Cloud Atlas (review)

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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 do not let the blurbs put you off. These are not hype so much as a 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 cliffhanging 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 many. In Cloud Atlas he writes with the hardboiled flair of an investigative journalist, in the persona of 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 this 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 that 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 and 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 1930s Belgium have to do with the last of the Morioris—to say nothing of a Korean slave clone working for a futuristic McDonalds? 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...