Review: Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’d heard great things about this one, and I suspect that has colored some of my reaction. I saw the Booker Prize interest and a terrific student (shout out to Bodo) told me it was one of her all-time favorites. As it stands, though, I couldn’t quite get into most of this, and that probably makes this feel more disappointing than if I’d simply stumbled upon it.

I love the ambition here. The structural premise is that six different stories, four set in the historical past and two in the speculative future, show us how a certain impulse travels across time and generations. This isn’t a family saga at all. It’s more in keeping with what Colum McCann or others of what I call the rhizomatic novel do. The characters only dimly sense their interrelatedness. It takes us as readers to develop a sort of “god’s eye view” of the goings-on below.

And part of the experience of that disjuncture is reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler in the way we’re shown texts that collide with one another. That novel (which is one of the great reflections on the power of reading) makes us jump from text to text, never quite satisfying the hunger it creates with each one.

Here, Mitchell attempts to hook us on each of the stories, at least on the first go-round. Then, after the sixth, we go back to the fifth, fourth, and so on to resolve what we’d earlier begun.

That’s where I ran into a couple of problems. For starters, I just didn’t like the stories as much as I expected to. I found the science fiction of the future chapters a bit narrow. In one we have a clone who’s raised to consciousness and part of inciting a great clone rebellion. In another we have a future where civilization has nearly been eradicated but a small redoubt of scientists remain to help a select group of pacific villagers.

I also didn’t enjoy a thriller with a Karen Silkwood heroine; it read like by-the-book thriller genre and – compounding the confusion of the novel’s larger premise – we’re eventually told it’s fiction and that it’s written by a man. It is not, that is, a story of a “true person” within the novel, someone who might be in a position to inspire others.

I did, however, very much enjoy “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” about a roguish publisher who, fleeing his creditors, is held against his will in a retirement home. It’s got a persistently funny tone, and its premise is fun.

Beyond finding the stuff of the novel itself up-and-down, though, I find I finally question its underlying metaphysics. The closing pages of the book suggest that we can’t measure the ultimate effects of great decency. A man who has risked his life to save a slave has that slave save his own in turn. That, we’re led to believe, ripples forward so that – in a dystopic future – it’s part of what saves humanity from extinction.

On the one hand, I find that a bit unimaginative. I’m all in favor of decency, but this is so narrow a genealogy of it that it doesn’t persuade me. Sure, this almost forgotten (even in the world of the novel) act of humanity matters, but shouldn’t countless others? Decency has many parents in every generation; I think this betrays some of its own potential when it suggests so slender a line running from one to another.

On the other, I find that a bit trite. Is decency always born of decency? Isn’t it possible for some people to discover it on their own, perhaps in response to the inhumanity they see? We’re a complicated species, I think, and this book doesn’t leave room for such complexity.

Anyway, while I confess I found parts that dragged and repeat that some of the core stories seemed under-imagined, I am still glad to see a narrative experiment this bold. I don’t think the explicit sci-fi is all that good here, but the shape of the interlocking stories is audacious. I’m glad to be finished with this, but I am also enjoying reflecting on the work Mitchell has done to weave so different a set of stories into something that begins to come together into a larger whole.


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