Cumulative Nimbleness, 22 Jun 2004

By	John Self "www.theasylum.wordpress.com" (Belfast, NI) - See all my reviews

And so it is. As you begin to read it, first your opinion rises to meet your expectations, and then continues from there. What Mitchell has done is return to the form of his first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), with a linked set of stories, but with a twist this time. The narrative is less a Russian doll than an onionskin: we get one story which is interrupted by another, and that by another, and so on as we drill through the flesh of the book. At the centre is a whole story, then we return to resume the story it interrupted, then the story *it* interrupted, and so on until the book ends with the conclusion of the story which began it.

And also! As well as having the earlier stories enclosing the later ones, within the structure of the book, Mitchell also has - fictionally and chronologically - the later stories enclosing the earlier ones. By this I mean within each story, the protagonist is aware of the story which has just been interrupted. So we have first, the journal of a Pacific explorer in 1850; then the letters home of a bankrupt young composer who is blagging his way through 1930s Europe (and who is reading the Victorian explorer's journal in its published form); then a cinematic thriller in 1970s California, a nuclear conspiracy with a hairpin or switchback on every page (in which the female lead has been reading the letters of the composer in Europe); a vanity publisher in contemporary England who is being chased by the gangland associates of a client (and who is reading the nuclear thriller as a manuscript submitted to him); then to the 22nd century where we get the death-row testimony of a fabricant in a corporate dystopia (who watches a film based on the vanity publisher's story); and finally, the central section, a far-future narrative in a Riddley-Walker-style post-civilisation age, told in pidgin English, whose narrator finds the holographic testimony from the executed fabricant, who in his world has become a prophet.

Phew. Okay. So there is much to admire here, not only in Mitchell's vast imagination - any lesser writer would have jealously hoarded these ideas to make up six novels and not splurged them all on one; clearly he has no fear of the ideas drying up, but then Iain Banks (of whose generously imaginative early work I was reminded) probably thought that too - but also in his execution of the stories. Each one is perfectly detailed and flawlessly ventriloquised. He successfully completes all of them (which was his stated intention, to reflect the frustration he felt on reading Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, where the many sub-stories all die hanging in the air). The stories have a unifying theme too, of subjugation and rebellion, deepening their superficial appeal, and also of course, we benefit from the dramatic irony of knowing the future for the human race that each character has such great hopes for in their own individual times.

I could end it there and leave you happy in the knowledge that Cloud Atlas was one of the greatest novels of our time. But that would be misleading, because much as I hate to carp on such a monumental achievement - I feel like a vandal scratching at Uluru with a pen-knife - the book is firmly flawed. As the stories break into one another, the sole connection - that each narrator is reading the story in the previous chapter - starts to seem a bit thin and gimmicky. There are attempts to bring deeper connections - two of the characters recur in successive stories, which is a good start - but they fall flat when all Mitchell manages otherwise is to have the protagonists share the same birthmark, to suggest, glibly, that they are related or reincarnated. And I thought Mitchell took a risk in starting and ending the novel (with the explorer story) and centring it (with the post-apocalyptic society: "a young Pacific Islander witnesses the nightfall of science and civilisation" - wow! Sounds fantastic, but isn't) with his least interesting and readable narratives.

I also had grave doubts about the thriller story - not that it is not very well done and highly entertaining. The problem is that, as noted before, the thriller is (it turns out) a manuscript which has been submitted to the vanity publisher: a pure fiction within the fiction of the novel. But this throws the preceding chapters - which are all, presumably, supposed to be "real" within the fiction of the novel - into chaos. If the character in the fictional thriller is reading the letters from the composer, does that make him just a subsidiary character within the thriller? And indeed the explorer whose journals he is reading? Does this even make sense? At least David Mitchell can be satisfied that, if you want to understand what on earth I am talking about when I make these criticisms, you will have to buy the book and read it to find out.

So despite its surface attractions and achievements - and they are many, and many people will devour the book joyfully and without complaint, and good luck to them - I am left with the feeling that, despite Mitchell's cumulative nimbleness, Cloud Atlas is more a trick than a book, to be returned to in parts (the composer's letters and the vanity publisher's "ghastly ordeal" were my favourite parts, both tragicomic and superb first person narratives), but not in whole, not to be lived in and loved over and over until either it falls apart or I do - which is what we want from all our books, after all.

 Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)