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A review by brenden_odonnell
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
5.0
My second reading of Cloud Atlas allowed me to see it from a more disinterested angle. I found myself concentrating on the mediums of each story: journal, letter, novel, film, orison, and oration, respectively. The diversity of these mediums raised a pretty simple question in my head: which stories participate in reality? This question is expertly obviated by Isaac Sach’s musings: “the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone” (393). My question of reality is one of Sach’s actuality, which is to say, it’s a pretty useless question insofar as it aims to distribute influence by declaring one of these narratives the most authentic. These narratives are peers; their distinctness is incidental.
The effect of democratizing all six narratives is unsettling in that it makes them all subject to Timothy Cavendish’s observation, “Reading too many novels makes one blind”—in other words, it makes me wonder if reading this novel necessitates wrapping ourselves up in solipsistic, comfortable fiction, such as a humanist utopia. Adam Ewing’s final theorization about the human condition raises the risk of subscribing to fiction’s description of ideas that don’t necessarily play out in reality. The question this novel forces us to ask, then, is, can we find any traces of utopia, as it is spelled out in this book, in the humanity we see every day?
I think it is necessary to believe in a certain amount of extraordinariness in humanity to enjoy this book. This immediately makes the novel a little problematic for me. But something I can give Mitchell props for: although he is nauseatingly hopeful about humanity’s interpersonal prospects, humans also destroy each other in this novel, in some of the most disturbing and brutal ways imaginable: psychologically, sexually, emotionally, physically. While the taste of utopia lingers on the reader’s tongue throughout, the conditions through which it persists are staggering. That this persistence is not confusing or inconsistent is an impressive feat alone.
The only thing I could probably do without is the obnoxious self-referentiality the novel needlessly insists upon. Why does a “sextet” need to exist in each story, sometimes in multiple forms, for example? The comet-shaped birthmark was heavy-handed enough. We get that “everything’s connected.” (Of course, this could be the sour taste leftover from the film’s trailer, which is stuffed with cliché dialogue concerning our connectedness with and responsibility for one another.) But everything is not necessarily connected, and that’s what I think the point of this novel is. There are choices; we have to decide cogently to observe the responsibility we bear to one another. We can choose to not discern between the virtual and the actual humanity—that is to say, we can insist upon seeing what we want in ourselves and each other, and rather than staying quiet and congratulating our perspicacity, we can act upon it.
The effect of democratizing all six narratives is unsettling in that it makes them all subject to Timothy Cavendish’s observation, “Reading too many novels makes one blind”—in other words, it makes me wonder if reading this novel necessitates wrapping ourselves up in solipsistic, comfortable fiction, such as a humanist utopia. Adam Ewing’s final theorization about the human condition raises the risk of subscribing to fiction’s description of ideas that don’t necessarily play out in reality. The question this novel forces us to ask, then, is, can we find any traces of utopia, as it is spelled out in this book, in the humanity we see every day?
I think it is necessary to believe in a certain amount of extraordinariness in humanity to enjoy this book. This immediately makes the novel a little problematic for me. But something I can give Mitchell props for: although he is nauseatingly hopeful about humanity’s interpersonal prospects, humans also destroy each other in this novel, in some of the most disturbing and brutal ways imaginable: psychologically, sexually, emotionally, physically. While the taste of utopia lingers on the reader’s tongue throughout, the conditions through which it persists are staggering. That this persistence is not confusing or inconsistent is an impressive feat alone.
The only thing I could probably do without is the obnoxious self-referentiality the novel needlessly insists upon. Why does a “sextet” need to exist in each story, sometimes in multiple forms, for example? The comet-shaped birthmark was heavy-handed enough. We get that “everything’s connected.” (Of course, this could be the sour taste leftover from the film’s trailer, which is stuffed with cliché dialogue concerning our connectedness with and responsibility for one another.) But everything is not necessarily connected, and that’s what I think the point of this novel is. There are choices; we have to decide cogently to observe the responsibility we bear to one another. We can choose to not discern between the virtual and the actual humanity—that is to say, we can insist upon seeing what we want in ourselves and each other, and rather than staying quiet and congratulating our perspicacity, we can act upon it.