Cloud Atlas review

[alobear]

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is very clever.  In fact, it practically screamed throughout, "Ooh, look how clever I am, writing in six different genres and styles and interconnecting them in a really interesting way!"

Up until the last two pages, I couldn't have possibly said what it was supposed to be about.  So it was evidently far too clever for me, as I have since been reliably informed it was about Nietzsche's theory of Eternal Recurrence, which I wouldn't have got in a million years.  The last two pages, however, outlined in no uncertain terms exactly what the whole book was about, so baldly in fact that it put me in mind of the old He-Man cartoons, where Man-At-Arms would come on at the end to explain the moral of the story.  I found those He-Man codas really patronising, as it was always perfectly obvious to me what the episode was about.  With Cloud Atlas, I had the opposite feeling, as I hadn't had a clue up to that point - and if it was necessary to explain it at the end, perhaps it would have been better to have been a little more obvious about it earlier on!  It made the whole conclusion rather heavy-handed, when it could have been quite an epiphany if it had all gradually slotted into place as it went along.

Still, from a structural and stylistic point of view, it was very impressive indeed, and the individual stories within it held my interest enough to keep me reading throughout all 530 pages.  None of them engaged my emotions, though, so it was all rather more of an intellectual exercise than an involving novel.

Comments

Ahhh...

[cholten99.livejournal.com]

The Wheel of Morality!

[quintus-marcius.livejournal.com]

I remember that Nietzsche was explicitly referenced quite early, and my review from eighteen months ago says there's quite a lot of will to power stuff, so I suspect most people who know about the theory will have noticed the connection. But I don't remember the end, other than that it's obviously back on the ship, so it's possible that you have a completely different interpretation. I'd be interested to know what it is.

[alobear.livejournal.com]

The last couple of pages explicitly describes the theory that everything is just repeated inevitably over and over, but then says that nothing will ever change if people just accept that as the case.

I actually rather liked the last couple of lines, where he says his grandfather always told him there was no point trying to change things because each individual's actions are just a drop in the ocean. The last line is something along the lines of, "But are not oceans made up of individual drops?"

[lareinemisere.livejournal.com]

There's a quote I've had stuck on one of our kitchen cabinets for years (someone called Margaret Mead, who I've never yet bothered to Google):

'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever does.'