Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas is a hugely frustrating book that alternates moments of utter brilliance with moments of pure pointlessness, with a central gimmick that never really goes anywhere. It's a book with a lot of parts, so I'm going to describe my experience reading it. I will avoid story spoilers, although I do have to say something about the novel's structure.

The book is a number of stories. One begins, then stops off at a point to make way for the next. Eventually the book goes into reverse, completing the stories one by one in the opposite order.

The first story takes place in the late 19th century. I was immediately impressed by how well the author caught the writing style of the time, working with long, intricate sentences, and how he created an interesting main character caught between conventional thought and a good heart that made him look beyond conventional thinking.

The next story takes place decades later. Once again the writing style was ornate, which still seemed appropriate. Unfortunately I found the main character very unlikable. I don't honestly know if I would have disliked him as much if I hadn't experienced this in an audio book; it's hard to differentiate how one feels about the text versus how one feels about the actor. But there wasn't really much to it.

The third story made me reevaluate my impression of the writer's stylist skills. This story was a suspense novel about evil corporations taking place in the 1970s. Yet the writing style was still ornate, far more a literary work than something by John Grisham or Robert Ludlum. It made me think that what I had earlier taken as brilliant mimicry of writing styles was simply the author's own overwritten style. On the other hand, it was a more involving story than the previous two.

The fourth story was also written elaborately, but in this case it worked well, because the author was a witty and self-involved literary publisher. It was comedic and the story was quite entertaining.

The fifth story proved that the author could, if he put his mind to it, write in simple sentences. It was written as an interview, and while the interviewee occasionally wandered into descriptive passages one would be unlikely to ever speak, it was a straightforwardly told futuristic dystopia that was highly effective.

The final story, and the only one that doesn't break in the middle to let the next story in, was amazing in every way. The author created a fascinating variation on the English language for his tribe of futuristic tribesman. The world portrayed and the story told are fantastic.

As the novel backed its way out again, the structure showed some inherent weakness. It was fine for the first couple, because they were still fresh in my head and their stories were easy to pick up. But when it reached that thriller I had forgotten many details of its elaborate conspiracy plot, and its dense writing style just made it more difficult to pick up what was happening. Eventually, though, I did get back to it, and there was a scene near the end that was brilliant and intense.

Another problem came with the next story, because it was my least favorite, meaning that the good will the book had rather grudgingly earned from me was evaporating at a quicker pace. This second half of the story was more intriguing than the first, but it was still quite weak.

Finally we got back to the beginning. The book had started well, but not amazing, and it ended the same way. It was a nice little story, but not close in quality to those great center pieces.

At the end, my big question was, why? The book makes clear that all the protagonists are connected somehow, but that neither matters nor makes sense. It doesn't matter because there is no real connecting thematic thread beyond this conceit, except perhaps in stories five and six. And reversing the chronology in the second half removes any real momentum.

The conceit doesn't make any sense because while most of the books are portrayed as memoirs, one is clearly labeled a work of fiction. So this means these aren't real people reincarnated or connected somehow, it's just something the author's thought would be cool.

I decided to read this book after seeing the movie, hoping it would clarify for me the Grand Point of it all. It did not. And the book's structure did not work as well as that of the film, which jumped around, preventing any story from sucking the life out of the overall narrative and creating something far more cohesive.

Overall, I enjoyed more of the book than not, but I feel it was ultimately a failed experiment .