of Zachry, who lives in a post-apocalyptic Hawaii of the distant future in an era where civilization has collapsed, echoing the account of Adam Ewing that opens the book.
At this point the novel’s action rapidly reverses course, going back through time and picking up the abandoned narrative threads, weaving them together to craft a fascinating meditation on civilization’s insatiable appetites. Even Mitchell’s characters seem to voice uncertainty about their creator’s grand plan.
The various pieces of David Mitchell’s mysterious puzzle combine to form a haunting image that stays with the reader long after the book has been closed. One shocking revelation is about the way main protagonists of each story are related to each other
All in all the book is funny, wildly entertaining, yet it also teaches us many things about love, betrayal, violence, compassion, and the nature of culture, society, & humankind. It’s the sort of book that you will want to re-read over and over again. The book is also an allegory, one which begins (and ends) with its title. ’’Cloud Atlas’’ will leave any reader asking questions, and looking up to the clouds.