Brian Trapp: I’m currently w
riting a novel, which has not proved helpful for my mental health. I’m beset with the usual first-draft questions: How many narrators? One? Three? How much time will the narrative cover? One month? One year? Ten? To keep from quitting forever and taking up a more forgiving occupation (Bomb defuser? Smoke jumper?), I take comfort in the fact that there are only so many options. But after reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, I am once again on the cusp of mental breakdown. Mitchell’s novel has six (!) narrators and covers oh . . . why not . . . a thousand years.
The book can more accurately be described as a series of interlocking novellas, each blending chameleon-like into different genres (seafaring journal, Victorian epistolary, mystery/thriller, sci-fi dystopia). The novel starts and ends with an epic of British imperialism, but in between it trapezes to 1970s California, Victorian Belgium, contemporary London, future Korea, and more distant end-of-civilization Hawaii, employing Mitchell’s assured prose and expertly curated detail.
This author is best when painting other worlds, and he can find the most telling detail to make a scene believable. For instance, in “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” when the nineteenth-century seafarer gets to a racist missionary outpost on an obscure island, he notices a dining room table with its legs immersed in a dish of water to keep the ants away. How did he come up with that? It’s the best of details: utterly convincing and also thematically significant. Civilization in this novel is always on shaky ground, and yet there is a hopeful air to many of these stories. In the mostly depressing Phillip K. Dick-inspired “An Orison of Sonmi-451,” a cloned “fabricant” gives her confession to a government minder after a quashed rebellion, and yet her Bill of Rights lives on as a religion in the next novella, showing that even when characters die, their stories can matter for future generations.
Cloud Atlas is held together like a symphony, with repeating themes of reincarnation and cannibalism, even down to the novellas themselves, each one existing as a text in a later novella. Mitchell, who did a master’s thesis on postmodern literature, offers the complex intertexuality of his postmodern forebears, while still supplying the old-timey pleasures of a good yarn. In other words, he is both sophisticated and accessible. While some novellas are better than others, cumulatively, this novel holds up, and in its last line makes a compelling case for itself: “Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”
I loved the old-timey pleasures of a good yarn in Cloud Atlas. Several of the stories are stuck in my head a year later. I especially liked the stories placed in the future. It was accessible but with the complexity and depth of structure that makes you feel that you did not waste your time on “just a story”. I loved it. After reading this novel an aspiring novelist might be forgiven if she retreated to the safety of a short story