ere is a book with many entrances. It is also a book with many exits—each of its six separate parts has at least one ending, and five of them stop twice. But the more you leave the parts of Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's extremely compelling third novel, the more you enter the edifice of the whole. It is like a house of mirrors, one crafted by M.C. Escher, perhaps. It is a Tower of Babel that makes sense in the end. It is hard on the mind: hard to explain, hard to follow, hard to hold. At the same time, it is also utterly clear, and the cradle of its telling births more complexities of emotion than we can easily grasp, like a beehive flinging bees.
We begin in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, 150 years ago, and we end there, but just as Cloud Atlas's six separate tales climb up to the present and into the future before they descend pastwards again, so the book itself reaches its height (and its deepest penetration of the future) on top of a mountain, above the clouds; from this highest pitch of the arch of story, the waters of the world can be seen, all around, and we see the end of the future. For all the splendours and miseries of its depictions of human beings attempting to escape bad lives, Cloud Atlas turns out, in the end, like any great SF novel, to be about the world.
As with any edifice, or for that matter any fix-up that works, Cloud Atlas means more than its parts, but we need to add up the parts first, five of which enfold the sixth. Each of the enfolding five breaks off at a halfway point and resumes afterward; only the central tale is told entire. The effect of the whole, as in a successful fix-up, is of something epic glimpsed through the peepholes of individual lives. Each tale (except the first) augments the effect of its predecessor, each climbs further up the coils of time and world, until at last the top of the mountain is reached in the central, enfolded tale, which is told entire at the top of time, after which point the five enfolding narratives finish themselves off, in reverse order, each completed tale settling us further back in time, until we see the beginning again. But by now we know what is going to happen to the world.
Six paths diverged in a novel novel
Story One. 1850. Adam Ewing, an American lawyer on a mission to find some MacGuffin papers in New Zealand, keeps a journal of his experiences in the South Seas aboard a ship called the Prophetess (which could be another name for the novel). His language has something of the autodidactic mesmerizing yawpishness of Herman Melville, whose Typee (1846) is mentioned at least once, though the governing model for Mitchell's loving parody is almost certainly Mardi and a Voyage Thither (1849). The sureties of Ewing's moderately rational Christian faith shatter under the horror and hypocrisy and genocidal greed to which he is exposed, in sequences that (perhaps just a little predictably) evoke Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and "The Secret Sharer" (1910). He is a virtual prisoner on the ship, whose captain and crew pass through his pages like monsters of the sleep of Reason, as do the Christian missionaries who have desecrated the lives and habitat of the natives whose islands the Prophetess visits; and a fellow passenger is attempting to poison him for his (imagined) riches. In the end, he gains a personal escape from the nightmare; but before he gets away his thoughts—which end Cloud Atlas, just as they began it—coalesce in one image. He has been talking with a fellow sufferer, Mr. Wagstaff. They both now understand that civilization has brought slavery and death to the Pacific. Wagstaff tells him a parable. "'There exists a tribe of ants', he says,
"Called the slave-maker. These insects raid the colonies of common ants, steal eggs back to their own nests, & after they hatch, why, the stolen slaves become workers of the greater empire, & never even dream they were once stolen. Now if you ask me, Lord Jehovah crafted these ants as a model, Mr Ewing." Mr Wagstaff's gaze was gravid with the ancient future. "For them with eyes to see it."
Story Two. 1931. In his acknowledgements, Mitchell says that the story of Robert Frobisher in Belgium "owes debts of inspiration to Delius: As I Knew Him [1936] by Eric Fenby." Fenby had served as amanuensis to Delius in his final years, when his syphilis had blinded him, and he had to convey his musical ideas aloud to the younger man, himself a minor composer. Mitchell's Frobisher is a louche, disinherited, dishonest, extremely clever, astonishingly funny young sh-t. His experiences with the blind composer Vyvyan Ayrs are conveyed in a series of letters sent to his ex-lover, Rufus Sixsmith; their style evokes Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell when young, or Simon Raven whenever. Trapped in Ayrs's house through his own doings, writhing on his own petard, he is, all the same, able to express some sense of the multifariousness of the world he has been opened to through the composition of a piece he calls the "Cloud Atlas Sextet." In one of his last letters, he describes it to Sixsmith as
a "sextet for overlapping soloists": piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its 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?
While rifling through Ayrs' antiquarian books, Frobisher also comes across the journal of Adam Ewing, which he reads, which he reincarnates, before committing suicide.
Story Three. 1975. California. The imaginary coastal city of Buenas Yerbas. This part of Cloud Atlas takes the shape of a contemporary techno-thriller, told in a fast-forward present tense, and entitled Half-Lives—the First Luisa Rey Mystery. Nobel Prize-winning scientist Rufus Sixsmith—whose deepest personal emotions continue to be focused on a packet of letters from his long-dead lover, Robert Frobisher—is in a "lethal mess." He has been hired by Seaboard Power, a local corporation, to rubber-stamp a highly dangerous new nuclear power plant, but has attempted to publicize his highly negative findings. He knows this will cost his life. Local reporter Luisa Rey is caught in a stuck elevator with him, and they bond. After his inevitable death, she attempts to get hold of Sixsmith's devastating report on Seaboard. She is chased, imprisoned, manipulated. Her adventures are many. Deaths are frequent. In the end, she defeats Seaboard.
En route to this exit point, she seems to inhabit what one might call a cloud atlas of conjoined lives: She shares a birthmark with earlier protagonists; place names echo one another; the theme of the Escape from Prison drives each tale. More explicitly, Luisa herself breathes in the letters of Frobisher, visits a renovated schooner called the Prophetess. At times it is almost as though she were a reincarnation of the earlier escapees, earlier tasters of the human condition, though the name-play on Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), in which a number of separate stories magically coalesce, may slightly overload Luisa's role here; and by now we can guess that she prefigures later players. Increasingly, Cloud Atlas evokes some of the tone of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, especially those sequences in the Bardo, where souls awaiting reincarnation almost remember their previous selves. There is a similar hauntedness to both books, a similar sense that somewhere within the pages of each an epic is being dreamed expressive of the nature of the world and time, but an epic humans can only catch glimpses of. In both novels, the most profound moments of perception are when characters seem suddenly able, for an instant, to see outside their story; to see Story tell them; to see the book entire. At the end of Story Three, Sixsmith's niece gives Luisa a packet of letters. She inhales the air from the opened packet. "Are molecules of ... Robert Frobisher," she asks herself, "dormant in this paper for forty-four years, swirling in my lungs, now, in my blood?" As readers of the fantastic, we are likely to feel that there is little imaginative point in saying no to this question.
An Atlas worth shrugging over
Story Four. Approximately 2004. Egregious vanity press publisher Timothy Cavendish writes down the story of his recent adventures, which he calls The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. He is fat, foul, borborygmic, pathetic, loud and venal, like one of Anthony Burgess' less attractive avatars, Enderby perhaps. Attempting to escape the criminals he owes money to, he leaves his beloved London for the north, where he is trapped in a old folks' home, where he has a stroke. His immurement seems total in this Slapstick Inferno; but, very Britishly, in the end, a comic escape is made, a slush-pile novel turns out to be the ultimately very successful Half-Life—the First Luisa Rey Mystery, and Timothy's own blowsy epic will be made into a film for the future to view.
Story Five. Approximately 2300. South Korea. In an extremely long interview, given to an increasingly appalled archivist, condemned fabricant clone Sonmi-451 tells of her early life as a slave waitress a chain fast-food restaurant under Seoul. Her voice and presence are recorded—embodied—in a "silver egg-shaped device ... called an orison." This orison may very closely resemble the glowing ball which records and embodies the story of Rush That Speaks in John Crowley's great Engine Summer (1979), but it must be said that Mitchell's vision of the world of the 24th century—which he seems to have spatchcocked out of Huxley, Orwell and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982)—falls seriously short of the subtleties of vision Crowley expressed a quarter of a century ago. Fortunately, as we are increasingly exposed to Sonmi-451's quite astonishing depth of feeling, and increasingly gain a sense that Mitchell has created a character smarter than we are, the archaic bits begin to obtrude less frequently. Sonmi is allowed to escape from the fast-food hell. As she tells of that escape, and of what she finds in the world outside, which increasingly resembles the kind of world 21st-century SF writers tend to envision, "An Orison of Sonmi-451" gains an extraordinary eloquence. Before our eyes, Sonmi begins to speak to us, like an oracle. Amusingly, she is deeply attracted to the Siddhartha-like figure of Timothy Cavendish, whose filmed story has become a light shone upon her path, a moment of happiness: for he gained his freedom. But the joke is just another knife to expose the flesh, for the only escape for Sonmi-451 is through her further and ultimate thoughts, which we are privileged to sense; after the interview is finished, she will be terminated.
Story Six. Centuries further on. We are at the apex of Cloud Atlas. We have returned to Chatham Island, east of New Zealand, where Adam Ewing's journal had begun. We are listening to an oral narrative. Zachry is telling his son of his youthful experiences. The language he uses is superficially similar to that invented by Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker (1980), but does not attempt to convey any genuine syntactical transforms. It is in fact, and to considerable effect, an eye dialect, like the perfectly "lucid" English Iain M. Banks coats with misspellings in Feersum Endjinn (1994), a book that, incidentally, itself evokes Engine Summer. Zachry is pacific, horny, sweet-tongued, lovable; and it is only slowly that we realize that the tale he is telling us is going to end tragically, like the world. A visitor from a still-"civilized" relic redoubt visits the island. She carries with her the orison of Sonmi-453, which has become a central text or telling, and which becomes Zachry's. He agrees to take her to the top of the mountain, where they see the circumambient shape of things to come. She tells him the very simple secret of the tragedy of the human species: Yay, she says,
Old'Uns' Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an' made miracle ord'nary, but it din't master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more.
More what? I asked. Old'uns'd got ev'rythin'.
No matter, no matter, she tells him. Their Smart did not stop them. They had to have more.
In the end, exiled from his home, Zachry watches clouds above the severing waters. To him, they are an atlas of souls. He makes landfall, and a new life. His son, to whom he has oftentimes told his story, doubts some details, but not Sonmi:
Like Pa yarned, if you warm the egg in your hands a beautsome ghost-girl appears in the air an' speaks in an' Ol'un tongue what no'un alive und'stands nor never will, nay. ... but some dusks my kin'n'bros'll wake up the ghost-girl jus' to watch her hov'ring'n'shimm'rin'. She's beautsome and she 'mazes the litt'luns an' her murmin's babbybye our babbits.
So the end of Cloud Atlas is its middle, the orison of all we have learned turns to murmin in thin air, turns to Babel. The edifice of tales, which we have summarized already, brings us back into a world we now know better, and to the waters of the Pacific, which Adam Ewing has escaped for a while, for our sakes. By now the novel has become, in the mind's eye, not so much a structure as a song. (Songs are sung and re-sung throughout the text.) Cloud Atlas, which may be creaky in some of its joints, looks in the end straight ahead, all the same, at the century within which it was written. In the end, it has a close to perfect pitch for the song it tells. It is a true SF novel.
