Leonard Gaya's Reviews > Cloud Atlas

A few pages before the end of Mitchell’s novel, one of the narrators, a young composer, discloses the unusual structure of his musical “masterpiece” — at it happens, Cloud Atlas is originally the title of a piano sonata:

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, 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. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished, and by then it’ll be too late, but it’s the 1st thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep. (Sceptre edition, p. 463)

This simple, yet entirely original idea is, by way of metaphor, the one that governs the whole novel. Mitchell interlocks six stories into a A-B-C-D-E-F/F’-E’-D’-C’-B’-A’ Matryoshka / palindromic series. A creative and surprising device that could put Mitchell almost on par with Nabokov, Calvino and Borges.

These six stories are written in different genres: seafaring adventure, spy fiction, science fiction, comedy, etc. Should we try to unravel the symmetrical mosaic of the whole sextet and consider each of these six novellas individually, much of the charm and effect of Mitchell’s novel would probably vanish. The fifth story, titled “An Orison of Sonmi~451”, written as a sci-fi novella (loosely inspired by Soylent Green) is powerful enough and would make an excellent stand-alone; but the rest of the lot can sometimes feel a bit uneven.

Still, interwoven as they are, and spanning across continents and centuries, they map out at their core a vast polyphony on the unrelenting oppression and exploitation of human beings by other human beings. According to Mitchell, it is everywhere and ever-present: on distant colonies, in art and trade, within political and industrial endeavours, in the treatment of vulnerable people, in social inequality. As says one of the characters, probably alluding to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche:

The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. (p. 461)

All this is, one way or another, the many manifestations of universal cannibalism. Or, to put it in an aphoristic manner: “The Weak are Meat the Strong do Eat.” (p. 508)

Yet, Mitchell truly shines as a writer in his ability to give each story “its own language of key, scale and colour”. In other words, he is a true virtuoso of mannerism, able to emulate just as well the style of writing of a 19th-century American mariner (cf. Moby-Dick) or the sci-fi neologisms-ridden lingo of a late-21th-century Korean clone, and every widely different type of language in-between, just as convincingly and with just as much knack and chameleonic finesse. Coming from someone who suffered from a stammer and had a hard time expressing himself as a child, this ability to bend the English language every which way (sometimes almost to the limit of readability) is nothing short of a stroke of wizardry.

Cloud Atlas is probably Mitchell’s most famous novel, thanks to the 2012 movie adaptation directed by the Wachowskis, with (among others) Tom Hanks and Halle Berry — it is still in my to-watch list. By the way, Mitchell also worked on the TV Series Sense8 with the same directors. While the LGBT+ themes come undoubtedly from the Wachowskis themselves, the idea of individuals interconnected across great distances is certainly David Mitchell’s trademark. Better still than the series, though, Cloud Atlas masterfully illustrates this concept.

So, is this whole thing “revolutionary or gimmicky?” Shan’t know until you’ve read it, and by then it’ll be too late. For my money, it’s probably somewhere in the middle, but I did enjoy this intricate, playful, stimulating novel tremendously.