Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
Random House Trade Paperbacks. First published 2004.
A very interesting book, it is actually six novelettes, connected in 'spirit', and by some common themes, occurring at six different points in human evolution, and arranged in a clever nested fashion as follows:
1st story 1st half
2nd story 1st half
3rd story 1st half
4th story 1st half
5th story 1st half
6th story
5th story 2nd half
4th story 2nd half
3rd story 2nd half
2nd story 2nd half
1st story 2nd half
This arrangement gives drama and suspense to the entire novel and also serves to illustrate the author's idea of the nature of human evolution as cyclical (or 'rise and fall'), rather than linearly progressive. The language, and indeed style, of the novelettes vary widely from one another, according the time period in which each is set, and its purported author. This is a remarkable feat of writing.
The first story is set in about 1850, and is a compilation of some pages from the diary (journal) of an American traveler Adam Ewing in the South Pacific. It is a tale of the meeting of the fairly 'advanced' Western civilisation, which is at the beginning of the kind of corporate culture that has now come to represent it, with the backward and 'savage' culture of the local Polynesian population. The westerners treat the Polynesians abominably, enslaving them for profit while all the while pretending to civilise them. But this treatment only repeats in a magnified way how one set of Polynesians - the Maoris - enslave another tribe - the Mororis. The story (i.e. the diary) is torn (literally) into two halves, and each half is positioned at either end of the second story.
This second story is a series of letters written in 1931 by a young, talented composer Robert Frobisher, to his friend in Cambridge, UK, called Sixsmith. Frobisher is fleeing his debts, his misdeeds and his family, and runs to Belgium, where he takes up an assistant's job with a well-known musical genius. Whether Frobisher makes a fool of his patron, or vice versa, is never clear, but the letters describe, among other things, Frobisher's composition of a piece he calls 'Cloud Atlas', his affair with his patron's wife, his falling in unrequited love with the patron's daughter, and his discovery of first one half of Ewing's journal, and then the other half. The second story is also divided into two halves, and is again positioned at either end of the next, third, story.
In the third story, the letters Frobisher writes are discovered in two batches by Luisa Rey, a journalist in a fictitious Californian city called Buenas Yerbas that is modeled probably on San Francisco. (According to Wikipedia, Yerbas Buenas is a town in Chile. Also Yerba Buena was the original name of San Francisco). The year is 1975, and Sixsmith is now a nuclear physicist with a nuclear power company and has come across a terrible cover up of potentially catastrophic engineering defects in the new power plant his company is about to inaugurate. He tries to make these defects public, but hired goons of the power company kill him. Luisa Rey has already met him and, after his murder, she herself undergoes terrible ordeals at the hands of the company's 'security' personnel in her quest to publish the expose. This portion is written in the fast thrilling manner of, say, John Grisham. Again the two halves of the story are positioned at either end of the next novelette.
In the fourth story, set in 2003, Timothy Cavendish, a small-time publisher, suddenly makes it rich by publishing the work of a previously unknown author. However he has cheated the author in the matter of royalties, and is visited by the gangster brothers of the author, forcing him to run away. Timothy's brother, who is tried of constantly supporting him and pulling him out of trouble, directs him to a country house which Timothy believes is a resort hotel, but is fact a mental institution for the 'undead'. Timothy is trapped, until with a great deal of effort he breaks out, or tries to. During all these happenings he receives, in two parts, a manuscript written by Hilary V. Hush, comprising the story of Luisa Rey, i.e. the third story. Timothy's ordeal is made into a movie, that is watched in two parts, by Sonmi-451 at either end of the next story.
The fifth story is in pure sci-fi style, written as a recorded narration (an 'orison' - defined as a 'fervent petition to a deity', i.e. a prayer) of a clone sometime in the future. At this time the world is completely corporatized, with AirCorp selling the air people breathe and WaterCorp the water people drink, and so on. Sonmi-451 is clone no. 451 of the original Sonmi, who is a drastically genetically modified human, engineered to work 18 hours a day at a McDonald's-like fast food outlet called Papa Song's (like Papa John's?), without tiring, without any food except a kind of Soylent Green, reconstituted from clones that have reached the end of their usefulness and die (or are killed). It is a description of a Ayn Randian society taken to extremes, and incorporating scientific advances unknown in Rand's time. Sonmi-451 attains an intelligence beyond what is prescribed for clones, and is therefore set up to take part in an elaborate charade in which she is first recruited as a fighter in what she believes is a freedom struggle, and then arrested and sent to her death, to be recycled as food. All this is to provide some excitement to the general public as well as emphasize the requirement for control and security, reasons familiar already in today's world. As she waits, she watches the second part of the fourth story. The story is set in a futuristic Korea. Some nice touches in this part include calling all cars fords, TVs or similar gadgets sonys, and so on. Sonmi-451's story is itself set on either side of the next story.
1st story 1st half
2nd story 1st half
3rd story 1st half
4th story 1st half
5th story 1st half
6th story
5th story 2nd half
4th story 2nd half
3rd story 2nd half
2nd story 2nd half
1st story 2nd half
This arrangement gives drama and suspense to the entire novel and also serves to illustrate the author's idea of the nature of human evolution as cyclical (or 'rise and fall'), rather than linearly progressive. The language, and indeed style, of the novelettes vary widely from one another, according the time period in which each is set, and its purported author. This is a remarkable feat of writing.
The first story is set in about 1850, and is a compilation of some pages from the diary (journal) of an American traveler Adam Ewing in the South Pacific. It is a tale of the meeting of the fairly 'advanced' Western civilisation, which is at the beginning of the kind of corporate culture that has now come to represent it, with the backward and 'savage' culture of the local Polynesian population. The westerners treat the Polynesians abominably, enslaving them for profit while all the while pretending to civilise them. But this treatment only repeats in a magnified way how one set of Polynesians - the Maoris - enslave another tribe - the Mororis. The story (i.e. the diary) is torn (literally) into two halves, and each half is positioned at either end of the second story.
This second story is a series of letters written in 1931 by a young, talented composer Robert Frobisher, to his friend in Cambridge, UK, called Sixsmith. Frobisher is fleeing his debts, his misdeeds and his family, and runs to Belgium, where he takes up an assistant's job with a well-known musical genius. Whether Frobisher makes a fool of his patron, or vice versa, is never clear, but the letters describe, among other things, Frobisher's composition of a piece he calls 'Cloud Atlas', his affair with his patron's wife, his falling in unrequited love with the patron's daughter, and his discovery of first one half of Ewing's journal, and then the other half. The second story is also divided into two halves, and is again positioned at either end of the next, third, story.
In the third story, the letters Frobisher writes are discovered in two batches by Luisa Rey, a journalist in a fictitious Californian city called Buenas Yerbas that is modeled probably on San Francisco. (According to Wikipedia, Yerbas Buenas is a town in Chile. Also Yerba Buena was the original name of San Francisco). The year is 1975, and Sixsmith is now a nuclear physicist with a nuclear power company and has come across a terrible cover up of potentially catastrophic engineering defects in the new power plant his company is about to inaugurate. He tries to make these defects public, but hired goons of the power company kill him. Luisa Rey has already met him and, after his murder, she herself undergoes terrible ordeals at the hands of the company's 'security' personnel in her quest to publish the expose. This portion is written in the fast thrilling manner of, say, John Grisham. Again the two halves of the story are positioned at either end of the next novelette.
In the fourth story, set in 2003, Timothy Cavendish, a small-time publisher, suddenly makes it rich by publishing the work of a previously unknown author. However he has cheated the author in the matter of royalties, and is visited by the gangster brothers of the author, forcing him to run away. Timothy's brother, who is tried of constantly supporting him and pulling him out of trouble, directs him to a country house which Timothy believes is a resort hotel, but is fact a mental institution for the 'undead'. Timothy is trapped, until with a great deal of effort he breaks out, or tries to. During all these happenings he receives, in two parts, a manuscript written by Hilary V. Hush, comprising the story of Luisa Rey, i.e. the third story. Timothy's ordeal is made into a movie, that is watched in two parts, by Sonmi-451 at either end of the next story.
The fifth story is in pure sci-fi style, written as a recorded narration (an 'orison' - defined as a 'fervent petition to a deity', i.e. a prayer) of a clone sometime in the future. At this time the world is completely corporatized, with AirCorp selling the air people breathe and WaterCorp the water people drink, and so on. Sonmi-451 is clone no. 451 of the original Sonmi, who is a drastically genetically modified human, engineered to work 18 hours a day at a McDonald's-like fast food outlet called Papa Song's (like Papa John's?), without tiring, without any food except a kind of Soylent Green, reconstituted from clones that have reached the end of their usefulness and die (or are killed). It is a description of a Ayn Randian society taken to extremes, and incorporating scientific advances unknown in Rand's time. Sonmi-451 attains an intelligence beyond what is prescribed for clones, and is therefore set up to take part in an elaborate charade in which she is first recruited as a fighter in what she believes is a freedom struggle, and then arrested and sent to her death, to be recycled as food. All this is to provide some excitement to the general public as well as emphasize the requirement for control and security, reasons familiar already in today's world. As she waits, she watches the second part of the fourth story. The story is set in a futuristic Korea. Some nice touches in this part include calling all cars fords, TVs or similar gadgets sonys, and so on. Sonmi-451's story is itself set on either side of the next story.
The final story, at the apex, is set hundreds of years after the above 'corporate' time, after what Mitchell calls 'the fall', which is obviously some kind of catastrophe, either nuclear or climate or something similar. The people in Hawaii, where this story is set, and perhaps in most of the rest of the world (though this is not explicitly mentioned), have reverted to a primitive life style, where the stronger tribes hunt down and enslave the weaker, gentler ones. One such gentler tribe is visited by a student from a different place - probably the mainland America, which still retains some of the advanced technology, though the people who could use that technology are all dying out, and only a few hundreds survive. The student brings along with her a recording of Sonmi-451's orison from the previous story which is watched by some of the members of the tribe.
Apart from being set as a narration, in six stories, of a kind of rise and fall of human society, there are some common elements that connect the six stories in the book. First, there is one leading character in each who, it is suggested, is the same soul reincarnated six times. A kind of birthmark in the shape of a comet that occasionally throbs at times of excitement is an indication of this, though there are also other indications. There is also Hawaii, which is where the characters of both the outermost story (no. 1 in the list above) and the innermost story (no. 6) end up. Also both California (no. 3) and Korea (no. 5) are on the Pacific rim. The other two stories are in England and Belgium.
If I were to quote one sentence from the book to serve as a leitmotif it would be the following: '..human hunger birthed the Civ'lize (civilisation), but human hunger killed it too.' Another quote, this time an ironical description of corporate philosophy: 'A Soul's value is the dollars therein'
I was induced to buy and read the book because I read in an article in the New Yorker that Lana (Larry before he/she changed gender) and Andy Wachowski, the makers of 'Matrix' have made this book into a movie. Tom Hanks is acting in it. It will be interesting to see how the complexities of the book are translated on to the screen.
No comments:
Post a Comment