Recent Reads: Cloud Atlas

Here’s the idea:  Start in the 1840’s with a man looking to get back to San Francisco by sea, move on to the 1930’s as another character attempts to rescue his career by aiding a dying composer, then to the 1970’s where a cub reporter looks to take down those pulling strings behind a deadly nuclear power plant, to present day where an editor finds himself held against his will…. I’m not done yet… into the future where synthesized human being have become an new race of slaves, and then to the end of recorded history where a band a of surviving islanders is witness to the disappearance of the last shreds of the civilizations that came before.  Then, turn around and go backwards, revealing on our second trip through each era how all these characters are interconnected.  Sounds like a tall order.  It is.

For the first half of the book I read with amazement at David Mitchell’s ability to inhabit not just different characters, but entirely different worlds and writing styles.  And for the most part, each new story was gripping and well told, if only because I had trouble imagining how it would tie into all the others.  But once we got into the future, to the top of the literary pyramid, and started coming back down, I found myself strangely less interested.  I think when you promise interconnections and revelations that can only be appreciated through a structure like this one you have to deliver more than one character’s story being read by another in the future.  Granted, he hints at deeper links, both metaphysical and thematic, but that’s how they feel, like hints.  There is no great ‘Aha’ that comes together as you travel down the backside of the book.  It’s more a disappointed, ‘oh’.

Mitchell is a fantastic and nimble writer, and I salute his attempt to do something different.  I just didn’t think it added up to more than its parts, and its parts weren’t quite interesting enough to stand alone.  It’s a book of things leaning on each other so they don’t fall down.  If you’re looking for something mildly similar (in structure, not tone or execution) that stands up, try David Schickler’s Kissing In Manhattan, a collection of short stories where the character’s bounce off one another, but each of which is more than capable of being appreciated on its own.