Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell
Random House, NY, NY, 2004
528 pp. Paper, $14.95
ISBN: 0-375-50725-6.

Reviewed by George Gessert

Cloud Atlas is an "overwhelming masterpiece," according to the Washington Times. "Never less than enthralling," announces The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times Book Review proclaims author David Mitchell, "a genius." But don’t let the blurbs put you off. These are not hype so much as loss for words. From the first page it is clear that Cloud Atlas is an extraordinary book. Mitchell has a rare gift for language and for the kind of cliff-hanging plots that most of us have become habituated to through movies and television. But most dramatically he has a gift for style, not just one but also many. In Cloud Atlas he writes with the hardboiled flair of an investigative journalist, like a British composer from the 1930s, in the voice of a prisoner in a contemporary nursing home, and in the manner of a 19th century American diarist. In addition to his mastery of historical styles, Mitchell invents two languages of the future, one for a genetically engineered slave of a Korean corporation, and another, funny and——once one grows accustomed to it——surprisingly beautiful, for a goatherd after the collapse of technocratic civilization. Through play with style, Mitchell explores the human condition in enough different times and places to suggest patterns that transcend historical circumstance.

The first of the six voices in Cloud Atlas is of a San Francisco accountant on a business trip to the South Pacific in the 1850s. No actual 19th century diarist would have written as intimately as Mitchell’s Adam Ewing, (and I suspect no English homosexual from the 1930s would have written with the ferocity of Frobisher, the composer) but verisimilitude is hardly the point. At the Chatham Islands due east of New Zealand Ewing is an accidental witness to the genocide of the Moriori, the islands’ original inhabitants. As a white American very much of his time, Ewing at first assumes that he has encountered a natural and perhaps divinely ordained process in which an inferior race is being replaced by its superiors. And yet he is repelled by the brutality and, eventually, befriends a Moriori trying to escape the Chathams for sanctuary in Hawaii.

Ewing the racist proves himself capable of seeing beyond race. But what is race? The worst violence is perpetrated not by the British, but by Maori displaced to the Chatham Islands by white colonists in New Zealand. The Maori and the Moriori, murderers and victims, are in effect one people. They speak variants of the same language (even their names for themselves are variations of the same word) and share numerous customs and beliefs. The Maori, however, have followed the path of violence, while the Moriori cultivated nonviolence. And so we are introduced to Mitchell’s metaphor for humanity as a cloud, interconnected and fragmenting, each part containing particles and possibilities of others, constantly flowing.

Ewing’s journal ends abruptly, literally in the middle of a sentence, and we find ourselves in 1931 with Robert Frobisher, a ne’er-do-well composer fleeing England from his creditors. In Belgium he insinuates himself into the household of Vyvyan Ayrs, the grand old man of British modernist composers. Frobisher soon becomes involved with Ayrs’s wife.

At this point the reader may well ask: what do the misadventures of musicians in Belgium in the 1930s have to do with the last of the Morioris——to say nothing of a Korean slave clone working for a futuristic MacDonalds? Mitchell traces subtle connections that seem to indicate much larger forces at work. Frobisher discovers Ewing’s journal in the Ayrs library. Ewing, Frobisher, the Korean slave, and the last Moriori all have affinities: Each leaves familiar territory for the unknown, and each encounters forms of murderous selfishness that suggest something eternally dark about human nature. There are hints that souls transmigrate.

But discontinuities outweigh continuities. In much modern literature and art we encounter heaps of fragments. Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, classical cubism, The Wasteland, and Smithson’s sublimely mordant images of entropy are well-known examples. In Cloud Atlas Mitchell subsumes modernist fragmentation in mist, not the mist of romanticism or of obfuscation, but of particles interacting in infinitely various but exact ways. Interactions within the human cloud are beautiful, terrible, constantly surprising, sometimes wonderfully funny, and always passing. With each change comes a new quality of light cast backward onto earlier parts of the book.

In addition to the two plots that I have summarized, there are four others, each as riveting as a thriller, and each illuminating the others——or perhaps not, because the lives described in this novel (if it is a novel, and not some literary parallel to a Robert Altmann film) are involved as much in digression as in anything else. Mitchell’s humor often skirts tragedy, sometimes plunging right over the precipice, transforming our laughter into a component of loss. Not that Mitchell's tricks are mean-spirited, but Cloud Atlas should satisfy even the most jaded appetite for irony. At the same time irony is not at the heart of the book. Irony, like nostalgia, rests on faith that normality, justice, rational order, or goodness once prevailed. Although Mitchell accommodates these yearnings, his view of the human condition is not heavily dependent on them.

Instead, Cloud Atlas is informed by something akin to Darwinism and Buddhism. They offer explanations of human experience that imply no Garden of Eden and no fall, promise nothing like universal progress and suggest no direction to history (social Darwinism, Teilhard de Chardin, and other misrepresentations of Darwinism to the contrary.) Tentative Buddhist attitudes ("part-time Buddhism, maybe," as the central character in Ghostwritten, one of Mitchell’s earlier novels puts it), provides one way for Mitchell’s characters to live in a Darwinian world without falling into barbarism, denial, or despair. These assail and inwardly haunt the characters, who must deal with crimes that go unpunished and with the triumph of bullies and thugs. What we call the "human spirit"——that is, what we treasure most about being the tentatively aware kind of creature that we are, endures in spite of the odds. Always marginal, always fragile, always unsure of itself and unlikely in its prospects, the human spirit is no more than a flea on a monster. But fleas, as one character observes, are difficult to eradicate.

Read Cloud Atlas for page-turning plots and for the joy of English used superbly well. Read it for the gorgeous symmetry of its structure. Cloud Atlas is an antidote to cynicism and to the dreariness of culture without transcendent vision. This is a map into the future.