Book: Cloud Atlas
Jun. 8th, 2005 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: David Mitchell
Details: (c) 2004 David Mitchell; Pub 2004 Hodder & Stoughton; ISBN 0-340-82278-3
Verdict: Cloud Atlas is pretty mediocre.
Reasons for reading it: It's a very talked about book at the moment.
How it came into my hands: Congratulation present from the lab on getting my PhD! I believe Boss S chose it. I'm really touched with the fact that they decided to give me books rather than the standard leaving gifts, so thoughtful and I really like being the lab bookworm.
The conceit of Cloud Atlas is that it has what some Biblical scholars of my acquaintance like to call a concentric or chiastic structure, with the first and last sections, the second and penultimate sections and so on matching, and the climax in the middle. To tell the truth, this just didn't work for me. It seems like a series of writing samples, which would be something I might want to read from a really loved author, but Mitchell just isn't that wonderful. IMO it would have worked better as simply a set of short stories; the clever-clever chiasma thing didn't do anything for me. The way it's broken up, stopping at a cliffhanger and jumping forward (first half) or back (second half) in time to an essentially unrelated story made me lose interest. The first half of the book felt like reading six opening chapters, not even complete enough to count as short stories, and every single one of the completions disappointed me.
There are hints of connections between the stories, but they are either silly (person in story 2 finds a manusrcript of story 1, person in story 3 reads the letters of story 2 etc) or not sufficiently developed. The concept of the various protagonists being reincarnations of eachother is tantalizing, but never filled in enough to hold the book together. The whole thing just feels gimmicky. The only other connecting theme is a heavy-handed moral message about how human greed leads to destruction and eventually self-destruction. While this is true, I feel desperately preached at, (not just by the narrative; most of the stories contain at least one long speech in a character's voice to this effect) and I don't need silly little fictions to illustrate the point.
As to the individual stories, well, their main redeeming feature is that Mitchell does a superb job of creating character. There are some deeply unpleasant people who still managed to catch my sympathy, and some very well-done flawed heroes. I also enjoyed the somewhat cynical humour, though that rather dries up in the second half and the narrative gets all earnest and over-dramatic. The actual stories are kind of slight and there are too many miraculous escapes from direly impossible situations, but not quite enough for it to be a true running theme to the book. I wouldn't mind any of them being expanded into a full-length novel, but Cloud Atlas leans too heavily on 'look at me, I'm really clever, I can write in lots of different styles'.
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, the story with a contemporary setting, is probably the most successful. Its description of how badly society treats the old is actually chilling, and the storyline mostly stays on the right side of dramatic, only the final section spilling over into melodrama. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing and Letters from Zedelghem are both slightly weird and fall too much into showing off the author's ability to pastiche period novels. Luisa Rey is quite dramatic but takes itself far too seriously. The two pieces set in the future read like very old-fashioned SF, An Orison of Sonmi being basically a re-working of Brave New World, though with nothing like the power of Huxley's understated writing, and Sloosha's crossing an absolutely bog-standard aftermath-of-nuclear-disaster story which ends up being merely depressing.
I see the target audience of Cloud Atlas as being intellectually lazy Guardian readers, basically. If you want to be told what to think it doesn't do a bad job, in a kind of journalistic way. And I can imagine someone who had never read SF enjoying the SF wrapped up in mainstream packaging, with lots of what a habitual SF reader takes for granted being painstakingly explained. Such a person might think Cloud Atlas was highly original, because the kind of books that explore the social consequences of imagined future technologies never normally appear in the parts of book shops that they frequent.
In short, not bad, but definitely doesn't live up to the hype.
Today is the 45th day, making 6 complete weeks and 3 days of the Omer.
Details: (c) 2004 David Mitchell; Pub 2004 Hodder & Stoughton; ISBN 0-340-82278-3
Verdict: Cloud Atlas is pretty mediocre.
Reasons for reading it: It's a very talked about book at the moment.
How it came into my hands: Congratulation present from the lab on getting my PhD! I believe Boss S chose it. I'm really touched with the fact that they decided to give me books rather than the standard leaving gifts, so thoughtful and I really like being the lab bookworm.
The conceit of Cloud Atlas is that it has what some Biblical scholars of my acquaintance like to call a concentric or chiastic structure, with the first and last sections, the second and penultimate sections and so on matching, and the climax in the middle. To tell the truth, this just didn't work for me. It seems like a series of writing samples, which would be something I might want to read from a really loved author, but Mitchell just isn't that wonderful. IMO it would have worked better as simply a set of short stories; the clever-clever chiasma thing didn't do anything for me. The way it's broken up, stopping at a cliffhanger and jumping forward (first half) or back (second half) in time to an essentially unrelated story made me lose interest. The first half of the book felt like reading six opening chapters, not even complete enough to count as short stories, and every single one of the completions disappointed me.
There are hints of connections between the stories, but they are either silly (person in story 2 finds a manusrcript of story 1, person in story 3 reads the letters of story 2 etc) or not sufficiently developed. The concept of the various protagonists being reincarnations of eachother is tantalizing, but never filled in enough to hold the book together. The whole thing just feels gimmicky. The only other connecting theme is a heavy-handed moral message about how human greed leads to destruction and eventually self-destruction. While this is true, I feel desperately preached at, (not just by the narrative; most of the stories contain at least one long speech in a character's voice to this effect) and I don't need silly little fictions to illustrate the point.
As to the individual stories, well, their main redeeming feature is that Mitchell does a superb job of creating character. There are some deeply unpleasant people who still managed to catch my sympathy, and some very well-done flawed heroes. I also enjoyed the somewhat cynical humour, though that rather dries up in the second half and the narrative gets all earnest and over-dramatic. The actual stories are kind of slight and there are too many miraculous escapes from direly impossible situations, but not quite enough for it to be a true running theme to the book. I wouldn't mind any of them being expanded into a full-length novel, but Cloud Atlas leans too heavily on 'look at me, I'm really clever, I can write in lots of different styles'.
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, the story with a contemporary setting, is probably the most successful. Its description of how badly society treats the old is actually chilling, and the storyline mostly stays on the right side of dramatic, only the final section spilling over into melodrama. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing and Letters from Zedelghem are both slightly weird and fall too much into showing off the author's ability to pastiche period novels. Luisa Rey is quite dramatic but takes itself far too seriously. The two pieces set in the future read like very old-fashioned SF, An Orison of Sonmi being basically a re-working of Brave New World, though with nothing like the power of Huxley's understated writing, and Sloosha's crossing an absolutely bog-standard aftermath-of-nuclear-disaster story which ends up being merely depressing.
I see the target audience of Cloud Atlas as being intellectually lazy Guardian readers, basically. If you want to be told what to think it doesn't do a bad job, in a kind of journalistic way. And I can imagine someone who had never read SF enjoying the SF wrapped up in mainstream packaging, with lots of what a habitual SF reader takes for granted being painstakingly explained. Such a person might think Cloud Atlas was highly original, because the kind of books that explore the social consequences of imagined future technologies never normally appear in the parts of book shops that they frequent.
In short, not bad, but definitely doesn't live up to the hype.
Today is the 45th day, making 6 complete weeks and 3 days of the Omer.
Addendum 8.6.05:coalescent has a very nice riposte to this review, which I highly recommend if you're interested in talking about the book: it's about how different types of fiction deal with the fact that human nature leads to destruction.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-08 07:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 08:37 am (UTC)*grin* This is definitely a different way for me to be useful. I have seen lots of positive reviews of it too, and positive in a way that made it seem like the kind of book I'd want to read. Genre bending, good characterization, ideas as well as story are all yay things for me. But actually it's a book with several good elements that don't quite add up to a good whole.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 05:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 06:59 pm (UTC)That's overly harsh for the Mitchell, but it is in that sort of direction; even if
Very much agreed, especially when the resulting product is trumpeted as being all original.
Huge swathes of Cloud Atlas have a very 60s feel to them, even (perhaps especially) the bits that aren't set in the 60s. The doom-mongering about how humanity is going to destroy itself, and the racism is bad moralizing put the mentality much later than the 20s but still not modern. Also, to be fair, Brave New World was way, way ahead of its time in lots of ways.
I also wonder how many people have read "classic" SF (I mean, really restricted to pre-war) and not anything more recent than that. A lot of the stereotypical complaints about genre are more applicable to HG Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne than even Asimov and Clarke.
I keep mentioning these two, but Babel Tower and The Ground Beneath her feet seem to me to fall into that category. Hesse and Iris Murdoch are doing something like that, but very subtle. I'll keep thinking about this one because I think the stuff does exist.
That I think is too hard. I simply can't imagine doing anything with Triton in a mainstream-y way, nor can I think of anything I've read in any genre that's like it. The book of Ebenezer le Page and some of Jane Gardam and Rose Macaulay have vague points of connection, but the similarity probably only exists in that they make my skin prickle in similar ways, it's not something I could actually justify.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 07:25 pm (UTC)Er, how? It's not something I noticed (or at least, remember noticing) in either of those.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 08:31 pm (UTC)That's overly harsh for the Mitchell, but it is in that sort of direction; even if coalescent is right and it's deliberate pastiche it's just not done as well as the originals.
I'm entirely happy to grant that it might be overly harsh on this particular book, but it is a thing to which I am particularly sensitive so Cloud Atlas having even some tendencies in that direction os more of a negative for me than it might be for many people.
laborious wheel-reinventing annoys me,
Very much agreed, especially when the resulting product is trumpeted as being all original
And sometimes the tone of said trumpeting is such as to remind me of the exchange in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the head of the sub-commitee developing the wheel gets all snotty in the fdirection "OK, if you're so clever why don't you tell us what colour it should be ?"
Huge swathes of Cloud Atlas have a very 60s feel to them, even (perhaps especially) the bits that aren't set in the 60s. The doom-mongering about how humanity is going to destroy itself, and the racism is bad moralizing put the mentality much later than the 20s but still not modern.
*nod* and SF has done that, sometimes very well, to my mind as much as it needed to be done then.
A lot of the stereotypical complaints about genre are more applicable to HG Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne than even Asimov and Clarke.
Agreed entirely. [ With the occasional leavening in recent years of mainstream authors who've also seen Blade Runner. ]
Show me a mainstream novel that's reacting to the best of SF.
I keep mentioning these two, but Babel Tower and The Ground Beneath her feet seem to me to fall into that category.
Babel Tower is on my long list. I liked Possession a lot and do intend to get around to it soon.
I'll keep thinking about this one because I think the stuff does exist.
Come to think of it, I had an example in mind but it has melted from my brain like dew.
Show me one informed by Triton rather than Flash Gordon.
That I think is too hard. I simply can't imagine doing anything with Triton in a mainstream-y way, nor can I think of anything I've read in any genre that's like it.
OK, I'll readily admit Triton's a bloody high bar to set; but if mainstream authors have axes to grind or interest to serve by treating SF poorly or in a shallow fashion, I think that's the standard their work deserves to be compared to.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 09:35 pm (UTC)For reference, David Mitchell doesn't fall into this camp. He was a member of the BSFA in the 80s/90s, and reviewed for Vector on a not-infrequent basis.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-10 08:12 pm (UTC)