Monday 8 October 2012

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell


Not just one book; six mini masterpieces in one linked together through centuries by birthmarks, diaries and the burning human desire for justice and freedom.

It's a nineteenth century travel journal from remote Chatham Island, which is mentioned in a young English musician’s letters from 1920s Belgium, whose recipient becomes a character in a 1970s American nuclear thriller, which is read in the present-time memoirs of a small-time London publisher who finds himself imprisoned in a One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest care home.

Then there is the Blade Runner-style interview with a human clone in a dystopian future Korea of man-made fast-food restaurant slaves, 1984 thought police and Brave New World production lines. The language is Anthony Burgess; the clone namechecks Orwell and Huxley. All cars are called "fords" - another reference to Huxley's hero? - the publisher's adventure turns up in a well-loved old movie, or "disney".

Next up, a post-dystopian dystopia in which an advanced, overseas visitor turns up to map an agricultural island scarred with architectural and Buddhist relics of on old world. It's like Planet of the Apes without the apes written by goatherd Zachry in the style of Huckleberry Finn. A trick that rarely fails: go into the future to shine a light on the madness of the present.

The male musician, the thriller's heroine, the publisher, the clone and Zachry all have a comet-shaped birthmark between their shoulder blades. Are they reincarnations of the same soul travelling through time and space? Soul regeneration is a core belief of Zachry's people, who talk of a prophet called Malthus: "Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud."

But the publisher rubbishes the idea while subbing the thriller: "Far too hippie-druggy new age."

The journal is formal Victorian prose with a debt to Treasure Island; the letters are risqué, farcical and bawdy in the style of Wodehouse or Jerome K Jerome; the thriller reads like Raymond Chandler and feels like Chinatown; the memoirs - my favourite part - combine the eloquence of Evelyn Waugh and the black comedy of Kingsley Amis.

There's also a salient quote from the stroke-stricken publisher: "Come now, what's a reviewer?" I reasoned. "One who reads quickly, arrogantly, but never wisely..."

The structure takes us through the seven ages then back through them all in reverse order. The horrors of the publisher's recovery from a stroke and his efforts to escape from the care home make even the reader's rush-hour commute to work on the tube feel like a priceless freedom: "Freedom! is the fatuous cry of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is."

The publisher's recollection of Gibbons' assessment of history is a useful summary of Mitchell's brilliant book: "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."

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