Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

When Lucinda first proposed creating this blog I thought it would be 100 reviews each and that would be it. A few months into it I realized that some of the items (such as the Harry Potter series and Remembrance of Things Past) would require separate reviews for each volume in the series, thus putting the number of reviews at 119. Now Lucinda tells me that she wants me to post a review for EVERY book I read. Forever. So now the number of book reports I've been assigned is open ended. Sigh...

So, before we started this blog I had heard about Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and wanted to read it before the movie came out... but I got side-tracked with all of these 'classic' novels and forgot all about it until Lucinda insisted that I read a book not on the list just because she wanted to read a book not on the list also. I figured that I would like this book because the back cover compares the author to Nabakov, Haruki Murkami and Umberto Eco... all authors with books in my top 50. I also thought the structure of the novel sounded intriguing and would be something completely different. And it looked like the story would be something that tried to examine deep existential issues and would leave the reader with more questions than answers and be wide open to multiple interpretations.

It is a bit hard to quickly sum up the plot. There are six different stories with each of them being interrupted half way through and then finished in reverse order. So it goes story 1,2,3,4,5,6 and then 5,4,3,2,1. In the first half of each story (except the first one), the main character finds the first half of the story preceding it and at the end of their second half discovers the remaining half of the story that finished it. So the character in the second story finds the journal of the character in story one and in the second half of the second character's story he finds the last half of the journal of the character in the first story. The structure works for the most part and it is easier to follow than it is to explain.

The first two stories start out really well, so the first 100 pages are pretty excellent. The first story is about an accountant aboard a ship in the Pacific during the 1800's and the second story is about a musician in Europe during the early 1900's that begins helping an older composer with his work. Both start out very promising. The next two stories are just okay though. The third story is about a reporter in the 1970's trying to uncover a conspiracy about a nuclear power plant and the forth is a story set in the present about a publisher that gets stuck in an old folks home. Neither is bad, but neither is very original either. The fifth story is about a clone in a futuristic Korea which is decent sci-fi but nothing spectacular and the sixth story is about a tribe of people in a post-Apocalypse Hawaii. That story was pretty good.

I think that by the end I was just a tad disappointed since I had been anticipating reading this book for so long. I felt that the stories didn't really interconnect very well thematically and would have worked just as well individually. Except for the sixth story, none of the stories had much mysticism or anything surprising happen. Also, all of the stories resolved in a very concrete way and didn't leave much open to interpretation. I wouldn't compare it to a Murakami novel at all. I'd say that it was a bad thing that it didn't leave me scratching my head at the end (unlike every Murakami book I've read). In the end, it wasn't a weird trippy book at all. It was like expecting a David Lynch movie and getting Spielberg instead. I really shouldn't hold my expectations against the book though, and some parts were pretty good and the structure was pretty unique, so I'll give it a B.