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Avg. Rating: 4.5
Am I Smart Enough to Review this Book?
Cloud Atlas is a complex and intriguing book. I titled my review, "Am I Smart Enough to Review this Book?" becuase there are so many levels, I am unsure where to begin a review. I, therefore, will keep my review basic.
This novel is constructed of six narratives who's characters are connected. Each narrative is begun and then cut off at a critical point. Mitchell builds the six stories from the time of Melville into the distant future and then completes each narrative closing the book where the first short would have ended. Each story is connected not just by the characters themselves but by the themes.
Mitchell is exploring our past, present and future through universal themes of what it means to be human and have humanity. He has a strong use of voice and the stories strongly hold your attention. The first time there is a break in the narrative you are very annoyed!!!
I think there is so much more that could be discussed with this novel. You could approach this novel to analyze: the comet tattoo, the theme of slavery, the structure of the novel as a muscial piece! There are so many opportunities for thought and exploration that again i don't know where to end or begin.
I personally enjoyed this book for its strength of narrative even though the first two narratives sounded very simliar for the most part and the future sections had a lot of sci-fi conventions. Mitchell can be forgiven for these small slips, if you can even call them that just simply for having the skills of creation. I even found I had to slow down and really read given the complex and consistent vernacular used in each separate narrative. I would not recommnd this novels for everyone. You have to really want to explore. If you are up to the challenge. Enjoy!
Extraordinary work
I've just finished this phenomenal book by David Mitchell, a present from a friend who recommended I read it immediately.
So glad I did. It has aspects of the dystopian future scenarios that I so loved in The Handmaid's Tale, Dune, and The Sparrow coupled with recent past and long-past stories. It addresses basic questions of where we are going as a species, following one soul reincarnated through six lives. That soul is on a trajectory that traces the basic human desire for domination, the often-myopic thinking of the powerful, and the fate of the powerless. It is on a grand scale, beautifully told, and quite enthralling.
The structure is what had me hooked to start--it is a mirror of itself. Rough breakdown: The first and twelfth chapters are "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," a story of subterfuge, gullibility, and poison on a ship bound from the South Seas to London.
Second and tenth chapters are epistolary, taking place in 1939 through the correspondence of Frobisher--a bit of a cad and scammer--to his friend Sixsmith. Frobisher is a brilliant musician but the family shame, in the process of writing his great masterpiece while apprenticing under a syphilitic genius composer.
Third and ninth chapters follow the efforts of investigative journalist Luisa Rey to uncover serious evil at a soon-to-be opened nuclear facility in the mid-70s. One of her primary sources in the mystery Sixsmith, Frobisher's correspondent from the last chapter, but now 35 years older.
Fourth and eighth chapters are the disturbing and frequently funny tales of Timothy Cavendish, a bumbling, arrogant, failure of a publisher in London during roughly our current times, maybe a little later.
Fifth and seventh chapter are my favorites--here Mitchell hits the sci-fi, dystopian future part with full gusto. Sonmi~451 is a human clone of sorts, grown in a womb tank (like all "fabricants," as they are called) and born into service to Papa Song Company. The world as we read about it is governed and shaped around corporate structures and the economy is based on the slave labor of these fabricants.
This chapter is her testimony about her ascension from fabricant to full human thinking and feeling. She observes the world outside Papa Song restaurant and ventures into the broader culture (a scary place, indeed).
I don't do these chapters justice. Sonmi~451 weaves a wonderful tale about this future world, using neologisms and appropriated words that make perfect sense based on how we are using language now. The links and connections to life in the 21st century make it compelling.
The peak chapter, "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After," describes a fallen world, one that has collapsed in on itself leaving the vast majority of humans in a new Dark Age where violence and predatory actions are the way of those who want to live very long. The strong dominate and destroy the weak. The protagonist, a goat herder, refers to the "Civ'lized days before the fall when people was ler'nd." It's written in this dialect and he tells a hard-wrought tale of lawless times.
But it's all believable. Mitchell never stretches his story in any part of the book beyond what we can imagine. He begins with a tale of dishonesty in the 1800s and spins it into the future, following some of our baser instincts to their logical, if stunning and frightening, conclusion.
This book is complicated and ambitious--it's a little over 500 pages of teeny, tiny print and plot lines that crisscross over chapters, lives, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.
The reincarnation theme is only hinted at in the vaguest of terms--it's not even a central part of the book, but it does weave the narrative thread from character to character. I can't begin to fathom how many Post-it notes and spreadsheets it took Mitchell to keep track of all this.
Cloud Atlas was the most thought-provoking novel I've read in years and I found myself meditating on the lives of the characters long after I'd put it down and moved onto something else. Extraordinary work.
Well written, poorly developed
Without a doubt David Mitchell can write. He cleverly shifts pacing and language to distinguish between six "interwoven" narratives. Unfortunately the narratives each are only mildly interesting and the connections between them are superficial at best. The stories set in the future are the hardest to bear and make the occasionally prescient genre of science fiction look childish. The linear progression into the future and back into the past is incredibly predictable and the consequences of the stories can hardly be called consequences, more like mild coincidences. I see no reason to break the stories in the middle and conclude them later in the book as they are each for the most part isolated, with the exception that character B watches the movie of character A or some other trite connection. (Not to mention the recurrent birthmark). Perhaps if Mitchell would suggest that there is more than a draw to past lives, but that in a cycle of reincarnation there was also a connection to the future, and a reciprocal relationship between lives at any time there would have been more interest in the different periods. As it was the various eras became a stylistic device to try out different speech patterns with historic or futuristic set pieces. In fairness there are beautiful moments in the book and it is still worth a few lazy Saturday afternoons.
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