I had no idea what to expect from Cloud Atlas before I started reading it, and that’s the way I recommend experiencing the book. It’s a novel with striking similarities to Never Let Me Go, one of which is the pleasure of letting it unfold as it will, with no knowledge going into the reading of it. High praise, indeed, as Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favorite authors, and I consider Never Let Me Go to be one of, if not the, best of his novels (The Unconsoled being the other main contender for that position). These are the type of book to savor as one goes, that leave the reader mulling the intricacies long after completing the novel. The less one knows about the content, the better, so I shall constrain my comments, and not mention the plot as such at all.
Not mentioning the plot leaves me with the writing itself. The writing itself is lovely; I agree with the critics that David Mitchell has a powerful command of the English language in written form. Each part of the book is lyrical and engaging in itself; taken together, the whole is an intricate puzzle. I had mixed reactions to the structure of the book. In the first half, the shifts are slightly jarring, but the lyrical prose draws you quickly and easily into each new segment. Once you know what to expect, each transition is a bit more smooth than the previous one. Still, I found the ending weak, and some of that was due to the constraint of the structure as established earlier on. Perhaps Mitchell is making a meta-point about history, and how we can only go as far as the foundation we’ve laid for ourselves in the past, that the limitations of the endings — of each segment, and the novel as a whole — bear out. Barring that, I’d say that the structure becomes less clever and more contrived through the second half of the book, and the engaging narratives get somewhat lost in the drive to wrap up. At the risk of giving away plot, the reliance on deaths as the vehicles for the end of narratives, a la Stephen King, contributed to my sense that the weak ending was simply weak, and not meant to be part of a grander commentary on the repetitive and inherently pointless nature of both novels and human history.
All that being said, the ending is not so weak as to diminish the general excellence of the book; it is one of the best I’ve read this year.
