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.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 12:32 pm (UTC)This would still be the case if there were 6 novellas in chronological order, though. Cliffhangers annoy me as a fairly general thing, admittedly.
Some of it is, I agree, but there's something about it that just drew me in emotionally, and I don't normally even like farce.
I think this is probably the best written of the stories, from a technical point of view. I just found Frobisher too unsympathetic, and that threw me out of the story. Cavendish is quite clearly a bastard, but he's a bastard who happens to be in a really horrible situation, whereas Frobisher's problems seem to be much more of his own making.
That does actually make sense, as a reading. I really don't read a lot of airport detective novels, so that's one where I likely missed the reference. I found it too pantomime good versus evil, where the good happen to be young and female and cute and the evil are fat and capitalistic and corporate. Also, the implausibly happy ending when so many of the stories end either badly or tragically, and the context of all the terribly earnest injunctions throughout the book to value morality and other people over material gain made it look serious to me.
Which kind of leaves the question of why I would want to read second-rate pastiches of these two novels. I mean, if a book has something else going for it then clever allusions can be an additional feature, but if a book is only pastiche, what's the point of it? I did wonder about Riddley Walker actually, but then I decided that it's not distinctive enough from a whole heap of other post-apocalyptic stuff.
Defoe, was my guess. The opening paragraph is pretty much a direct parody of the famous scene in Robinson Crusoe, and the rest sounds Defoe-ish too, though it's been years since I last read Defoe so I can't be sure.
I'm not entirely sure what metafictional means, to be honest. The main thing I can think of that comes to mind is Natalie Sarraute's Les fruits d'or which is a deeply pretentious thing from the 70s, being a novel about the eponymous novel. And yes, the way Cloud Atlas playing with levels of reality is quite clever, but it's just not clever enough IMO to carry the book.
I like that, that's a really interesting take on it, thank you.
I didn't find it so, actually. It creates sympathetic characters, and there's a lot of humour and also a lot of (melo)drama, so if anything it's intensely emotive, rather than cold. At the same time I think it definitely comes under the heading of 'too clever for its own good'. I don't really care that it has an unusual structure or that Mitchell is good at imitating lots of different styles, if the book isn't enjoyable as well.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 12:55 pm (UTC)Unfortunately, the reason you couldn't find the relevant post is that there isn't one, really. :) I never posted anything to LJ about it, really; I wrote a review for Vector, but it didn't say much more than I said above.
This would still be the case if there were 6 novellas in chronological order, though. Cliffhangers annoy me as a fairly general thing, admittedly.
Fair enough. To be honest, I'm a bit of a sucker for the clever-clever aspects of it all. And I read the Guardian fairly often. I hope I'm not too intellectually lazy, though. ;-)
I think ['Letters from Zedelgehm'] is probably the best written of the stories, from a technical point of view.
Agreed.
Cavendish is quite clearly a bastard, but he's a bastard who happens to be in a really horrible situation, whereas Frobisher's problems seem to be much more of his own making.
Again, this seems about right. What it says about me that I sympathise with a screw-up, I'm not sure.
I found [The Luisa Ray mystery] too pantomime good versus evil, where the good happen to be young and female and cute and the evil are fat and capitalistic and corporate.
Absolutely, it was. And all the plotting is much larger than life, too (to a greater extent than the other stories, even). I seem to recall there's a bit where someone has an epiphany and then gets blown up, isn't there?
Which kind of leaves the question of why I would want to read second-rate pastiches of these two novels. I mean, if a book has something else going for it then clever allusions can be an additional feature, but if a book is only pastiche, what's the point of it?
I think the juxtaposition of all the different pastiches is meant to be the extra thing going for it. Because it inspires exactly the sort of thing you talk about with reference to the end of the Luisa Rey story versus all the other stories--the implausibility of the happy ending. If the Luisa Rey story was on its own, you wouldn't get that contrast.
I did wonder about Riddley Walker actually, but then I decided that it's not distinctive enough from a whole heap of other post-apocalyptic stuff.
Well, it's the one that famously has the degenerate language. I can't think of any other post-apocalyptic books that do that, although they may be out there.
I'm not entirely sure what metafictional means, to be honest.
I don't know if there is a precise definition, or if everyone uses it to mean something slightly different. I mean stories that in some way address the fact that they are stories; I don't know if that's what Les Fruits D'or does or not. Jeff Vandermeer's collection City of Saints and Madmen is the best recent example I can think of.
In the case of Cloud Atlas, I don't think it's a coincidence that the shift between fictional-within-the-novel's-universe and fictional-in-our-universe comes after Luisa Rey. In other words, the three stories set in the past are made up by someone in our present. You could argue that all the shifts are about offering different ways in which the past is remembered, and how those are necessarily incomplete and different from the actual experience of the time.
It creates sympathetic characters, and there's a lot of humour and also a lot of (melo)drama, so if anything it's intensely emotive, rather than cold. At the same time I think it definitely comes under the heading of 'too clever for its own good'.
Interesting--I think for me, the cleverness (much as I enjoy it) is emotionally distancing. It's hard to get involved in characters when you're (more than normally) aware that they're just words on a page.
Great review, though, thanks.