Cloud Atlas: a reflection on the novel by David Mitchell

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a fascinating but slightly imperfect attempt to tell a story of one soul crossing and re-crossing the centuries.  It weighs in at 509 pages, divided nicely into six full novellas, nested one inside the other.  Each of the first five are interrupted halfway through, at which point the next novella begins.  The sixth novella runs from start to finish, and then each novella resumes in turn until all six stories and the novel itself is complete.

Each novella is pastiche in some way, either literary or genre.  The plots themselves aren’t innovative.  The first one, The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, is a series of heavy allusions to Early American Lit.  An Orison of Sonmi-451 (winking at both Hamlet and Bradbury in the title) doesn’t do anything, not one thing, William Gibson or Philip K Dick didn’t do first and better.

They are very sharply written.  Highly readable, technically well-executed.  Each one is thoroughly immersive.  But if taken as a collection of novellas, like King’s Four Past Midnight or something—I don’t think the thing would quite tick over.  You’d have to dismiss the stories as kind of derivative.

However:

That is definitely not what Cloud Atlas is.

The big fun here is that the nested-novellas thing isn’t just a gimmick.  The structure itself creates cliffhangers and narrative tension.  Those notes hang in the air as you turn the page to begin the next story, and the violence of the interruption often colours your perception of what follows.  The act of division itself often conceals and yet implies the occasion of some great human catastrophe:  between the 1850s and 1930s, World War I; between the 1930s and 1970s, World War II, Korea and Vietnam; and so on.

Stranger yet, when we return to each novella in turn, the self-referential narrative tacitly expects us to remember the detour we’ve taken.  Not only our view of the same characters has changed, but even the characters seem to notice that something has changed about themselves or about each other.  That is to say, this is a novel masquerading as six novellas.  And masquerade of identity is also a major theme of the book.

Again and again reincarnation is referenced.  We always sense a finite number of beings in action—perhaps six in total, given the heavy emphasis on that number.  But there is only one unambiguous sign that a character has reemerged in a different body.  None, or all, of them are the “real” person.  But unlike most examples of what might be called the Reincarnation Romance, Cloud Atlas is not so much concerned with identity as with aspect, pattern and recurrence.

There are deep mythic and historical tropes in there: explicitly mentioned are Adam, Christ, Judas, the Buddha and the Hydra.  Cain and Abel seem to fit also.  We can point farther afield to almost any great image of literature, art history or philosophy—the Conversion of Paul.  The Rape of Lucretia.  The allegory of the chariot from Phaedrus.  Nietzsche and Marx go without saying.

From these, we can really go anywhere.  The structure of the novel itself is inherently dioptric.  We can refract and focus where and what we wish.

This is a deeply innovative epic.  And I do mean “epic,” a work that attempts to stretch out its arms and embrace the World Without End, Amen.

As a book that honestly wonders about what sacred texts are, how Bibles come to be, how they’re made and how they’re used, and where they go—Cloud Atlas succeeds in becoming an exegetical commentary on everything.  An epic.  It wonders about the world as a living text; it proposes an answer, and contemplates how that answer might often fail.

This is not perfectly orchestrated.  The novel connects its six stories to each other (often through music, movies or the written word), but the connections can be ambiguous, deliberately obscure, or mutually contradictory.  Sometimes characters chase after strands of the other stories, which, in terms of fiction qua fiction, is ultimately completely irrelevant to the story at hand.  Parts of the novel are explicitly fictional when viewed from other parts.  This allows Mitchell to mix style, genre and form effortlessly, at the price of internal continuity.

The world we peer into is almost always aware of itself, both on the inner level of the internal narrator and his/her audience, and the outer level of David Mitchell and us.

Mitchell makes clear statements to us about the nature of tyranny, history and greed.  On another level, he’s also experimenting with how far he can fuse literary and genre fiction, almost like Frankenstein’s monster.

In so much as it was meant to be this kind of hybrid, Cloud Atlas cannot be what it is without the stitches that hold it together.  I think the last of those stitches, the novel's largest incompleteness, is meant to be the responsibility of the reader to address.  We are aware, for instance, that the theme of Eternal Recurrence invites us to read the novel again as soon as we finish it.  That is on a lower level.

On a higher level, we should also be aware that the novel's structure opens and closes like the famous lotus from the mantra.  Deep within the story's centre resides the novel's true message--that of trust in love and rejection of fear--that both appears and disappears at the novel's beginning and end.

Just as in the mantra, the jewel in the centre of the lotus must reside, can only reside, in our hearts.

A truly fantastic adventure.