Cloud Atlas

“Spent the fortnight gone in the music room,” writes Robert Frobisher in a letter to Rufus Sixsmith, “reworking my year's fragments into a ‘sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and colour. In the 1st set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the 2nd, each interruption is recontinued, in order.”

The story, structured in six parts, about how this story came to be in the first place. Caught in the middle are some very interesting characters, some more than others, and the world is governed by a definite determinist sense of cosmic fate. Each in its own language and color; all of this is expertly written, even when it's “mediocre”, as in the pulp story that is Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, or The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.

“It is very rare,” writes Philip Hensher for Spectator, “to come across a novel so ruthlessly planned, and yet so unconfined by its formal decisions, so unpredictable in its direction, so convincing even at its strangest, so capable of doing anything to serve its extraordinary ends.” This is an acute observation. The way the stories grow out of and in each other, synecdochically, is masterful. This device is one of my favorites in all art, the means through which the art produced is not only justified but its creation commented on: the Cloud Atlas Sextet; Half-Lives inspires Cavendish to write his story to a screenplay that is later watched by Sonmi-451, whose narrative is later “seen” by Zachry in the orison.

It's brilliantly pieced together, where each layer contained is able to comment on the previous one – Frobisher commenting, for example, that he finds it amusing that Ewing doesn't realize he's being poisoned.

I devoured the book until the story started folding back into itself. Half-Lives and Cavendish were the parts where I saw my excitement wane. Zedelghem and Ewing's Pacific Diaries, however, offered a great sense of climax. The difficulty of writing this kind of prose is unfathomable – the ideas always tend to work as mere ideas, but when put to paper as a narrative, the likelihood of failure exponentially rises.For the most part Mitchell's creation is perfectly capable of avoiding any narrative snares. I want to read this again, and perhaps one day the individual stories from start to finish, just to see the kind of dramatic effect they carry in and of themselves.

5 October,
2014