David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas. Random, 2004.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past. (Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” 1.1-3)
In my beginning is my end…
In my end is my beginning. (Eliot, “East Coker,” 1.1, 5.38)
Cloud Atlas is another one of those books I have wanted to read. I can honestly say that I have never read anything quite like it. It is genre-bending, clever, and entertaining. Parts may not be especially easy to read, but it is worth sticking it out.
The title comes from the name of a musical composition by one of the characters in the novel, the Cloud Atlas Sextet. Unlike, say Infinite Jest, however, the composition does not play a very big part in the overall tale. Still the title does suggest the transience of things. Clouds are always changing their shapes and locations; it would be futile indeed to try to map them out in a book the way Rand McNally maps out countries and continents in an atlas.
The story’s organization is interesting and significant. The book is made up of six separate and vaguely related stories. Each story or novella is from a different time period and presents a different style. They are presented in chronological order and then conclude in reverse order.
The first story which begins and ends the book is “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing.” This reads like Robinson Crusoe in style and like Melville’s nonfiction in content. It mentions Typee. It begins on Chatham Island, a small island off the coast of New Zealand where Ewing’s ship has landed. He observed the conquest and basic eradication of the indigenous people on the island by the Maori, the first settlers of New Zealand proper: in other words, colonizing by those who would themselves be colonized. Plus ça change…
Ewing sets sail and spends some time on one of the smaller Society Islands (Tahiti is the largest in that archipelago). The episode which ends the book has him observe things there and then move on to their final destination, Hawaii. The story is set around 1859-1860. It is very typical of the kind of writing and travelogue from that time period.
The second and penultimate story is entitled “Letters from Zedelghem.” This is set in the 1920s and is epistolary in nature. It is a series of letters written by a young Englishman Frobisher from Belgium to his friend in England, Sixsmith. Frobisher is a musician and composer who has been hired by the elderly composer Vyvyan Ayrs as an amanuensis and helper. Ayrs is English but now lives in Belgium.
The plot of this section has echoes of novels from the time period. When I began reading it, I thought of a comment by a literary critic in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: “Brideshead Regurgitated.” Think of English writers from this period like Maugham or Woolf. Frobisher gets taken advantage of, but he also exploits others as he makes his way through the highbrow music world and the Ayrs family’s drama. While in Belgium, he works on his Cloud Atlas Sextet.
Ayrs owns an extensive library which includes the manuscript of Adam Ewing’s journal. Frobisher reads it with fascination, but is frustrated because it only contains the first half of the voyage, ending where the first part of Cloud Atlas ends. It is no spoiler to say that later he locates the second half and is able to finish reading the travelogue—which is, of course, the last part or “chapter” of Cloud Atlas.
The next section carries the ironic title “Half-Lives.” It is a mystery-thriller set in the California of 1975-1976. Ford is president and Carter is campaigning. Our main character is a young investigative reporter Luisa Rey. She is looking into the corruption and potential safety issues involving the building of nuclear power plant on the California coast.
The elderly and respected nuclear scientist Sixsmith (yes, Frobisher’s buddy fifty years later) fears the planned construction will not be safe enough. He suddenly “commits suicide,” but Rey and others suspect murder. Rey herself gets on somebody’s hit list. Thugs seem to be everywhere. We also learn that Rey likes chamber music and is a fan of Frobisher’s Cloud Atlas Sextet.
The dangers Rey experiences and the attempt to expose the corruption and murders connected with the power plant make up the plot. The title could be considered ironic because, of course, the term half-lives refers to radioactive elements but like the other stories, it is told in halves, after the first part of the Zedelghem letters and before the second part.
“The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” follows. This is contemporary, that is, early twenty-first century. Cavendish makes a living as a London vanity publisher who suddenly has a bestseller, something unexpected in his line of work. Without going into too much detail, he finds himself swamped with book proposals and manuscripts of writers who are not looking for a self-published approach. Before he can sort things out, he is committed to a home for the elderly near Hull.
One manuscript he has received is the story of Luisa Rey. Again, he has just read the first half when he is committed. The second half of his story is how he manages to escape. This story has lots of irony and does typify the style and plot of a number of contemporary stories.
The last two stories are set in the future. The first of the two, “An Orison of Somni-451” describes a post-apocalyptic world which is a cross between 1984 and Brave New World. Much of the world is uninhabitable because of a nuclear holocaust. The Juche government of North Korea rules much of the Orient. The government is called the Unanimity—in other words, everyone is to believe and think the same way.
Many or most of the people are clones, bred in flasks for different types of work, not unlike the alphas through epsilons of Brave New World. One of the clones is Somni-451, in other words, the 451st iteration of a “person” named Somni. A little like Winston Smith, Somni-451 behaves as an independent thinker rather than a “unanimous” type. However, she is able to overcome her clone-servant status. As she learns about the society around her, we get a pessimistic view of a post-apocalyptic Dystopia. This section tells me why the book as a whole is sometimes considered science fiction.
Her story is told with some distinctive words and spellings, perhaps echoing A Clockwork Orange. All movies are called disneys, for example. One disney she has enjoyed is about Timothy Cavendish. Again, there is not much to explicitly connect the disparate tales, but there is a small connection.
The last story is the one in the middle. “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Everythin’ After” is the only one written in one part since it is the last chronologically. It is set some time after the story of Somni-451 because Somni is referred to a number of times as some kind of goddess or wise “Abbess.” Instead of a diary, novel, or film, it seems Somni’s story had been told by word of mouth, or as scholars would say, via oral tradition. One of the Somnis (whether it was #451 is unclear) apparently came—or escaped—to live on the Big Island of Hawaii where the story is set.
The story may be most challenging to read because it is told in a modified Hawaiian Pidgin. Hawaii is not part of the Asian dystopia, but people from Asia do some trading with Hawaii. Much of the story focuses on Meronym, an Asian and probable clone descendant who comes to live for a year on the Big Island to learn the customs and to promote trade.
Hawaii has become like a pre-civilized tribal island. Our narrator belongs to a tribe in the north of the island. They get attacked and some are killed by the tribe or gang from Kona on the west of the island. While there are traditions and some trade, the overall effect is one of lawlessness, perhaps reminiscent of something by Cormac McCarthy. Still, our narrator and his friends and family try to survive and make a living. If too much conformity brings order and repression with it as in the Juche Unanimty of the future Asia, anarchy and tribalism can be just as oppressive though in a different way.
After the story of Sloosha’s Crossing, Cloud Atlas unwinds in the opposite direction from which it came together. We read then about what happens to Somni-451 and the discoveries she makes about the Asian Brave New World. We learn what happens Cavendish, then what Luisa Rey does. Finally, we get a resolution of sorts to Frobisher and his music. Among other things, Frobisher discovers the second part of Ewing’s diary which completes Mitchell’s novel.
Many novels these days will have different narrators for different chapters. While that technique goes back at least to Castle Rackrent and Wuthering Heights, the approach has become popular in recent years. Mitchell takes that and turns it into something else: Part travelogue, part family drama, part technothriller, part man against the world, then a science-fiction dystopia, and finally an anarchic tale told in a patois.
After reading about a third of the book, I was not sure what was going on in the work as a whole. At the end, I found it satisfying. Cloud Atlas is clever and fascinating, yet somehow it manages to hang together. There are slight threads connecting the stories, but overall it is an examination of human nature from a variety of perspectives and conflicts. Sonmi-451 learns that even no conflict is a conflict. The first and last “chapters” deliberately mention Melville. When I finished Cloud Atlas, I could not help but think of the final words of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener:
Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!
Or as Shakespeare wrote and Huxley echoed:
O brave new world,
That has such people in it! (Tmp. 5.1.69-70)