NIKKI BYRD — writer, thinker, lover

Note: This content was written entirely by me and was not generated, edited, or researched using AI.

REVIEW

Frustrating yet exceptional, Cloud Atlas is a somewhat agonizing, intriguing journey, generally brilliant and well-written, but personally an exhausting literary adventure. Mind you, I went in blind, with no idea of the plot, linguistic styles, or the chiastic structure that is prefaced, but I was captivated by the mysterious, abstract artwork on the cover (definitely judging the book by the cover).

Great things about this book include multidimensional, dynamic characters and rich, ambitious prose. You can tell this project took a lot of technical and literary expertise, with strong motifs, experimental dialects, and cyclical sociophilosophies alluding to concepts by renowned thinkers such as Darwin and Nietzsche, never missing an opportunity to capture the zeitgeist of the times, both in the past and in the dystopian future, across the world.

Each story has a structure different from the last, one epistolary, others first- and third-person narrated, filled with mysticisms more unique than its predecessor, i.e., nods to reincarnation and ontological patterns. Most of the stories leave a cliffhanger until it is finished in the second half of the book, having the reader climb up a metaphorical mountain, frustrated and stubborn, only to reach the peak and revel in the view of its magnificence (I’m speaking of the story ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After’ told in completion in the heart of the book). The journey back into the book’s valley is so beautiful that you curse yourself for rushing up the mountain in the first place.

Themes like power, oppression, and freedom are woven throughout every story and are discussed in terms of colonization, relationships, truth, age, and revolution, representing Mitchell’s “ladder of civilization” mentioned in ‘The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing’, ‘Letters from Zedelghem’, and ‘An Orison of Somni-451’.

“Belief is both prize and battlefield, within the mind and in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a Colosseum of configuration, exploitation and bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being.”

“You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the ‘natural’ (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?

Why? Because of this: one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself …. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Is this the doom written within our nature?

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree; if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real.”

Mitchell wrote literary fiction, dystopian science fiction, and historical fiction…all in one. This tour de force is a classic tale of history repeating itself while exploring the mysteries of soul connection, capturing the hope for a better future — that the ‘ladder of civilization’ as portrayed by the privileged at the top, exploiting the downtrodden at the bottom, comes to an end of the spiritual, social, and political anguish among the human race.

★★★★

SYNOPSIS

Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . .

Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.

But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.