re:mote voices

Title:Cloud Atlas
Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Sceptre

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year's fragments into a "sextet for overlapping soloists": piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in it’s own language of key, scale, and colour. In the 1st set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the 2nd , each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished and by then it'll be too late

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas is perhaps best summed up by this quote, which is taken from a letter by the character Robert Frobisher to his friend Rufus Sixsmith, describing the sextet he is writing, entitled "Cloud Atlas Sextet".

Cloud Atlas is the third novel by the writer David Mitchell, following on from his debut Ghostwritten and number9dream. With each of his novels he has experimented with the idea of the short story/novella and how to overlap that with the idea of the novel. In Ghostwritten he presented a series of short stories, travelling across the globe from Japan, via China and Mongolia, then Russia, London, Ireland, and ending up in America; with each of these stories there were overlaps, characters bumping into characters from the previous story and the next, binding the whole together. With number9dream he tried something different with the idea, he presented a core novel; following the journey of Eiji as he travels to Tokyo in search of his father, with each chapter featuring a sub-narrative.

Ghostwritten flowed well, each of the stories worked on their own and as part of the whole and is a strong work. number9dream was more of a mixed bag, some of the sub-narratives became distracting, detracting from the flow of the parent novel. With that Cloud Atlas takes from the experience of both of his previous novels and applies a determination to push his idea of experimentation further than he has before. With that Cloud Atlas can be considered to be that sextet, six separate stories, written in their own language and colour, each being interrupted by the next, until the sixth is reached, and then resuming once more from the cut. As with Ghostwritten, each story touches the next, working it’s way in, with themes and tendrils weaving beyond the immediate bounds.

The six separate stories are: The Pacific Journal Of Adam Ewing, Letters From Zedelghem, Half-Lives - The First Luisa Rey Mystery, The Ghastly Ordeal Of Timothy Cavendish, An Orison of Sonmi~451 and Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After. The first is set in the 1850's and written as a journal, following the travels of an American notary in the Pacific, returning from New South Wales via Honolulu to San Francisco. The second is a series of letters written in the 1930's by the music student Robert Frobisher, who has fled debts and disgrace in London to the Belgian estate of Zedelghem to take advantage of a reclusive elder composer. From there we have an American pulp novel, a thriller following the adventures of Luisa Rey as she investigates the corruption surrounding a nuclear plant. Timothy Cavendish is a vanity publisher in London, who finds himself in trouble after ripping off a violent gangster, with this being a contemporary memoir of his experience. From the present we move to the future, and follow an interview with a Sonmi clone, a burger bar server who became intelligent and joined those fighting the oppressive Korean government. Further forward and on a post-apocalyptic Hawaii we follow the story of a troubled tribe as delivered in the oral tradition round the cooking fire.

Not content with simply over lapping narratives ala Ghostwritten, each of these stories is written in a different style. Not just moving from journal to letter to novel, but from the convolutions of 1850's language to tech future language filled with simplifications to the post-apocalyptic cut up dialogue. With that each has a certain appropriate influence. Frobisher finds Ewing's diary and compares it to the writing of Herman Melville, while Mitchell himself suggests parallels between the 1930’s letters of Frobisher to the writing of Christopher Isherwood's writing of that time, while the tale of Sloosha's Crossin' is clearly inspired by Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (Mitchell having written about how much he was inspired by Riddley Walker recently to mark Hoban's 80th birthday). As for the story of the clone Sonmi~451, this character recalls the images of the androids on the train in Wong Kar Wai's 2046.

This has led to some accusations of plagiarism, number9dream gaining the ire of some fans of Haruki Murakami - but Mitchell acknowledges his influences. number9dream comes from the name of a John Lennon track in the same way that Murakami's Norwegian Wood is from a Beatles track. Further, the lead character in number9dream is even reading Norwegian Wood at one point. With the similarities between Sloosha's Crossin' and Riddley Walker more questions have been asked about what Mitchell is doing. But he would prefer his work was considered to be his own, with knowing tributes to those who have influenced him over the years. And to dismiss his work so out of hand would be foolish.

Apart from questions of source, one of the most relevant points of discussion regarding Mitchell's work is the very one he puts into the mouth of Robert Frobisher in the above quote. Is Cloud Atlas revolutionary of gimmicky, although this is something which has been relevant as a question for Mitchell's entire body of work. For myself, Mitchell was at his most gimmicky with number9dream, which is a good read, but as I've already said, some of those sub-narratives seem to be about style over substance.

With that, there is no denying that Cloud Atlas is way over the top, six nested novels, which are like a Russian Doll in Mitchell's own words, drilling through the to the centre and out the back; travelling from the past to the future via a series of narrative types and language styles. But he manages to make each of his separate stories work well, though the degree to which each of them keep the readers attention can vary. Beyond that, he also works on the binding, the links that bring it all together. Luisa Rey meets the nuclear scientist Rufus Sixsmith, who has the letters from Frobisher, in which Frobisher talks about this journal he has found by a man called Adam Ewing. In the future the new empire which arises from Korea will be a jewel in a dwindling planet, where all services will be provided by fabricant clones, who will serve for 12 years before retiring in Hawaii; in the future Hawaii will be one of the last human outposts of a devastated planet, where the tribes worship the goddess Sonmi. And so on; even taking the time to link back to the characters in Ghostwritten to some degree.

When Cloud Atlas came out in hardback last year it was nominated for the Man Booker Prize 2004, one of the UK's most prestigious book awards. With that Mitchell found himself as being the most favourite-favourite for the award ever, which is of course curious given that in the end he didn't actually win - to the surprise of many. Cloud Atlas is an ambitious and sprawling novel, following the themes of predation, the way in which exploit other people - journeying from the white man exploiting indigenous tribes, through corporate manipulations to the development of clones as second class citizens - using a variety of styles and influences to demonstrate this point. Accomplished and fun, each of the sections has absorbing passages, and as a whole Cloud Atlas is like Ghostwritten in that David Mitchell keeps his reader on their toes, trying to keep up with the stories and the links to the whole which pop in the course of the individual. Where does Mitchell go from here?

Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell