Six novels in one.
The word genius is bandied about in several of the reviews I read of David Mitchell’s fourth novel, Cloud Atlas, and so I decided to read it, thinking Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein, Michaelangelo, etc., people who in my opinion, fill this billing. I found no genius in Cloud Atlas, but what I did find was a courageous attempt, including many brilliant moments, to write an apocalyptic novel for our times.
Let me start, and dismiss, the structure: six separate narratives linked by a comet-shaped birth mark, a music manuscript and probably a couple of other props that I missed. These are not in any event significant (if they are I missed the point) and the narratives are not really related except in the overarching sense that mankind has done and will continue to do bad things, including destroy the planet, all because of the will to wealth and power by the bad people among us. An old theme but one that bears scrutiny and, as I say, takes courage to address.
The heart of the book is the novella entitled, Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After. This is a brilliant evocation of the world after the fall, a subject that has always fascinated me (think Alas, Babylon, A Canticle For Liebowitz, On The Beach), and one that Mitchell utterly dominates. His creation of language, culture, artifact, religion and poignant myth-like memories of the world before the fall, along with a compelling story line about a simple man caught up in the battle against evil, is brilliant and the work of a wildly creative yet disciplined imagination.
Two of the other stories come close to Sloosha’s, but do not quite hit the mark. The first part of The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, which is where Cloud Atlas begins, is the story of a good and honest man traveling as a passenger on a schooner from Australia to San Francisco. The horrors of these journeys under tyrannical and evil captains have been described before, but Mitchell’s take, with his balance between Ewing’s interior and exterior lives is well worth the read.
As is An Orison of Sonmi-451, a novella set in futuristic Korea, in which a cloned “fabricant” escapes her slave status and ends up as the goddess worshipped by the simple inhabitants of Sloosha’s world. This narrative is filled with clichés (the planet is being destroyed by corporate greed, clones are deceived into believing they will go to an island paradise when they have completed their service, etc.). It is, however, saved from the cliché dust bin by the wonderfully imaginative setting Mitchell creates: language, technology, myriad Big Brother accessories—all come across as completely believable. This story, done in a series of interviews with the future goddess, lacks the fear factor that made 1984 great, but it is quite an achievement.
The other novellas, one pointless, (or to me, anyway) about a publisher trapped inn a nursing home, and the other–about a reporter in 1975 California trying to expose, a la Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome–the fatal design flaw in an atomic energy plant–is too painfully politically correct to be interesting. God appears out of a machine to save the heroine so often in this story that I thought at first Mitchell was pulling the leg of his readers, but no, he meant it.
I did not find genius in Cloud Atlas. I should not have expected to, knowing that the meaning of the word has been dumbed down, along with almost everything else in our culture. But it does contain brilliance and some great story-telling. For these reasons it is well worth reading.
Reviewed by James LePore , author of A World I Never Made.
Published by Random House - paperback - 978-0375507250 - $14.95