A Cog in Something Turning

Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
2004, Hodder and Stoughton


It's hard for me to keep track of books I'm interested in reading. Scrawling a recommendation on a post-it, for example, is typically proven fruitless when the title comes out of my washing machine mangled in a chewing gum-like wad. The closest I've come to a workable system is in saving notes on my phone, but the down-side to this method, as I've entertained my friends with on countless occasions, is that I'm left to decipher cryptic notes like "Tapper Evolution", "Earth Abides" and "Blood Feast".

This mobile phone-as-notepad system had its genesis several years ago when I first took a walk around the Andover Bookstore, my preferred local indie. Pressed with a sense of urgency to remember the countless employee recommended titles and alarmed at the sheer volume of them, I began a note on my phone in desperation to take down the names of these surely soon-to-be-favorites.

I'll admit that not too many of these titles wind up working their way into my hands. In that first note is a flurry of book titles without coherent punctuation or author names that might help me determine where exactly their names begin or end. I quote: "Wednesdays wars society of the spectacle optic nerve mudbound kaputt cloud atlas the intuitionist the traveler.how to breathe underwater".

Earlier this summer I was reminded of that then-forgotten note when I picked up two things more or less simultaneously: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet from the library and the new issue of the Paris Review (for my boyfriend because of a new story by Geek Love author Katherine Dunn) which featured an "Art of Fiction" interview with David Mitchell.

As you may recall from my blog entry on it, Jacob de Zoet was a delight to read. And so, several months later, looking for a title to resuscitate my reading habits, I turned to that note.

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was exactly the book I needed. Like a shot of adrenaline, Mitchell's prose awakened my senses to where my love of reading comes from: a desperate need to validate my existence by forging the kind of connections I was so enraptured by in reading David Foster Wallace's essays. The book is hellbent on forging such a connection; it presents characters whose lives, seemingly removed temporally and geographically from our own, speak to some intrinsic aspiration in human nature to seek understanding for our existence, to find balance and rhythm - meaning, even - to the chaos of our lives.

It will help to explain these concepts with the context of the book itself, which displays bravura shifts in dialect and voice and a remarkable breadth in genre.

Cloud Atlas is composed of six texts. Each of these texts, excepting the centerpiece, is interrupted by another. The narrative unfolds so that these pieces, each functioning more or less independently of the others, is cushioned within another, creating a sort of Russian nesting doll effect. After the centerpiece of the novel is reached, each text resumes its narrative and plays out to its end in reverse order.

This might sound complicated, but while the book is highly structured, its rhythms are anything but oblique. For example, the opening text is a piece called "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing".

"Adam Ewing" recounts in the style of a journal its eponymous character's voyage aboard a ship from New Zealand to America. Ewing is an American notary who is unfamiliar largely with the crew of the vessel upon which he travels. Ewing discovers mid-way through the narrative a native New Zealander who stows away in his cabin. Ewing, a man of god, is reluctant to deny the man protection on account of his morals and jeopardizes his standing on the ship by offering him safe harbor.

Meanwhile, Ewing discovers that he has fallen victim to a parasite in his brain that endangers his life. He is offered council and medication from a physician on board, who supplies him with medication during the treatment that has adverse affects on Ewing.

Mitchell's prose in the "Ewing" section is the sort of deck-swabbing, arch nineteenth century writing one might read in Billy Budd. It is initially a little off-putting to slog through; despite its relatively short length (at 40 pages), it took me two days to wade, as though knee-deep through a bog, through Mitchell's thicket of arcane syntax and vocabulary.

Sentences like "Mr. Roderick has little sympathy with my petition to have the offending hawser removed elsewhere, for he is obliged to quit his private cabin (for the reason stated below) & move to the fo'c'sle with the common sailors, whose number has swollen with five Castilians 'poached' from the Spaniard at anchor in the Bay" are not conducive to breezy reading.

Eventually though, the nautical terms like "hawser" and "fo'c'sle" grew on me. By the section's end, I had grown accustomed to beautiful, graceful passages cast in sepia-toned prose like this one:

By day, my coffin is hot as an oven & my sweat dampens these pages. The tropic sun fattens & fills the noon sky. The men work seminaked with sun-blacked torsos & straw hats. The planking oozes scorching tar that sticks to one's soles. Rain squalls blow up from nowhere & vanish with the same rapidity & the deck hisses itself dry in a minute. Portuguese man-o'-wars pulsate in the quicksilver sea, flying fish bewitch the beholder & ocher shadows of hammerheads circle the Prophetess.

Just about the time that I had grown accustomed to this style and passages like that one snagged on my breath and left me gently tugging to set it free, Mitchell cuts "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" off - in mid-sentence, no less!

The second section, which interrupts "Ewing" just as it is getting good, is entitled "Letters from Zedelghem" and is set in Belgium in 1931, nearly eighty years after "Adam Ewing".

"Zedelghem" is comprised of a series of letters from a young composer named Robert Frobisher to a friend from his home in England. Frobisher is traveling in the Belgian countryside to seek a distinguished composer named Vyvyan Ayrs in order to offer him assistance in transposing new musical ideas that have been prevented from being recorded due to illness.

The shift in location across the globe and in time by three-quarters of a century necessitate a shift in style and Mitchell envelopes the reader in a warm, personal narrative full of asides and short-handed cleverness. Where Ewing was writing to no one but himself, Frobisher's narrative (also in 1st person perspective) has an audience: a mysterious man named Sixsmith. As such, the writing is more intimate and more amusing, in the way that one always wants to amuse when writing a letter. Take for example, this passage, in which Frobisher describes being interrupted having intercourse with his boss's wife:

A tiring night turned inside out. J. came to my bed at midnight, and during our athletics, my door was barged. Farcical horror! Thank God J. had locked it on her way in. The doorknob rattled, insistent knocking began. Fear can clear the mind as well as cloud it, and remembering my Don Juan, I hid J. in a nest of coverlets and sheets in my sagging bed and left the curtain half open to show I had nothing to hide.

As the narrative progresses, the bedroom farce of Frobisher's cuckolding of his mentor, the delicious complaints of a stifled artist, and the sneaking suspicion that Frobisher and Sixsmith were gay lovers sucks you in easily. Imagine my surprise when towards the end of the section, Frobisher discovers in his master's library and mangled, interrupted copy of a the Pacific journal of a certain American notary.

It is in this manner that the narrative continues: Mitchell entertains with a passage that is interrupted by another set in the future in which the new main character somehow discovers the preceding manuscript.

It's a complex structure, but a simple idea (nearly a gimmick), but one that compels the reader to zip along, eager to see in what manner Frobisher's letters, for example, will reappear in the next narrative, a airport novel about corporate demonism set in the 1970s.

While part of me is desperate to re-live Mitchell's worlds by describing in depth their virtuosic range in voice, tone, style, characterization, I am reluctant to ruin the pure joy of discovering (and then re-discovering) each layer of this novel. Instead, I suppose I'll stick to generalities, starting with the pure breadth of his writing style.

Mitchell's ear for language, colloquialisms both invented and borrowed, is astounding. His sense of syntax, of vocabulary, of semiotic signification is dizzying. It's not often that I get to read a stylist so prone to inducing goosebumps at the language itself, divorced (as much as it can be) from the narrative framework that surrounds it.

This is not to say that the framework within which these delightful linguistic adornments is not compelling, because it is. Mitchell's six narratives pulsate with rich imagery and wordplay, but so too do his characters thrum with energy. Each is a delightfully realized, idiosyncratic presence - the scrim through which we view the newly weird world around us. And yet, there are distinctive commonalities that help to flesh out Mitchell's themes: among them, the idea of fate, societal and social predation and religion.

The first and last of those themes seem somehow tied together in this work; throughout Mitchell's narrative his characters seem destined, guided by some authorial force. Part of this is overtly literal, of course. Mitchell is their author, their fates in his hands. But moreover, perhaps through the construction of the Russian nesting doll-like narrative, each character seems to be functioning as individual pieces of the same large, multi-decade machine ("I feel to be a cog in something turning," Joni Mitchell has sung). The eventual significance of one character's story in another's, their very interconnectedness, implies some fate that belies the sometimes-illusion of fiction writing that what you read is occurring contemporaneously with the act of reading it.

This sense of authorial guidance seems to be part and parcel of Mitchell's characters' tendency to seek guidance of some religious nature. In part one, Adam Ewing is a man of profoundly religious devotion whose faith as a Christian leads him to make moral choices that directly lead him down his eventual course. In a later portion of the book, corporate enterprise takes the place of religious devotion as characters worship, in Orwellian fashion, the visage of a Ronald McDonald-like commercial logo.

Mitchell's work, while transparent in its authority (in an inversion of an Oz axiom, Mitchell seems to call us to "pay attention to the man behind the curtain"), is sincere and ambitious in its determination to present its characters as living truths while keeping them characters - that is, dramatic (or almost semiotic) representations of people. Mitchell's sense of humanity is warm, all-encompassing. In his portraits of characters striving to make sense of their fated lives by fighting the apathetic or malignant societal machinations that surround them, his demonstration of their devotion to causes and ideas beyond themselves, and especially his loving, precise crafting of their voices - in all these things, we see a writer whose abundant goodwill towards humanity-as-the-individual and whose profound suspicion of humanity-as-the-collective is transformed by his gift for style into the beautifully elegiac fates of the six characters in Cloud Atlas.