Only one specimen here, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. If you drew the shapes you seemed to inhabit while reading this book, you might come up with something like a matryoshka doll—six long stories, one nested in the next. If you’ve got a geometrical mind, the picture could be a Sierpinski triangle—smaller triangles within larger triangles forever, making this book’s structure a species of fractal. But you might also draw the book as a series of cells . . . or as a long, long line . . . or even, god love it, an arc. A wave so huge it would hurt your neck to lean back and see its peak before the whole thing toppled and crashed.
All right. We’ve got six stories in Cloud Atlas, each told in a different manner, mostly faux-nonfictional—journal, letters, memoir, recorded interview, oral history—together with a thriller. The stories run from the 1850s to a shattered far future, and each story stars someone who’s weak and others who are monstrously powerful. In the first, for instance, a man is slowly poisoned on a Pacific-plying ship by a greedy “doctor”; in the fourth, a man is sneakily sent to a nursing home by his wicked brother; in the fifth, “fabricants” are bred for labor, then butchered for food. I’m using the passive on purpose: we’ve got victims in these tales. Together the stories trace a path through centuries of the worst human hungers, yet with glimmers of humanity. All but one of the six is split into two, the whole told in a pattern like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 4 3 2 1. That is: we read half of each of the first five, all of the sixth, then back down we go for the second halves of the first five. We climb up in time and even space, the central scene of the sixth story and thus the book set in a ruined observatory atop a Hawaiian mountain hundreds of years in the future. At the end of the narrative, we’ve climbed back down to the bottom of the triangle, back where we began, with nineteenth-century Adam Ewing rescued from his poisoner and hoping “humanity may transcend tooth & claw.”
If you tentatively accept the “reality” of the six stories, here’s the sequence: Adam Ewing keeps a shipboard journal, which the composer Robert Frobisher finds in the 1930s and writes about in his letters to Rufus Sixsmith, which are acquired in the 1970s by the investigative journalist Luisa Rey or her alter ego/author Hilary Hush, who writes a bad novel; the literary agent Timothy Cavendish reads this bad novel and mentions it in his memoir, a film version of which Sonmi 451 sees and describes in her death-sentence interview, which is recorded on an “orison” owned by the future scientist Meronym. The longest chronological storyline in Cloud Atlas stretches from the Maoris enslaving and eating Moriori people in the early nineteenth century, all the way to a Valleysman escaping enslavement by Kona hundreds of years later and cheerily telling the tale to his children. The plot, meanwhile—how this storyline is arranged on the page—moves from Adam Ewing’s journal documenting horrors of “civilization” to a shattered future world’s near-extinction of humanity, and then back to the beginning, with Adam devoting himself to bettering humanity. So both the storyline and its plotting move from viciousness to hope for a gentler humankind.
Thematic connections galore run among the six stories, as do links on the line level, so a reader can weave webs as she travels. Most obvious is the (silly) karmic cameo in each story of a birthmark shaped like a comet. Also repetitions of phrases (“blood obscenely scarlet and wet”); images (dendroglyphs); places (Hawaii); and the number six (Sixsmith, “sextet for overlapping soloists,” six comet tails, Six Catechisms, six’n’six in a dice game). Over the discourse level of the stories runs another kind of profluence, too: the English language morphs. Adam writing his journal uses phrasing and penmanship devices of a white gentleman in the 1860s:
Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints. Through rotting kelp, sea cocoa-nuts & bamboo, the tracks led me to their maker, a White man, his trowzers & Pea-jacket rolled up, sporting a kempt beard & an outsized Beaver. . . . His nationality was no surprise. If there be any eyrie so desolate, or isle so remote, that one may there resort unchallenged by an Englishman, ’tis not down on any map I ever saw.
The 1930s composer Robert Frobisher, though, has a swaggering, flirty, smarty-pants style:
Set foot on Continental macadam and asked a Customs man where I might find the railway station. He pointed toward a groaning tram packed with malnourished workmen, rickets, and penury. Preferred shank’s pony, drizzle or no drizzle. Followed tramlines down coffinesque streets. Ostend is all tapioca grays and browns. Will admit I was thinking Belgium was a b. stupid country to run away to.
By the fourth section, in the 1980s, the empire has struck back at the English language. “Yurrin Hulpal,” a Modigliani-looking man on a train tells our disoriented narrator, who panics and thinks, Arabic? He wants a “clear sign, in English” of where he is, and gets one: “ WELCOME TO HULL.” You’re in Hull, pal. But then a turbaned driver reports that his cab fare is “Sick teen-squid Zachary,” which means sixteen quid exactly. And so on: the stodgy white Brit’s nightmare of his language gone to tongues. In the next section, in the dystopian world of Sonmi, English has been fantastically reduced to generics and brand names, but it’s also inventive: yellow-up = sunrise, sony = a screen, cars produce fordfumes. In a passage when characters have escaped the hellish metropole of corpocracy and roam the remnants of nature, “genomed moths spun around [their] heads, electronlike. Their wings’ logos had mutated over generations into a chance syllabary: a small victory of nature over corpocracy.” Wing patterns as chance syllabary: I love that. Entomology mates with etymology, Nabokov. As if those wings led a quiet protest against humankind’s savagery upon itself with its language, in the next story—the sixth—English starts over raw (and very Anglo-Saxon):
Second day fluffsome clouds rabbited westly an’ that snaky leeward sun was hissin’ loud’n’hot. We drank like whales from icy’n’sooty brooks. Higher to cooler we climbed till no mozzie pricked us no more. Stunty’n’dry woods was crossed by swathes o’ black’n’razory lava spitted’n’spewed by Mauna Kea. Snailysome goin’ was them rockfields, yay.
Each cell of Cloud Atlas—or each small Sierpinski triangle—has its own rich texture and colors, and each makes the same sort of moves (being trapped, escaping). Yet you can read the whole linearly, or read it as a web, or even as a wave: a tsunami. Cloud Atlas got lots of attention for its postmodern, metafictional cleverness: each story being nested within the next makes the “reality” of any dizzying. But I think this contrivance is the least interesting thing about it. The book seems to me shyly earnest, moral, urging us away from being “crookit selfy people”: away from violence and self-interest and toward a semi-Buddhist selflessness. The Moriori in the earliest moments and the Valleysmen in the latest share a “unique pacific creed.” For the Moriori, “whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana—his honor, his worth, his standing, and his soul,” and was ostracized. For the Valleysmen, “crookit selfy people was called ‘stoned’ an’ no fate was more dreadsome.” In the final dramatic scene of the Valleysman story, characters flee the main Hawaiian island and its violence, and this island they call “Big I.” What else is “big I” than big ego, big self? In the Sonmi section before it, Sonmi, first seeing the ocean, thinks, “All the woe of the words ‘I am’ seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully.” That ocean is of course the Pacific: peaceful. Adam asks in the book’s final lines, “What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?” Surrender selfiness, give yourself to the good of all people and creatures and the world they inhabit: hardly a sly postmodern smirk.
If a sweet and earnest message indeed curls at the heart of Cloud Atlas, the book’s formal features might become more than gimmicky. In describing the structure earlier, I pictured my hands holding an invisible book open before me: my left-hand fingers (1 2 3 4 5), the invisible book, and my right-hand fingers (5 4 3 2 1). And that mirrors Cloud Atlas’s structure, the “invisible book” being the sixth story, the only one told whole. Far-fetched? Maybe, but in that story, at the novel’s peak, we learn that it is a recorded narration that can be viewed and heard by gazing into a “silvery egg,” or orison, which one must hold. An orison is a prayer. “Sit down a beat or two,” we are bidden. “Hold out your hands. Look.”
Is this book in our hands a prayer for gentler humanity, the book structured like two hands held out in supplication? Could the sixes that organize and run through this text be linked to Buddhism’s Six Realms of Existence or Six Perfections? Or, maybe an even farther-flung way of reading this: in a crucial early scene, Adam Ewing, being poisoned by a greedy doctor, protects and saves a Moriori named Autua who has stowed away in Adam’s cabin to escape the violence of his “master.” Five hundred pages later, when we return to poor Adam’s journal, we see that Autua has now saved him from poisoning. Human kindness repaid: awfully rare in the five hundred pages between. So with Autua’s return gift of kindness we have narrative balance and completion, and this act by Autua, who becomes a sort of angel or bowsprit steering the book, persuades Adam to devote his life to humanity. And here comes my most extravagant reading: look at the name “AUTUA.” Like the parts of the novel, the name’s letters form a palindrome or triangle (1 2 3 2 1). Midway, the sense of the name transforms, from “aut,” meaning self, to “tu,” meaning you. A shift from self-interest to empathy?
In one way the book follows a classic wave, peak and all, with symmetry and balance. But of course the book has no single dramatic arc but many interlocking wavelets. Then again, the structure is fractal, the Sierpinski triangle of nesting forms. All of these; none of them. In any case, it’s deeply designed and patterned, with repeating shapes, webs of connection, visual images and phrases that repeat like dots of color on a canvas.
My more extravagant readings of the book’s form might convince you, and might not. But I insist that Cloud Atlas is not only clever, not only designed, but earnest and moving. Its playful elements add to its depth.
And this to me, as a writer, a reader, a human, is what matters most.