Tildes Book Club discussion - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
This is the first of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Cloud Atlas.
Our next book will be Piranesi, sometime in the third week of April.
I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.
For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.
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I had the double whammy of never quite finding the time to get my teeth into this Cloud Atlas book, but I think what really smoked my bacon this time was the fact that I'd got stuck into C. J. Cherryh's First Contact (Foreigner) series, which has 22 (not a typo, 22!) books in the sequence.
I'm coming to the end of book 9, which marks the end of one of the three-book arcs the series is so helpfully split up into, and I've wanted to read Piranesi ever since I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, so I hope to be a more active participant in the next round of these discussions.
That said, I've very much enjoyed reading everyone else's experiences and views on this book and thought you did a great job posing a few questions to break the ice and get people's ideas flowing, so thank you for that. It's clear to me that it's a book worth being on the "to read" list.
Thanks for the sharing your experience/situation and for the positive feedback.
Apologies for championing a book that so many seemed to have a hard time with! Hopefully the next one is easier going, eh? :D
If it makes you feel any better, I also DNF'd Exordia, which was my nomination - love the author (Seth Dickinson) & the first bit was great but wow that tone change around 25% does not work for me
It is truly an impressive book. The author displays great skill.
Were there any subsections that spoke to you or that you thought were particularly well crafted?
I've been doing a lot of studying lectures, textbooks, and scientific papers lately, and I've found that at this moment I'm viewing most of my extracurricular activities from an entertainment standpoint--how fun it is rather than how deep. So from an entertainment perspective (plot, rather than themes), I found the stories roughly in order from least entertaining to most entertaining, with Ewing the most boring and Sloosha's the most interesting. The exception to this is that I would flip Cavendish with Luisa Rey in the order. I found the start of the book quite boring, and almost decided to quit on this book club idea.
I think all the sections are well crafted as far as the quality of writing. Mitchell paints a vivid picture for me, especially in the parts featuring nature. I think that's part of what helped get me through the first Ewing chapter. Maybe I was just more interested in the stories that I felt were describing bigger events. I didn't find the general plot of Ewing very interesting, with the action being mostly hikes and travel by ship. I think I just didn't care enough about Ewing to be interested in whether he was being poisoned or his conflicts with the crew of the ship. I wasn't terribly interested in Frobisher or Cavendish because they seemed like jerks who never learned anything. In contrast, I felt like I'd been on a journey with Sonmi and Zachry where they grew as people, so I felt invested in their conflicts, all the characters involved, and how their stories would end.
Maybe it's just that they're more on the nose about it, but I feel like some of the big overarching ideas in the book were presented better in the last two stories as well. Well, to me more realistically presented than Luisa Rey's story, which used a more cartoon villian kind of approach, with evil mega-corp Seaboard that somehow thinks it's financially prudent to build a power plant that will explode, and Bill Smoke, who seemed to have an almost mystical ability to show up at every turn. It kind of felt like I was watching an episode of Captain Planet in terms of subtlety of the overarching plot. I think this style of storytelling was in kind of a pulp fiction style on purpose, but I didn't enjoy it as much.
My headcanon for the Luisa story is that it alone is fictional in-universe. The passing references to Cavendish reading the manuscript for it as well as the pulpy tone definitely give me that impression, at least.
Yeah, that was an interesting detail that got me thinking about how real these stories are in-universe. The way Cavendish speak about it, Luisa's story could be fiction, unless Cavendish just didn't read about Seaboard in the news. I'd been taking all the stories at face value, but it seems like all of them are presented as a dramatization of events, if not outright fiction. So we are reading fiction about characters reading/watching/hearing the same fiction.
I had to step away from the book for a while and am only just approaching the halfway point.
I'm glad I decided to check out the book club discussion before finishing, so I can pay more attention to this idea as I finish.
Letters from Zedelghem was always, and remains my favourite story in the book. It's one of those tales where nobody is really likeable, but I adore it anyway. As a musician and a writer, it really well depicts the struggle of having large, all-encompassing ideas that you just have to get out. "Sometimes you slay the dragon, and sometimes it slays you." The painful experience of knowing that you have talent but aren't able to capitalise on it to make a living is rendered very well here as well, and even though he's an arrogant shit, I feel for Frobisher every time. Early on this story has one of my favourite lines from the whole book: "Tapped on the pane, and asked in French if she'd save my life by falling in love with me."
I also strongly enjoy the Sonmi story, but that is more out of worldbuilding than for the story itself, which is done magnificently. Everything about this world is just normal to the two (ish) narrators, so we don't get explanations of all of the weird hyper-capitalist concepts that rule their lives, we just get passing mentions and fill in the blanks ourselves. I think that is quietly genius, and something I wish I saw more of in other works.
I have trouble getting past my dislike of this character. I don't like thieves. I don't like people who are ok with themselves believing that they are enticing a romantic partner into infidelity. The older characters were not quite as bad but were also not good people. The daughter and the police officer I liked.
I suppose it is some reflection of skill to get me to dislike a character quite as much as I disliked that young musician
I really enjoyed Letters from Zedelghem and Sloosha's Crossin'.
I have a musical background and the way Mitchell describes the almost madness you feel when you hear music everywhere and just have to get it down really spoke to me. It's not something that I have seen written about often in fiction and it just really hooked me (which was much needed after The Pacific Journal - I almost gave up through that story).
I loved Sloosha's Crossin' for the dystopian future and the complexity of reading the language. I am typically drawn to science fiction and dystopian stories, so this one was an easy win for me. It was also perfectly sandwiched between Sonmi's story. I was first annoyed by the language and the way words were written because my mind was just trying to understand what was going on. After getting into the story and literally sounding out some of the words, it became much more enjoyable and almost a game to try and figure them out with minimal context.
If you want more books featuring music, I quite enjoyed White Tears by Hari Kunzru (very dark themes) and Bel Canto by Patchett.
The Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy I could take or leave. However it took a deep dive into a musical education
Thanks! I've added them to my to-read list.
The sections with Songmi and the Sloosha's Crossing sections impressed me with their creativity and attention to detail. The dialect in Sloosha's Crossing was fun for me to read and the anthropological interaction was interesting alongside the post disaster setting.
The Sonmi dystopian corporate future seemed extremely well done. I appreciated the inclusion of the concept that revolutionary cells get infiltrated and used for government purposes. Like Sloosha's Crossing, the word choice in the Sonmi section was fun to parse and communicated a lot about the development of that civilization.
Did you see parts of the narrative that work as metafiction, i.e. parts of the story that seem to refer to the book as a whole?
What did you think about the structure of the book?
Maybe I'm just lacking in insight or appreciation of subtlety, but I felt that the structure was only moderately successful. To me, the link between the stories was something along the lines of: "these stories all happened because of the same kind of human flaws." I was kind of hoping for more meaning behind that comet birthmark beyond that. Maybe that's part of why I appreciated the Sonmi and Zachry stories a bit more, because the former story directly influenced the latter, and returning to the Sonmi story resolved some questions about the Zachry story. In contrast, Sonmi could have been watching any Disney other than Cavendish, and it wouldn't have affected the story. I had this expectation that the end of the Cavendish story would tell me something significant about the Sonmi story, so I was a bit disappointed when I got to the end of it and all that happens is he escapes and gets rich off movies, which we already knew would happen from the presence of his film in the future. Sure there were some parallels you could draw between the two stories, and I can see why Sonmi might enjoy such a Disney ending, but I didn't find the connection that satisfying.
So in the case that there was a strong link between the stories, I felt like it added a lot of depth. In the cases where there wasn't much of a causal link, the structure felt like a cheap trick to me, cutting away from the action to build suspense rather than having the story speak for itself.
I agree, and I think the experiment of recursively embedding the stories within themselves doesn't really pay off. It's certainly unique, and it is (partly) what drew me to the book in the first place, years ago. But I think laying this out as six short stories would have worked just as well, if not better. His more recent book The Bone Clocks is more straightforwardly a group of short stories, although they more cohesively tied up in a single narrative with shorter time-skips between each section. That said, I would welcome more books in this style if the continuation and influence of the stories on each other across decades and centuries were more pronounced.
An interesting thing about David Mitchell is that all of his works are vaguely self-referential, and all appear to take place in the same mildly fantastical universe. Main characters in one story are given passing mentions in another. They're like little Easter eggs for readers of all of his works, and are a fun little addition, even if they add very little to the experience overall.
I need to reread to be sure but I think I found meaning in the midpoint transition of most of the stories seemingly moving suddenly from failure/defeat to success in some form. Admittedly suicide is an odd form of success but he wrote his magnum opus so I think it fits.
I also was looking for something more between the stories. I kept waiting for that "ah-ha" moment when you finally figured out how all of the stories connected and was very disappointed to realize there wasn't anything. The Sonmi and Sloosha's Crossin' stories interconnected well and it seems to me that those two stories could have been more detailed and then released as a book of their own. I enjoyed (most of) the rest as individual short stories - their ties to the other stories were threadbare and ultimately had no impact on the story lines.
I thought the musical work Cloud Atlas in the story of the young musician was meant to represent this novel and its structure.
I appreciated how each story found a turning point between the two divided narratives that changed the trajectory. I might reread the book to see what I can see in light of what I know now. It seems to me that Mitchell is playing with variations on themes.
What did you think about how the author treated power relationships, influence, authority and coercion?
This book has a huge variety of characters, narratives, voices and styles. Having read it, is there any place where you think you recognize the voice or perspective of the author coming through to the reader?
I think the morality of the book is where Mitchell's perspective shines through the most, and perhaps as well in the tale of an artist's struggles in Letters from Zedelghem. I've read a few of his works, and as a writer I think he is quite chameleonic, and I don't know that he has a consistent "voice" that I have ever noted. He slips on the guise of characters with ease, often writing in the first person, in a variety of eras, and that makes it difficult for me to pick out a particular style or voice that I could point to and say "that's David Mitchell!" I like a lot of his work though, ponderous and action-lite though they typically are, and even where the is action it's never the point of the book.
What did you think about how the book dealt with ethics and moral choice?
I thought the final choice of the notary from San Francisco at the end of the book was an interesting statement of ethical autonomy and moral possibility after a book that was full of hopeless situations and powerful bad actors that might suggest despair.
Yeah, given that his idea that selfishness would lead to ruin was shown to be true, I wasn't sure what to think about Ewing's concluding statements in the context of the other stories and what kind of message we're getting from this book. Maybe something along the lines of civility and civilization may have some inconsistent ebb and flow, while selfishness is a constant. In these stories, the people who were selfish generally seemed to gain from it, and the people who were trying to be civil and moral experienced hardships. So then the author is demonstrating that civility is bad for you but good for society, while selfishness is good for but bad for society?
I want to reread Cloud Atlas some time to maybe chase down this theme.
But for me, ending the book with a character who has been disgusted by colonial power relationships and racism then following a near death experience with a choice to go join the abolition movement sends a signal to the reader. I can't interpret it fully but perhaps something like choose your side and do your part.
I read the book years ago, but I think you are hitting something on the head here. The book shows that selfishness often is the easy road out and I think the author is using that as a way of explaining the horrible history of humanity. But, it is through individuals wanting something better that we have fought against it to make the world a better place. I think with Sloosha's Crossin' Mitchell shows that progress is not guaranteed and we can fall back into depravity, but also that said depravity is not inevitable as long as people are willing to move forward.
I took a similar conclusion from the ending and Ewing's choice to become an abolitionist. It is a subtle book but parts were very unpleasant for me while others were extremely satisfying to read.
What subsections did you find difficult or disliked?
The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing is definitely what I would define as a slog, and it's a shame that the book has to begin and end with my least favourite of the stories it tells. I think the overall story it tells is fine, but I struggle with the delivery quite a lot, which makes it challenging to get through. When I do reread Cloud Atlas I typically skim (or even skip) this one.
The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing pretty much completely put me off the book, TBH. As I said in another comment, I know it's historical fiction, and that's how people thought/behaved/talked back then, but the blatant racism being portrayed really got under my skin and left a horrible taste in my mouth that I couldn't seem to get rid of.
Despite that horrible first section and impression, I managed to slowly grind my way through Luisa Rey to Timothy Cavendish, but even getting there felt like a real slog, and I found myself not enjoying either of those parts much either... so I decided to finally call it quits. Sorry, @boxer_dogs_dance. :(
Not a problem at all. This book club is meant to be fun and satisfying. I will say that the two specific setions about Sunmi and about Zachry that you missed were a lot of fun for me with the best aspects of dystopian, post apocalyptic and science fiction. I wish the sections had each been written separately. Personally I have enjoyed historical fiction in the past but Adam Ewing was hard for me. I did like the way his arc ended but not enough to recommend it to someone the way I would recommend Patrick OBrian novels like Master and Commander or I Claudius or the Physician as historical fiction i have enjoyed.
The section about the young musician I just found grim and distasteful all the way around.
At the end of the day, the book club is meant to serve and help you. Don't feel bad about a dnf.
The weird part is that I greatly enjoy Historical Fiction too (esp Military Historical Fiction). I absolutely love love love James Clavell's Asian Saga, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin series, C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series, Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe series, etc. etc. etc.
And I'm not entirely unaccustomed to seeing portrayals of racism in such novels either. However, something about the way David Mitchell wrote that first section felt different and far more visceral to me. Although I think my expectations were also severely distorted from having watched the movie ages ago too, which I only vaguely recall, but I'm pretty sure it had no racism in it, which is why suddenly encountering that horrible portrayal as the very first thing in the book really took me by surprise.
Ah well, maybe one day I'll go back and try to read it again... but I'll probably just skip the first part if I do, to see if that helps me read the rest without feeling like the experience has been tainted.
I'm currently really enjoying the new series Shogun.
As I mentioned, the Physician by Noah Gordon was a fun historical fiction for me
I actually own the old Shogun series starring Richard Chamberlain on DVD. :) I'm waiting for the new series to finish before I watch it though, since I prefer to binge stuff rather than having to wait week to week.
I've read I, Claudius before too, and also watched the old BBC series based on it as well (which is dated, but still very good, IMO).
I've never heard of The Physician before though, so I will definitely have to check that out. Thanks for the recommendation!
Would you recommend this book? If yes, would you provide any warnings or disclaimers?
okay, confession time. I didn't go back to this book after watching the movie, and when I made the decision I was going to dnf I was so happy lol. Can't say I'd recommend the book, but the movie was pretty good.
Good for you!
I actually ended up liking many things about the book, especially the dystopian section futuristic section and the post apocalyptic section, but the historical fiction at the beginning was a slog. I hadn't heard of Cloud Atlas and didn't vote for it, but I am now happy I read it. I'm going to have to watch the film.
I watched the movie years ago, and I remember finding it very confusing, especially since the same actors played different roles in each story. According to IMDB, Halle Berry plays Native Woman, Jocasta Ayrs, Luisa Rey, Indian Party Guest, Ovid, and Meronym. I remember wondering if this was supposed to some kind of reincarnation story where a person ends up in different situations in different lifetimes depending on their circumstances, but there's something regarding that comet mark such that fate always brings them together for some purpose. Well, it didn't really turn out that way, at least not overtly. I also remember it being a really visually stunning film. I just got a big new TV, so I'll probably rewatch the movie. Maybe I'll be able to appreciate it more now that I've read the book.
hah, being pretty faceblind, I had no idea!
On the understanding that if you have seen the film it is a very different beast; and if not that it's a fairly ponderous, more philosophical than action-packed tome, then yes I would recommend this book!
I would not recommend this book. I had the distinct feeling that it was a collection of short stories, tied together rather tenuously, somewhat awkwardly, and deliberately, so that it could be called a novel. Aside from the Luisa Rey and Sonmi stories, the characters in the others were quite unlikeable. Sloosha's Crossing was difficult reading due to the dialect (soooo many apostrophes!). I stopped reading in the middle of the 2nd part of the Luisa story; I just gave up, the enjoyment factor was lacking. There were definitely some things I truly liked about the book. I loved the descriptions of Sonmi's world, such as yellowup for sunrise and calling things by corporate names.
Honestly, no. The first story almost had me wanting to stop reading before I got through. I understand that the author was writing with an authentic tone for the period, but I truly did not enjoy reading it at all. Throughout the entire book, I was looking for that thread that was going to tie all the stories together. It seemed like it would be the comet-shaped birthmark, but nothing came of it. I agree with many of the other posters that this could have been published as a book of short stories. I feel like it would have been much more satisfying to read knowing that the stories weren't really connected before starting.
What did you think about how the author dealt with religion?
Example, p.328 a Malachite statue of prophet Malthus surveyed a dust bowl
In several of the sections I saw religion play a prominent role. In some it was understandable, such as the colonial pacific islands where missionaries played a historically realistic role in conquest and subjugation.
The self aware martyrdom of Sonmi was meant to reflect the Good Friday to Easter story although literal resurrection is replaced by the publicizing of the story and the unwitting acts of the government to raise awareness in the population.
I appreciated the tension in Sloosha's crossing between the secular anthropologist character and Zachry's attempt to live up to his values within the tribe and reconcile his religious beliefs with new facts.
What characters stood out positively or negatively?
What genre is Cloud Atlas? Are there books you can compare this book to as a whole, or books that you think are worth comparing with specific sections?
The confession format of Sonmi's story reminds me of The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen which I read last year and would recommend highly.
Zachry's story reminds me of a Canticle for Leibowitz in some ways.
I didn't enjoy the historical fiction section of Cloud Atlas. However, it reminds me of naval fiction I have enjoyed more such as Patrick O'Brian's stories (Master and Commander etc) and Mutiny on the Bounty.