Cloud Atlas

 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, 509 pages.

This nested novel is complex and twisting, but I will do my best to summarize it concisely nonetheless. The novel begins with the Pacific voyage of Adam Ewing in 1850, where there is much philosophy on the nature of race and civilization, and where Ewing is treated by his new friend Dr. Henry Goose treats him for a mysterious parasite. The story then jumps to 1931, when  disinherited bisexual composer Robert Frobisher finds his journal in the house of the aging composer who he is working for (and being abused by) in an attempt to break into the musical world. Then in the 1970s reporter Louisa Rey finds Frobisher's letters in the possession of a man murdered for trying to warn the world about an unsafe nuclear reactor, a catastrophe it falls on her to stop. A novelization of Rey's adventures are sent to publisher Timothy Cavendish in more-or-less present day England, which he reads on the run from debtors before being inadvertently locked in an old folks home. The film adaptation of Cavendish's ordeal is illicitly watched by Sonmi-451, a clone in a far future Korea taken over entirely by corporate greed where she has the opportunity to discover herself as a person instead of property for the first time. A recorded interview with Sonmi after her arrest is found by a young man in a post-apocalyptic iron age Hawaii, who's culture reveres Sonmi as a goddess. All of these source materials are interrupted, so all of these stories go unfinished. That is until we reach young Zachry on Hawaii, whose adventures at the end of recorded history reach their conclusion, as the stories finally ripple back through the centuries and all reach their conclusions. 

I picked up this book pretty much immediately after watching the 2012 film by the Wachowskis because I thought it was such a fascinating experiment in structure that I felt like I needed to compare them immediately. And I was not disappointed. Just as I suspected, the film and the novel are different in a lot of ways, but both play masterfully with their structures, allowing format to reinforce themes. And I would say that this is a novel driven by themes more than any other element; I believe I will be thinking about the details for quite a long time. This is an intensely literary novel, but despite that it rarely feels slow or difficult. It is full of action, and the characters are all flawed and compelling. I am also extremely impressed by how well Mitchell captured each of the many genres he wrote in, the style and language shifted dramatically in each story, which I think went a long way towards making each character feel complete in their own story (even if the language shift after the apocalypse was a little hard to parse until I got used to it. Overall I think this book was a masterwork, and I would definitely recommend it to others.