Play Book Tag discussion

This book is a roller coaster. It reaches dizzying heights, dips into some real low lows, and I'm left shaken as I try to get off the ride. What the hell did I just read?

Calling David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas "genre-defying" is perhaps putting it lightly. There are six (count 'em, six) parallel stories going on at once, each one fitting a different genre. We have historical fiction, futuristic sci-fi, post-apocalyptic thriller, detective fiction and even a comedy of errors; there are stories told in letters, in journal entries, in interview format, by oral history. Just when you think you have a handle on one narrative thread, the section ends (sometimes mid-sentence) and you're thrust into another. Yet all the sections are linked – sorta. So is this all one novel? Or six novellas strung together? Why break them up the way they are? I've heard this book is structured like a parabola, but I considered it more like climbing up and down a mountain: the first plot is also the final one, the second story the penultimate one, and so on. You start in the past, climb up to the distant future, and then climb down again. And, like going on a mountain hike, by the end you are exhausted.

The writing is exquisite, but trying to keep all the disparate storylines straight while still sussing out how they are related is tricky. Here is my best shot. We start in the journal of Adam Ewing, a notary from 1850s San Francisco sailing through the South Pacific on business. Then we jump to the letters of a brilliant but troubled music prodigy, Robert Frobisher, sulking about 1930s Europe while he writes to a former lover, Rufus Sixsmith. During his stay with an old music savant, he discovers Adam Ewing's journal. Then we jump to 1975, where journalist Luisa Rey meets Sixsmith, now an aging scientist desperate to whistleblow the corruption of a nuclear power company whose reactor he helped design. Then we jump to "present day" (early aughts-ish?), where an elderly publisher of ill-repute, Timothy Cavendish, finds himself reading the manuscript of Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery while simultaneously getting hoodwinked into checking himself into a nursing home. Then, we jump seemingly hundreds of years into a nightmarish, corpocratic dystopian future, where a liberated clone named Sonmi-451 confesses her final manifesto to her state-sanctioned executioners. The only classic film she's ever seen, one from the early 21st century and banned for its subversive ideas, is The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. Finally, some untold centuries after that, a pre-Industrial tribe sustaining itself on the remnants of Hawaii worships Somni as a god. Then we go back as if in rewind, to finish the outstanding stories.

Exhausting, like I said.

These stories are linked by vague coincidences and strange circumstances; for instance, several characters in the changing stories have an identical birthmark. At first I thought this meant the next protagonist was a descendent of the previous one, but the book itself posits reincarnation, which I found a little puzzling. I mean, I guess it fits. Cloud Atlas is a book obsessed with the course of history, how small things make big changes down the line, and how the enduring greed of humanity will likely cause our downfall, yet virtuous people struggle against it all the same. Some iterations win, others lose. Poor Sonmi in particular was heartbreaking to read about. This premise is complicated by the fact that previous installments are potentially fictional (particularly Luisa's storyline), so it's a little difficult to say for certain what is real. That's part of the fun, or part of the existential crisis, depending on your mood.

This was a challenging but engaging read. Mitchell has amazing prose, and so much of this book knows how to chill a reader to the bone. (view spoiler)[The reveal about what happens to Sonmi's fellow Papa Song's co-workers, though a twist I expected, is still haunting me days later, as is Frobisher's descent into madness and suicide. (hide spoiler)] I did find the formatting gimmick a little tiresome after awhile – by the third return to the previous story I pretty much knew to expect a resolution and a hint to what came next. And I had some difficulty suspending disbelief in a few spots, especially in Sonmi's chapters. (view spoiler)[Like, did Mitchell really have to write her having sex with her handler directly after witnessing the slaughter and processing into food of her former co-workers? I can think of nothing that would put me in the mood less. And does she even know what sex is? Isn't she only like, two or three years old, technically??! Any sexuality of her character is completely glossed over by the author and so I found this rather jarring and its implications a bit icky. (hide spoiler)] Finally, although I found the content of Zachry's chapter some of the most interesting, the phonetic dialect in which it was written was tough to get through. I rarely consider skipping whole sections, but if not for Meronym's character I would have been sorely tempted.

What am I meant to take away from a book as sprawling and ambitious as this one? Its message about the arc of history feels quite bleak – I keep coming back to Sonmi's chapters, thinking of how close we've come to that sort of late-stage capitalist nightmare in the few short years since Cloud Atlas was published. But we don't end in the post-apocalyptic far future, we end in the past, with the awakening of an average joe to the social inequities of the world and vowing to do something about them. So there is, perhaps, some hope – hope that we will continue to struggle for a brighter future. I'll take it, I suppose.

All in all, a challenging read, and I can't say it's something I enjoyed as much as experienced on a visceral level. But I've been putting it off for several years because it intimidated me, and I do feel better for having finally tackled it. Despite my minor misgivings, it earns all five stars and more. I'll be mulling this one over for a long time.

What the hell did I just read?

Exactly what I said-and sorry to say I hated it

I loved it too, Heather. Apparently it's a love it or hate it type book.

Joanne wrote: "What the hell did I just read?

Exactly what I said-and sorry to say I hated it"

LOL! I'm so sorry you hated it. It's such an investment to end up not liking!

Joy D wrote: "I loved it too, Heather. Apparently it's a love it or hate it type book."

I think so. I ultimately found it worthwhile, but I did wonder whether I would have liked it better if all the stories had been told in the correct order without being split up. I mostly kept reading for the promise of having all the plot threads resolved.

This is a ‘desert island’ book for me, but I can totally see why it’s a love or hate. Sometimes I find books offputting and pretentious when they are so obviously and deliberately constructed and this skirted pretty close but I just adored the cleverness and beauty of the writing and the different voices in this one. I struggled initially because it was so different but once I let go and went along for the ride, I was in reading heaven.

KateNZ wrote: "This is a ‘desert island’ book for me, but I can totally see why it’s a love or hate. Sometimes I find books offputting and pretentious when they are so obviously and deliberately constructed and t..."

I totally agree. I think in the hands of a less skilled writer the premise would have REALLY grated on my nerves, but I found all the storylines so engaging that I didn't care.

I loved it too, but I like books that play with expectations. I also like pastiches - that is imitations of different styles. The amazing thing is that they made a movie of this - and it worked.

I enjoyed this one. Glad you liked it!