From the Clouds

David Mitchell is a force to be reckoned with.  Watch him.

Several years ago I picked up ‘Cloud Atlas’, got bogged down early in the book and set it aside.  Recently prodded by a friend who planned to read the book in advance of the release of the movie version next month, I picked it up again.  This time I loved it and finished it pretty quickly.  I won’t even try to figure out what was different about me then and now.  I’m just grateful that for whatever reason I was able to appreciate this wonderful book the second time around.

Welcome to the Barbershop. Multiple chairs.  No waiting.

The structure in itself was enough to draw me in.  The book consists of six loosely related stories, but they’re not told in a straightforward way.  First comes the first half of Story A.  Then the first half of Story B, etc.  When we get to Story F (the sixth story), it’s told in its entirety straight through to the end.  And what an end it is.  That’s followed by the second half of Story E, the second half of Story D, all the way down to the second half of Story A at the very end.  Very conceptual, very intellectual, and incredibly hard to bring off.

But Mitchell manages it well. First of all, each story takes place in a well defined historical period, and is written in a specific style.  There’s a 19^th-century nautical log, a series of early 20^th-century letters from a serious young musician, a late-20^th-century crime thriller, a British comedy, a Philip Dick-like sci-fi story, and a scary post-apocalyptic vision of the destiny that awaits humankind. We hurtle forward into the future, then lurch back to the place we started from.  Each is written in the most natural way.  Each is convincing, and even more crucially, each is entertaining in its own way. I continue to be surprised by the variety of ways I was entertained by a single author in a single book.

Mitchell is a master of dialect.  A master.  Enough said.  I can’t explain it.  You need to read it.

 The stories are linked by a device that seems at first to be a bit contrived:  In the first half of the book, each story is contained in a document of some sort in the following story.  It’s a bit of an uphill battle in the first half as we gradually gain altitude.  But that plays out in the most natural and inevitable way in the second half, where each story ends with the natural telling of the second half of the following story.  The ease with which we flow from one story to the next brought a special downhill thrill.  It’s just plain neat.  What an idea.

In the end, it’s a pretty depressing view of human nature, but the novel ends with at least some sense of hope.  The general trend may be into the abyss, but if we try hard we can each make a difference.  Might seem trivial to some, but I got it. All we can do is try to make things better in the face of long odds.  The outcome doesn’t look good from a distance, may not be good at all, but the best of us will try nonetheless.  Such is our fate.

The various connections between the stories are too numerous to mention.  In a way it’s the same story told over again in a new setting and context. But it’s different and fresh each time.  By the end I had the sense that I was looking down at humanity and time from a very high altitude, a kind of satellite view of history and mankind that is rare indeed.  How did Mitchell manage to do that?

Gotta look at what else he’s written.

What the hell kind of movie might this be?