This is not really one novel. It's six novellas rolled into one story. But somehow the novellas are all connected, even though they span multiple lives and are told across the arc of centuries. Mitchell breaks up five of the stories, interrupting one with the next. For someone who has always enjoyed reading more than one book at a time, "Cloud Atlas" was perfect.
The sixth story, a post-apocalyptic adventure, is told with no interruption and all of the others have their threads picked up seamlessly in reverse order from when they were interrupted. The final story, a series of diary entries from a 19th Century American notary sailing the Pacific Ocean, picks up more than 400 pages from where it left off earlier in the book. "Cloud Atlas" is like a matryoshka doll of a book and the way Mitchell nestles all of the stories together into one is so cleverly done that it was a pleasure to read. Each story bears its own voice, style, setting, and even tense. Finishing the book left you thinking, "How did he think of doing this?" And, more importantly, "How did he pull it off so well?"
Each story has a reference to the one that came before it, one main character is reading the previous one's diary entries, the next protagonist is listening to a musical piece composed by the last. This could have come off as gimmicky, but instead made the book self-referential in a believable way (David Mitchell was meta before meta was cool). Recurring characters sport identical birthmarks, even though their genders and personalities change. Mitchell flirts with making "Cloud Atlas" a tale of reincarnation, but never commits to that theme deeply enough to claim reincarnation is an explicit theme. It's just a likely explanation for a remarkably complicated but surprisingly clear storyline.
Mitchell plays with language and the evolving nature of human communication. Language is a living thing and humans are constantly changing it, adding to it or grafting new things in when they are needed, rejecting what proves cumbersome. Mitchell's first story is set in the 1840's and the language is as stuffy and proper, but also as soaring as the Victorian Age itself. But by the futuristic "Orison of Sonmi 451" English has changed noticeably. Spelling has become more efficient. Xtraneous "E"s are xpunged from this sleeker lexicon and, reflecting the corporatized nature of human society, everyone refers to products by their most common brand names. All cars have become simply fords, all shoes are nikes.
This story, "Orison of Sonmi 451" (an obvious but endearing reference to Ray Bradbury's famous futuristic novel) was the one that you liked the most as a stand alone story. Sonmi 451 is a "fabricated person" who was cloned for the sole purpose of serving as a slave to her civilization's "purebloods." She proves to be a wonderful reminder of the universal truth that slaves are often greater people than their masters. Like Data, the android from Star Trek the Next Generation, Sonmi reminded you that you can learn a lot about being human by imagining how someone who isn't would try to become human. While describing falling snow, her observation that "Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively" served as another reminder to slow down and relish those common moments of fleeting beauty. Not everyone is privileged enough become immune to the exquisite wonder of the world that constantly surrounds you.
Sonmi 451's story also served as a catalyst for you to ponder the nature of the soul itself. In her world, the word soul simply refers to an individual's ability to purchase goods or services. It is a subcutaneous device, a piece of technology that serves to perpetuate an inherently soulless system. You found yourself putting the book down and asking yourself difficult and unanswerable question like, "Where does the soul reside? What is it? When does it take up residence?" and, most maddeningly of all, "Would cloned people posses souls?" These are old questions, but the fact that they do not have easy answers implies that they are not unimportant. Truth resists simplicity and there are few easy answers, in your world or in Sonmi's.
Although Mitchell's style is remarkable, the book keeps its head above any accusations of style over substance. The substance is the whole point. The style just makes it all easier to drink in. After five hundred pages and six different intertwined stories, after murders and suicides, after revolutions and apocalypses, after petty thefts and grand betrayals, Mitchell closes his book with a surprisingly concise and unflinchingly hopeful point. Our history and our future are established on our individual beliefs, and those very beliefs tend to become self-fulfilling. Every story in the book is a morality play on this one theme, each matryoshka doll an artist's rendering of a larger, more universal truth.
"If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being... One fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself... In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw, if we believe diverse races and creeds can share this world peaceably,... if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass."
One hundred years ago, humanity was engaged in an unthinkable slaughter they called the Great War. One hundred years before that, Washington DC was torched in the War of 1812. Today it is looking like the War in Afghanistan, America's longest war, might be coming to a whimpering end. What do we believe, as a people, as one species, about how the world works? One hundred years from now, your grandchildren will be able to tell what we believed by the shape of the world they inherit from you.
"Cloud Atlas" helped you remember that we each have a part to play in shaping that future, in making a world that doesn't perpetuate the belief that pure selfishness and self protection lead to anything other than aggression and subjugation, that might ever makes right. If we believe that the world is a terrible place, one that can only be changed through selfishness, fear, and violence, we will guarantee, once again, that is what it will be. If we believe the world is a good place, one that can be changed through empathy, kindness, compassion, and a shared kinship with all people, we might just be proven right.
It is daunting to realize that every life spent in pursuit of that goal is but one drop in a vast ocean of history.
"Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"
On to the next book!
P.S. Here is a fascinating flowchart for the characters from the book and the actors who played them in the movie across all of the different story lines. This is definitely one movie you need to see!
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoGfVDqYXkC7M-9989rv6fOHUG2oZyPTKypF7lZBUomHb6yV7fV5SY3NEREh0CdETXKJSkiFcHu3TrfR0jbLsPe3PsfB0gvvcf88hMaMLA0GbTUP7Zw9BHNAIH7d-a01FGlodRriQLPyI7/s1600/cloud-atlas.jpg
P.P.S. See if you can add a postscript in your next review that doesn't contain the word 'fascinating.'
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