Watching the Clouds

The book, Cloud Atlas, is unusual. Most books have one main character, one plot, one setting and one message. Cloud Atlas has six. And they’re all woven together into one story. It’s not seamless; the stories have very definite beginnings and endings. They’re all from different time periods: the past, present, and future. They don’t directly address each other either. In one case, one ends and the next starts 100 years or so later, with a very different person doing a very different thing. However, there are little threads connecting each of them. Of the twelve sections in the book, one section involves a character reading the diary of a character from the previous section. Another character from another section is reading a manuscript, which happens to be the story that precedes that one. A third character from a third section is watching the last section through a movie. The point of this is to show how we’re all connected, even as we move throughout time.
That wasn’t my initial impression after reading 40 pages of the first story and then noting that it leaves the first main character on a cliffhanger as it moves to another one, over a hundred years later. If I hadn’t been forewarned, I might have thought my copy was missing pages. But I moved on to the next section, got attached to that character. After approximately 40 pages, the story jumps to another character, who probably lives a few decades or so later. The cycle repeats. I would get attached, and then cue the cliffhanger. By the time you make it to the story labeled “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” it’s a little tiring. But then you get to the sixth story and it ends, and then it goes backward. To explain better, the seventh section is the final part of the fifth section, and the eighth is the final of the fourth section and so on. You can now cruise your way down the very last story and the very start of it all. And it’s worth it. However agonizing the first 5/12 of the book may be, Mitchell knew what he was doing, the last section is a very satisfying ending. And then Mitchell is revealed for the true writing genius that he is, being able to craft six different lives that you’re attached to, in six different ways and even several different genres. The first is historical fiction, on a Pacific voyage a few hundred years ago, and is written in diary format. The second is also historical fiction, written in the early 1930s and it consists just of letters. Next is a spy novel written in third person. The fourth is first person, and it’s written from the view of a dotty old man whose thoughts are somewhat chaotic in about present time. Story number five is science fiction; taking place in the future with clones and written entirely in interview format. The sixth story is the hardest to read, also science fiction but farther in the future and filled with futuristic slang and superstitious villagers.
Throughout this book, you only get hints that all the characters are actually one soul, such as that one character can recognize a song she’s never heard before, written by the previous main character. It’s very subtle and elegant, and when you think about it at the end, you notice that every main character had someone who they were close to and somehow seem to meet again in the next section.
To quote the synopsis on the back of the book: “The result is brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky,” which seems to be a good, even if somewhat biased, description. You just have to remember, when watching the clouds, to not just look at the shapes, but to also look at how they change as they move through the sky.