The payoff wasn't as impressive as I hoped ...

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	• Cloud Atlas: A Novel David Mitchell Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 169 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The payoff wasn't as impressive as I hoped ...

but still an engaging read. I kept on missing my stop while reading this on the bus. It was almost annoying at first to have the first set of stories stop before their resolution. However - once past the hump of the middle section the book got really enjoyable as each story was then completed and the ties between each were revealed.

On a side note - one of my favorite characters in the book makes an appearance of sorts in Mitchell's new novel "Black Swan Green" - another great read.

A pleasure to read

David Mitchell weaves these stories together in a smoothly rich pattern. The writing style is exciting and I kept making time to get back to the book.

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An Amazing and Entertaining Work

It's hard to know where to start with this book, so I'll do so by saying that of the 130 or so works of fiction I've read so far this year, this is easily among the best. I suppose that's because Mitchell effortlessly blends a number of fictional genres I happen to like, including historical, science, neo-noir, dytopia, farce, and comic. This is done by structuring the book as six separate novellas, each of which is cut in half. The first half of the book presents the first half of each story, in chronological order. Then, the middle of the book is the "bridge" story, set in a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, after which, the second of half of the five other stories unravel in reverse chronological order. To a certain extent this is merely a gimmicky way of presenting six novellas (one character, a composer who is arranging a six-part piece with the same title and structure as the book even admits as much, "Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished."), but the recurring themes of the mankind's capacity for evil and the man's inhumanity to man and the transience of civilization are what bind it all together.

The first story is "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing", and appears as the journal of a San Francisco lawyer in the 1850s who has been traveling in search of a legatee and is now en route home. A stop in the Chatham Islands (near New Zealand), opens his eyes to the both innate cruelty of both native peoples and the colonial system which professes to be saving them. His account, with clear echoes of Melville and Conrad, is found in the library of an aging composer living in Belgium in the 1930s -- which is where the second story takes place. Its unearther is bisexual composer Robert Frobisher, who has insinuated himself into the luxurious home of the decaying blind genius in order to hide out from his numerous creditors. His trials and tribulations are recounted via hilarious scathing letters to an old Cambridge friend which then turn up in the third storyline.

This takes the form of a '70s pulp thriller starring a Latina investigative journalist looking into malfeasance at a California nuclear plant. This "Luisa Rey Investigation" is a very capable thriller which turns up as a manuscript in the offices of a contemporary London vanity publisher. The publisher's story is Kafkaesque farce, as he is incarcerated by person or persons unknown in a retirement home/prison. His attempts to learn who put him there and to escape appear as a film watched by a genetically engineered McDonald's waitress in a dystopic futuristic Korea. This is a very well-realized story worthy of any sci-fi anthology, with overt nods to films ranging from "Blade Runner" to "Soylent Green."

The central bridging story, a far-future tale of a boy's post-apocalyptic survival on a Hawaiian island is definitely the weakest, requiring the most heavy lifting on the reader's part due to the constructed slang. In it, a peaceable farmer/herder community are continually at risk from warlike neighbors. An envoy arrives from a technologically advanced group, potentially upsetting the delicate balance of power. This storyline clearly binds it to "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" in Mitchell's attempt to show how human behavior simply cycles back around to established modes. If this all sounds bafflingly complex, it really isn't. What it is is a set of completely immersive stories with distinctive settings, characters, and styles, but common themes. Mitchell is at ease across genre, time, space, gender, race, you name it. The stories can be read for individual enjoyment or one can track the progression of various recurring cues and behaviors as an exploration of the corrupting and dehumanizing nature of power. Either way, this is an amazing -- and entertaining -- work.

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Impressive and exhausting

I started this book months ago and would not have returned to it but a friend pointed out that there are different narratives so I thought I'd slog through the journals of a tedious notary in the 18th-century on a Pacific island to get to the next bit...

well, this is the book's charm and also its downfall. The several sections (each interrupted at a high point and then continued later on, which both adds excitement and is also maddly irritating) are mystically connected-- that is, following Ewing's journal, we meet Mr. Frobisher, a rake-composer in 1931 who has wangled himself into the position of secretary to a world famous British composer-- and Frobisher is reading Ewing's journals. He's writing letters to his friend Sixsmith, and Sixsmith is a character in the next section, which is a mystery corporate thriller about a woman named Luisa Rey.

All of the sections capture the genre they ape perfectly. You have to admire a writer this versatile. And Mitchell is wrestling with big themes about humanity and its tendency to war or to civilization (he wraps this up with a big bow on the last page, actually).

But, I found the central and most crucial section, a post-apocalyptic world narrated by a simple goatherd in dialect (crossin', for example; in the future apparently nobody pronounces "g" anymore) incredibly exasperating and hard to slog through.

OK, so there will be, and always has been, tension in the human race between the will to destroy and the will to create. Yeah, and? There's a recurring comet-shaped birthmark that several characters have, suggesting that this is all the story of one person incarnated many times... an interesting idea, never really ddeveloped.

As a dystopian warning, the book falls a little flat, although the scifi section about a clone ("fabricant") is particularly exciting. I visited Korea recently and can see why Mitchell would choose Seoul as the capital of a world based on international corporate conglomerates. Much of the book takes place in the Pacific; why, I'm not sure. I feel that I missed a lot of what Mitchell was getting at... but feel little impulse to reread.

It's an enjoyable yarn, certainly, and once immersed I didn't want to put it down. Still, I doubt I'd be rushing to read another book of his... I prefer to go deeper into one narrative than for narratives to play on each other this way.

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Poor Timothy Cavendish!

'Cloud Atlas' is written by the hand of a master storyteller. Different voices, in different periods all sounding authentic without pretense. Back in time even ahead of time, the stories are all slightly interwoven to show the cyclical way our lives are all connected, even if it's as ethereal as clouds. "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" could be published seperately and sold as a Nabakovian masterpeice. One of the funniest things I've ever read. An original and moving work.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, page 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

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