Cloud Atlas

This is a very unusual book.

It is made up of several separate stories, each utterly different in style and setting, that each end halfway through their narrative, only to be concluded in reverse order.

The opening story is written as the journal of a 19th century gentleman travelling through the Pacific Islands. This story breaks halfway through and we are presented with a series of letters from an aspiring composer in 1920s Belgium, who discovers and reads the Pacific Journal. The sequence of letters is broken off and we find the opening to a 1970 crime drama-novel in which we follow an intrepid reporter who, among other things finds, among the affects of a murder victim, the 1920s letters. This sequence continues, each story shedding light on the one that went before. There really is something for everyone here.

You may have heard a movie was made of this book. My advice – watch the trailer as it really gives the feel for the book...then go read the book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWnAqFyaQ5s

While you can just sit back and enjoy the humour, action and romance, there is a point to it all. This book really makes you think. Here is a section from the 19th Century Pacific Journal that I really loved because it is so beautiful and so true - I've edited it to remove plot/character sensitive stuff (ie. it's spoiler-free).

“ If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a Colosseum of confrontation, exploitation and bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being...You and I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage and our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?

Why? Because of this:- one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Is this the entropy written within our nature?

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw, if we believe divers races and creeds can share this world...if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable and the riches of the Earth and it's Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make come to pass. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.

A life spent shaping a world I want my child to inherit, not one I fear my child shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth living...

I can hear my father-in-law's response... “He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain and his family must pay it with him! Only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!”

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”