Cloud Atlas

a great read, and highly recommended. It was by no means perfect, but for something I picked up on a whim because it was a bestseller, it was excellently written, literary and good fun. Its only real problem is that it really is just six stories with only incidental connection. I think that David Mitchell could very well write a chameleonic masterpiece, but not until he has a great unifying idea, so this is not it. What I said before about it putting me in mind of a schoolboy doing all his best funny voices for his friends stands, but to be entertaining, those voices have to ring true. Mitchell’s impersonations are damn good, if not quite perfect (but impressionists are only fun when you can recognise the face behind the voice).

Metatextual playfulness and pastiche always give the rather irritating shield of putting the work above criticism (What is an intended flaw and what is a genuine one? Is a man who has never heard of Poker using an expression from that game a slip or a statement about how elements survive while the whole is lost? Is the Britishness of the invented manners of speaking in the sci-fi segments intentional? What does this mean?), but the different genres are all taken seriously enough to be entertaining in their own right. None of these stories would be particularly good alone, but the contrast between them gives the pleasure of showmanship to the display of versatility. A trick has limited satisfaction, though; what was missing was unity.

‘Six interlocking lives – one amazing adventure’ boasts the blurb. But the connections are extremely tenuous, and the appearances of each work in the next are contrived and could be allusions to anything, real or fictional, without the effect being changed one bit. Adam Ewing is a 19th-c diarist who describes his stay on the Chatham Islands and the plight of the Moriori natives while a conman doctor makes him sicker so that he pays for the cure.

This diary is read by the superbly arrogant and snobbish Frobisher, who goes to study under an august musician and soon lets his loins lead him into various inconveniences.

Frobisher’s letters are addressed to Sixsmith, who in his old age is a murder victim in the well-observed aping of pulpy thriller ‘Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery’, in which the eponymous journalist investigates corruption in a nuclear power plant in the 70s.

This thriller is sent to present-day publisher Timothy Cavendish, whose adventures are meant to be comedic but I found chilling (though rewarding in the end). I thought I’d imagined the similarity between this section and Nabokov’s writings, with its aloof, cantankerous narrator, literary allusions and instructions to cinematic directors, presuming I simply had Nabokov on the brain after my dissertation – but when Tim commands, ‘Speak, Memory!’, the allusion couldn’t be more direct (though Nabokov is not the only influence here). This homage, like the rest of Mitchell’s voices, is excellent, though of course not quite as inspired as its inspiration, as sparkling as that which sparked it, and I’m not sure Nabokov would have referred to such writers as Stevie Smith or J.D. Salinger, though Paddington Bear may well have held some appeal for him, too.

Cavendish’s life is made into a film, which is viewed by Sonmi~451, a mass-produced drone called a Fabricant from the not-so-distant future, where sinister consumerism holds the world in its corrupt grip.

This fabricant is then regarded as a god by the near-savage population of the final segment, where the civilised world has collapsed and a storyteller called Zachry tells his story about how he was host and guide for a visitor from a ship whose population had retained some of the old ‘Smart’ from before the ‘Fall’.

In other words, the connections don’t amount to a hill of beans and any crazy world you care to pick (‘Casablanca, Lars!’ I gleefully misquote).

There are other connections, frivolous and insignificant – a recurring birthmark, the ‘Cloud Atlas’ phrase, references to Nietzsche and especially the Will to Power – but really, drawing any connection between these would be as specious as saying there is great significance in the fact that the first and last tales both feature the buggery of little boys.

So with no message except perhaps that consumerism is bad in excess, and that racial equality is good (though some Scots beating up some English baddies can be a joyful thing), there is little to draw from this book. But that is not why it was written. It was written to be enjoyed, a playful and experimental piece of showmanship: art for art’s sake. In that, it is excellent, and is only very rarely dull or too self-indulgent. I loved it, though I sincerely hope that one day Mitchell will far out-do this and write something stylistically exemplary, playful AND significant.

The biggest lesson to learn is: every division for division’s sake can only push the onlooker one step further away.