Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.
Title: Cloud Atlas.
Author: David Mitchell.
Genre: Fiction, literature, science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, romance, politics, political dissent, philosophical fiction, multiple narratives, dystopian fiction, futuristic fiction.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2004.
Summary: The book begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neo-capitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a post-apocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.
My rating: 8.5/10.
My Review:
♥ Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides… I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longtitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.
♥ I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’ that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.
♥ ...but it’s an incomparable creation. Echoes of Scriabin’s White Mass, Stravinsky’s lost footprints, chromatics of the more lunar Debussy, but truth is I don’t know where it came from. Waking dream. Will never write anything one-hundredth as good. Wish I were being immodest, but I’m not. Cloud Atlas Sextet holds my life, is my life, now I’m a spent firework; but at least I’ve been a firework.
People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it’ll no longer function.
♥ One must be cynical as Diogenes to prosper in my profession, but cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues.
♥ “The Mariori must kill or be killed. Elders urged appeasement, for as long as Mariori preserved their mana with their land, their goals & ancestors would deliver the race from harm. “Embrace your enemy,” the elders urged, “to prevent him striking you.” (“Embrace your enemy,” Henry quipped, “to feel his dagger tickle your kidneys.”)
♥ What moral to draw? Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.
♥ “To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom.”
♥ Dreamt I stood in a china shop so crowded from floor to far-off ceiling with shelves of porcelain antiquities etc. that moving a muscle would cause several to fall and smash to bits. Exactly what happened, but instead of a crashing noise, an august chord rang out, half-cello, half-celeste, D major (?), held for four beats. My wrist knocked a Ming case affair off its pedestal - E-flat, whole string section, glorious, transcendent, angels wept. Deliberately now, smashed a figurine of an ox for the next note, then a milk-maid, then Saturday’s Child - orgy of shrapnel filled the air, divine harmonies my head. Ah, such music! Glimpsed my father totting up the smashed items’ value, nib flashing, but had to keep the music coming. Knew I’d become the greatest composer of the century if I could only make the music mine. A monstrous Laughing Cavalier flung against the wall set off a thumping battery of percussion.
♥ Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction, and now was such a time.
♥ “Are you mad?”
Always a trickier question than it looks. “I doubt it.”
♥ A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.
♥ Really, Sixsmith, you should try to enjoy lovemaking in total silence. All that abllyhooing transmutes into bliss if you’ll only seal your lips.
♥ Oh, we above the stairs like to congratulate ourselves on our cleverness, but there are no secrets to those who strip the sheets.
♥ People knelt in prayer, some moving their lips. Envy ‘em, really I do. I envy God, too, privy to their secrets. Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I’ve stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.
♥ Blind, emaciated fiddler performed for coins. Now he could play. Requested “Bonsoir, Paris!” and he performed with such élan I pressed a crisp five-franc note into his hand. He removed his dark glasses, checked the watermark, invoked his pet saint’s name, gathered his coppers, and scarpered through the flower beds, laughing like a madcap. Whoever opined “Money can’t buy you happiness” obviously had far too much of the stuff.
♥ Ayrs was now slumped, á la a Pre-Raphaelite oil painting entitled Behold the Sated Muse Discard Her Puppet.
♥ How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.
♥ “The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged. The world’s Alberto Grimaldis can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness, and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers. They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying ‘guest fees’ to leader writers, or just buying the media up. The media - and not just The Washington Post - is where democracies conduct their civil wars.”
♥ “I became a scientist because… it’s like panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold. I-I don’t know what I want to do…”
“Journalists work in torrents just as muddy.”
The moon is over the water.
“Do,” says Luisa finally, “whatever you can’t not do.”
♥ “Journalists need insiders, Fay, so I’ll certainly bear it in mind. I have to warn you, though, Spyglass doesn’t have the resources for the kind of remuneration you may be-”
“Men invented money. Women invented mutual aid.”
It’s a wise soul, thinks Luisa, who can distinguish traps from opportunities.
♥ A volume I once published, True Recollections of a Northern Territories Magistrate, claims that shark victims experience an anesthetic vision of floating away, all danger gone, into the Pacific blue, at the very moment they are being minced in that funnel of teeth. I, Timothy Cavendish, was that swimmer, watching London roll away, yes, you, you sly, toupeed quizmaster of a city, you and your tenements of Somalians; viaducts of Kingdom Brunel; malls of casualized labor; strata of soot-blitzed bricks and muddy bones of Doctors Dee, Crippen et al.; hot glass office buildings where the blooms of youth harden into aged cacti like my penny-pinching brother.
Essex raised its ugly head. When I was a scholarship boy at the local grammar, son of a city-hall toiler on the make, this country was synonymous with liberty, success, and Cambridge. Now look at it. Shopping malls and housing estates pursue their creeping invasion of our ancient land.
♥ Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.
♥ From my accident-victim’s-eye view I saw the taxi speed away, and I suffered a disagreeable flashback to my Greenwich mugging. It wasn’t the watch or even the bruises or the shock that had scarred me so. It was that I was a man who had once faced down and bested a quartet of Arab ragamuffins in Aden, but in the girls’ eyes I was… old, merely old. Not behaving the way an old man should - invisible, silent, and scared - was, itself, sufficient provocation.
♥ Behold your future, Cavendish the Younger. You will not apply for membership, but the tribe of the elderly will claim you. Your present will not keep pace with the world’s. The slippage will stretch your skin, sag your skeleton, erode your hair and memory, make your skin turn opaque so your twitching organs and blue-cheese veins will be semivisible. You will venture out only in daylight, avoiding weekends and school holidays. Language, too, will leave you behind, betraying your tribal affiliations whenever you speak. On escalators, on trunk roads, in supermarket aisles, the living will overtake you, incessantly. Elegant women will not see you. Store detectives will not see you. Salespeople will not see you, unless they sell stair lifts or fraudulent insurance policies. Only babies, cats, and drug addicts will acknowledge your existence. So do not fritter away your days. Sooner than you fear, you will stand before a mirror in a care home, look at your body, and think, E.T., locked in a ruddy cupboard for a fortnight.
♥ Your version of the truth is the only one that matters.
Truth is singular. Its “versions” are mistruths.
♥ Humor is the ovum of dissent, and the Juche should fear it.
♥ A more metaphysical question… were you happy, back in those days?
Before my ascension, you mean? If, by happiness, you mean the absence of adversity, I and all fabricants are the happiest stratum in corpocracy, as genomicists insist. However, if happiness means the conquest of adversity, or a sense of purpose, or the xercise of one’s will to power, then of all Nea So Copros’s slaves we surely are the most miserable. I endured drudgery but enjoy it no more than yourself.
♥ You said you envied your unthinking, untroubled sisters.
That is not quite the same as wishing to be one.
♥ Snow is bruised lilac in half-lite: such pure solace.
You speak like an aesthete sometimes, Sonmi.
Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it more instinctively.
♥ At our seminar, the professor asked if my lecture had been fruitful; I chose the word informative and asked why purebloods despised me so. He replied, “What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?”
I speculated such a suggestion could be seen as a serious deviancy.
Mephi seemed delited. “Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods’ consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror.”
I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.
Mephi replied, “History suggests, not until they are made to.”
♥ Well, Hae-Joo probed, what did I do to relax?
I play Go against my sony, I said.
“To relax?” he responded, incredulous. “Who wins, you or the sony?”
The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve?
♥ Your faces are askin’ me, Why’d I lie?
In my new tellin’, see, I wasn’t Zachry the Stoopit nor Zachry the Cowardy, I was jus’ Zachry the Unlucky’n’Lucky. Lies are Old Georgie’s vultures what circle on high lookin’ down for a runty’n’weedy soul to plummet’n’sink their talons in, an’ that night at Abel’s Dwellin’, that runty’n’weedy soul, yay, it was me.
Now you people’re lookin’ at a wrinkly buggah, mukelung’s nibblin’ my breath away, an’ I won’t be seein’ many more winters out, nay, nay. I know it. I’m shoutin’ back more’n’ forty long years at myself, yay, at Zachry the Niner, Oy, list’n! Times are you’re weak ‘gainst the world! Times are you can’t do nothin’! That ain’t your fault, it’s this busted world’s fault is all! But no matter how loud I shout, Boy Zachry, he don’t hear me nor never will.
♥ Now I seen Mauna Kea from Honokaa b’fore, o’ course, but a mountain you’re plannin’ on climbin’ ain’t the same as the one you ain’t. It ain’t so pretty, nay. Hush ‘nuff an’ you’ll hear it.
♥ I asked why Meronym’d never spoke this yarnin’ in the Valleys.
Valleysmen’d not want to hear, she answered, that human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too. I know it from other tribes offland what I stayed with. Times are you say a person’b’liefs ain’t true, they think you’re sayin’ their lifes ain’t true an’ their truth ain’t true.
♥ Then the true true is diff’rent to the seemin’ true? said I.
Yay, an’ it usually is,” I mem’ry Meronym sayin’, an’ that’s why true true is presher’n’rarer’n diamonds.
♥ I und’standed why Meronym’d not said the hole true ‘bout Prescience Isle an' her tribe too. People b’lief the world is built so an’ tellin ‘em it ain’t so caves the roofs on their heads’n’maybe yours.
♥ I don’t say that yarn’s got a hole sack o’ sense, but I always mem’ried it, an’ times are less sense is more sense.
♥ Honokaa’d got more law’n anyplace else on Big Isle ‘cept the Nine Folded Valleys I s’pose, tho’ law an’ Civ’lize ain’t always the same, nay, see Kona got Kona law but they ain’t go one flea o’ Civ’lize.
♥ So, I asked ‘gain, is it better to be savage’n to be Civ’lized?
List’n, savages an’ Civ’lized ain’t divvied by tribes or b’liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev’ry human is both, yay. Old Uns’d got the Smart o’ gods but the savagery o’jackals an’ that’s what ripped the Fall. Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ’lized heart beatin’ in their ribs.
♥ “Time to liaise,” he told me. Then he unhooked the Beloved Chairman’s kodak and placed it facedown on the low table. Hae-Joo inplugged his sony to a socket concealed in the blemished frame.
An illegal transceiver? Hidden in a kodak of Nea’s architect?
The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.
♥ No, I was stuck in Aurora House all right. A clock with no hands. “Freedom!” is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.
♥ Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book. Well, Mummy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print saga of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.
♥ “Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. “We - by whom I mean anyone over sixty - commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”
♥ Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured.
♥ Ernie had never read a work of fiction in his life - “Always a radio man, me” - but watching him coax the Victorian boiler system into life one more time, I always felt shallow. It’s true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.
♥ Ruddy hell, when your parents die they move in with you.
♥ That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrification concealed for a few decades, that is all. Outside, fat snowflakes are falling on slate roofs and granite walls. Like Solzhenitsyn laboring in Vermont, I shall beaver away in exile, far from the city that knitted my bones.
Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.
♥ The man who would be board members cackle like hyenas. Whoever said money can’t buy you happiness, Lloyd Hooks thinks, basking, obviously didn’t have enough of the stuff.
♥ Funny, thinks Milton. Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.
♥ We just shook hands and I left, I didn’t know what to say. The most humiliating thing you can do to a man is to save his life.
♥ “If you could see the future, like you can see the end of Sixteenth Street from the top of Kilroy’s department store, that means it’s already there. If it’s already there, you can’t change it.”
“Yes, but what’s at the end of Sixteenth Street isn’t made by what you do. It’s pretty much fixed, by planners, architects, designers, unless you go and blow a building up or something. What happens in a minute’s time is made by what you do.”
“So what’s the answer? Can you change the future or what?”
Maybe the answer is not a function of metaphysics but one, simply, of power.
♥ What I want from you, Luisa, is a killing of perfect intimacy. For a moment Bill Smoke wonders at the powers inside us that are not us.
♥ Was he so sure another war was coming?
“Another war is always coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions, and the borders of state. Listen to this and remember it. The nation-state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be. War, Robert, is one of humanity’s two eternal companions.”
So, I asked, what was the other?
“Diamonds.”
...The League of Nations? Surely nations knew laws other than warfare? What of diplomacy?
“Oh, diplomacy,” said M.D., in his element, “it mops up war’s spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents. Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots, and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.”
The reductio ad absurdum of M.D.’s view, I argued, was that science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destructions overcome our powers of creation and our civilization drives itself to extinction. M.D. embraced my objection with mordant glee. “Precisely. Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out! You’ll probably live to see it happen, you fortunate son. What a symbolic crescendo that’ll be, eh?”
♥ Eva. Because her name is a synonym for temptation: what treads nearer to the core of man? Because he soul swims in her eyes. Because I dream of creeping through the velvet folds to her room, where I let myself in, hum her a tune so - so - so softly, she stands with her naked feet on mine, her ear to my heart, and we waltz like string puppets. After that kiss, she says, “Vous embrassez comme un poisson rouge!” and in moonlit mirrors we fall in love with our youth and beauty. Because all my life, sophisticated, idiotic women have taken it upon themselves to understand me, to cure me, but Eva knows I’m terra incognita and explores me unhurriedly, like you did. Because she’s lean as a boy. Because he scent is almonds, meadow grass. Because if I smile at her ambition to be an Egyptologist, she kicks my shin under the table. Because she makes me think about something other than myself. Because even when serious she shines. Because she prefers travelogues to Sir Walter Scott, prefers Billy Mayerl to Mozart, and couldn’t tell C major from a sergeant major. Because I, only I, see her smile a fraction before it reaches her face. Because Emperor Robert is not a good man - his best part is commandeered by his unperformed music - but she gives me that rarest smile, anyway. Because we listened to nightjars. Because her laughter spurts through a blowhole in the top of her head and sprays all over the morning. Because a man like me has no business with this substance “beauty,” yet here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart.
♥ Had got to that last flight of stairs, when I saw a man in profile leaning on the balcony, gazing at the sea - recognized your gabardine coat, your one and only trilby. You strolled to the north side - one turn my way, I would have been rumbled. Watched you for as long as I dared - a minute? - before pulling back and hotfooting it down to Earth. Don’t be cross. Thank you ever so for trying to find me. Did you come on the Kentish Queen?
Questions rather pointless now, aren’t they?
Wasn’t the sheerest fluke I saw you first, not really. World’s a shadow theater, and opera, and such things writ large in its libretto. Don’t be too cross at my role. You couldn’t understand, no matter how much I explained. You’re a brilliant physicist, your Rutherford chap et al. agree you’ve got a brilliant future, quite sure they’re right. The healthy can’t understand the emptied, the broken.
♥ Luger here. Thirteen minutes to go. Feel trepidation, naturally, but my love of this coda is stronger. An electrical thrill that, like Adrian, I know I am to die. Pride, that I shall see it through. Certainties. Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one’s core. Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortés’ll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.
Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long. Once my Luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet. Such elegant certainties comfort me at this quiet hour.
♥ My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity. My thoughts flow thus. Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes.
What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.
What precipitates acts? Belief.
Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history’s Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?
Why? Because of this: - one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
Is this the doom written within our nature?
If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s world.
A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.
I hear my father-in-law’s response: “Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don’t tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the rednecks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell ‘em their imperial slaves’ rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium’s! Oh, you’ll grow hoarse, poor & gray in caucuses! You’ll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you grasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!”
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?