Ramblings on libraries and life upon the wicked stage

Cloud Atlas

Sometimes membership of a book group forces you to read something which you have been avoiding for whatever reason.  This can be a bad thing, or it can be a good thing.  In the case of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, it is a very, very good thing.  I had been avoiding the book because a great many people had told me I ought to read it, and such pronouncements often make me nervous, feeling (irrationally) that if I don’t enjoy the book I will be letting people down.  Well, everyone was right and I enjoyed it very much.

Cloud Atlas is  a difficult book to describe.  What genre does it fit into?  What is its style?  Which narrative technique does the author principally use?  The answer to all three questions is essentially ‘all of them’.  The novel is like a Russian doll, each story opening up to reveal another story nested inside it, each of them connected to the one before and the one after, and sometimes to several others as well.  We encounter epistolary fiction, thriller, science fiction, folk tale and more as we move across centuries, perhaps even millennia, in the company of a wide variety of characters.  Lawyers, journalists, hunter-gatherers, students, fast food workers, musicians and others manage to affect the lives of quite disparate people across the years as they hear, watch or somehow connect with the stories each tell.  Each story is interrupted midway through, but eventually each resumes, and it is like welcoming back an old friend as you settle back into the world that you left behind 50 or 300 pages earlier.  As an eclectic reader, the shifts in tone, style and genre intrigued and fascinated me.  Hints of Defoe gave way to a smattering of Isherwood and eventually, perhaps, to an echo of my favourite book, Riddley Walker.

I do not understand how David Mitchell conceived this book, as it is an intricate jigsaw puzzle fashioned from pieces that you would not expect to come from the same image.  In some of the sections, nothing much seems to happen, and in others there is more going on than you can quite grasp.  The narrative point of view is sometimes third person and sometimes first person, the latter coming in the form of diaries, letters, a storyteller and an interview.  It simply should not work.  But is does.  Comments about a strangely-shaped birthmark tie some of the characters together, but each segment fits into a grand scheme, each dealing in part with the idea of the “will to power” which is said to be humanity’s greatest strength and greatest weakness.  We see positive and negative effects of this will on scales ranging from the domestic to the fate of the world.  People lie, steal, cheat, blackmail, kill, poison and defraud one another, but they also struggle, adapt, rebel and endure.  There is no ‘message’ as such, just an image, or rather a collage of images.  There is also a metatextual comment about the creation of Cloud Atlas, as a composer character creates a musical work with much the same structure as the book.  The whole thing is utterly beguiling, completely fascinating.  I found that each section stayed with me whenever I had to close the book, and the whole work holds a strange power.  It is, I think, a work of genius.

Cloud Atlas has won itself a place on my list of top books (joining such titles as Riddley Walker, Tom Jones, The Remains of the Day and A Fine and Private Place).  It really is as good as everyone says it is.  Now, I just need to decide which of David Mitchell’s other novels to read next…