David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas begins on a “forlorn strand” with the journals of American notary Adam Ewing. Each of the stories that follow, with one exception, is interrupted midstream by the following story.
Ewing’s story gives way to the laconic missives of aspiring composer Robert Frobisher. Frobisher’s letters are penned to his lover Rufus Sixsmith who appears in the flesh, so to speak, in the next interruption, a pulpy novel entitled Half-Lives: The First Louisa Rey Mystery. A manuscript treatment of Louisa Rey ends up in the hands of Timothy Cavendish, a London-based vanity publisher who has just struck it rich with a new novelist in the 1980s.
Cavendish doesn’t show up in the next story (a science fiction confessional set in a near-future Korea) until the end, as a character in a movie that story five’s heroine Sonmi-451 watches. Sonmi-451 is a newly sentient “fabricant” who begins to narrate the story of her life in a sort of Motorcycle Diaries-meets-Blade Runner set-up.
The only story to be told whole is the central one, a post-apocalyptic fictionalization of the destruction of the Moriori tribesmen, written in a near vowel-less dialect and narrated by the tribesman Zachry. Following Zachry’s tale, Mitchell takes us back through each of the proceeding stories, offering a satisfying, but not altogether elegant conclusion to each narrative.
Mitchell is preoccupied with the way the narratives we construct about our times and ourselves will influence future generations and societies with the idea that “the superior shall relegate the overpopulous savages to their natural numbers.”
The passion in Mitchell’s writing is impressive, and the questions he’s asking are vital and incredibly relevant, but the novel also feels at times like tripping through Mitchell’s lost Calvino weekend with jodhpurs and a library card-like intellectual gamesmanship.
Brava, but begrudgingly.
-NATHAN STONKUS
