Bold Book (Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Date:	22/02/05 (232 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: an ambitious book

Disadvantages: too ambitious

Browsing through amazon I chanced upon the novel ´Cloud Atlas´ by David Mitchell, a British author (born in Southport in 1969) hitherto unknown to me, the word ´bizarre´ in one of the critiques made me order it although the number of pages was not given as it usually is. Shock, horror!, when the book arrived, 529 pages in small print!

Without any introduction I find myself reading ´The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing´, an ´American Notary of Letters & Law´ written on his return trip to San Francisco from a South Pacific island where he was on business. The language is quaint (we´re in the first half of the 19th century), ´I hurried thitherwards´ . . . ´awakened me wide-eyed & affright´. . . I wouldn´t be surprised if some readers decided to put the book into the box for the next bazaar after reading the first pages, I was fascinated, though, to read what was PC in those days: ´It´s one thing to throw a blackie a bone, but quite another to take him on for life! Friendships between races . . . can never surpass the affection between a loyal gun-dog & his master.´ and what missionaries thought about the heathens they converted, but would I want to do so for more than 500 pages?

Big surprise, the journal stops on page 39 in mid-sentence and the second chapter with the title ´Letters from Zedelghem´ begins. Odd. Robert Frobisher, a young Englishman, the only son of a well-to-do family, yet disinherited for improper behaviour and a drop-out of a college in Cambridge where he read music, has fled from his debtors to Belgium. The year is 1931. His plan is to convince the composer Vyvyan Ayrs, now half-blind and unable to go on working, to take him as his amanuensis, help him with his work and get inspiration for his own compositions. He´s indeed accepted and a fertile cooperation ensues. He writes regularly to his friend Rufus Sixsmith in England, his style is short and terse.

Robert finds one half of ´The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing´ on the shelves of his room, recognises its values and, always short of money, sells it secretly. Aha, this is how the author connects the first and the second chapter, clever, even if they have nothing in common concerning the content.

The composer´s wife seduces Robert, tension starts building up, also on the composing front – Robert has the impression that Ayrs steals his ideas and feels exploited – where will that lead to? Just when the reader´s interest has been aroused the chapter ends. Odd again.

The third chapter with the title ´Half Lives - The First Luisa Rey Mystery´ takes us to the 1970s, Rufus Sixsmith, the addressee of Robert Frobisher´s letters has become a world-famous scientist of nuclear physics and has left Cambridge for a job in a nuclear power plant in the USA where he endangers his life by showing that he senses foul play. A friend advises him to leave the country asap, on the way to the airport he´s trapped in an elevator with the journalist Luisa Rey. I´m not going to bore you with details, let me just tell you that Luisa gets the letters Frobisher wrote 40 years ago and that she´s got the same birthmark shaped like a comet as Frobisher. Aha! Link!

Besides these two connections the Luisa Rey story has nothing to do with the two preceding ones, it´s a conventional thriller of the kind you buy in airports or at stations to pass the time with goodies and baddies, car chases, bombings, killers, you name it.

Why I´ve followed David Mitchell obediently so far although I can´t discern an overall theme is due to his brilliant style, lesser talented authors can also create different characters but can´t give them different voices, Mitchell uses different genres and his characters always sound genuine.

When the fourth chapter with the title ´The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish´ introduces the British publisher of the same name who was sent the manuscript of Luisa Rey´s story (link!) before he lands in a prison-like old people´s home with a sadistic head mistress, I follow him again without complaining knowing that I´ll be in for another gripping read. Why do authors write, why do readers read at all? Robert Frobisher has written in a letter, ´Composers are . . . scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because if one didn´t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one´s throat all the sooner.´ Exchange ´composers´ and ´music´ for ´writers´ and ´literature´ and you have the answer.

Yet, in chapter five which has the title ´An Orison of Sonmi ~ 451´ my attitude changes and I see the author´s performance in a different light. Fast forward centuries, millennia?, the world is run by an anonymous corporation whose headquarters is located in Korea, the main protagonist is a genomed female (with a birthmark shaped like a comet, link!) fabricated to serve in a below-ground Mctype diner. A pureblood PhD student selects her as a test specimen for his thesis, she´s upgraded and given a soul. The whole chapter is dark, apocalyptic sci-fi, a genre which doesn´t appeal to me much, but that´s not the reason why I grow tired of Mitchell´s way of story-telling.

A character in the Luisa Rey chapter says, ´But it´s been done a hundred times before!´- as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristotle and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!´ I have the distinct feeling that here the author reveals his programme. Right he is, of course, literary criticism has found out that there are no more than seven plots altogether, but if the How dominates the What, we have art for art´s sake. From one of the blurbs at the beginning of the book ´. . . (Mitchell) manages to be enormously clever while resisting the temptation to show off.´ Clever, yes, resisting the temptation, no!

The sixth chapter with the title ´Sloosha´s Crossin´ an Ev´rythin´ After´, structurally the climax of the book, I´ve only skimmed, location: an island somewhere in the South Pacific resembling the one of the first chapter, time: fast forward again, after the Fall. Which Fall? The main character´s new born baby has got ´no mouth, nay, no nose-holes neither, so it cudn´t breath an´was dyin´. We read about a primitive society in a primitive language. Of course, there´s also someone with a birthmark shaped like a comet (What does that mean/indicate/refer to? Nothing, I´m afraid).

If you think, that´s it, that I´ve retold the whole book, you´re very much mistaken because chapter seven is chapter five continued, chapter eight is chapter four continued and so on and so forth until on page 493 we read the end of Adam Ewing´s South Pacific Journal that broke off on page 39.

What is gained by this extraordinary way of story-telling? Nothing, if you ask me. The novel as such has no plot, no connecting theme (at least I can´t find one), the links are so weak they break It´s really a collection of six independent stories, each with a plot of its own, told well and with some profound insights, fascinating characters and enjoyable descriptions, had I been Mitchell´s publisher I´d have advised him to write a series of stories, one after the other, un-cleverly and without any artsy-fartsyness.

I feel like giving 3 ½ stars.

David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas (2003)
Sceptre
529 pages
7.99 GBP
amazon 4.79 GBP

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