My book club's pick for our August meeting is David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Published in 2004, Mitchell's third novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, which apparently means people are supposed to revere it. Right now, I do not.
So far, I am on page 326 of its 509 pages. And I am just sitting here, struggling through absurd language, screaming, "WHY WON'T YOU END???"
This book has an interesting format. I'll give it that. The "story" (if you can call it that) is told through six separate novellas of sort. The first is the diary of a man crossing the Pacific on a ship in the 1850s; the second is a series of letters from a young composer in the 1930s who headed to Austria to escape debt; the third is a thriller about a journalist in the '70s trying to expose a corrupt energy company; the fourth is about a publisher who escapes from some rough extortionists and ends up in a retirement home from which he can't escape; the dystopian fifth story interviews a Korean clone bred for work in a fast food joint who has gained consciousness; the sixth takes place in post-apocalyptic Hawaii where...well I'm not really sure what happened there.
So that all sounds like a mess of things that are unrelated. Except for brief mention of the previous story in each story...and I mean very brief. As in, the Composer in story B finds the journals of the man in story A. He finds them, and Mitchell mentions that fact, and nothing else. Nothing else gives you a hint as to how these stories all connect, except that this comet-shaped birthmark keeps appearing, and I'm not sure at all where that fits in.
And because we're spanning centuries of time here, Mitchell uses different language for every story. But I don't get why people (ie: on Goodreads) are so impressed by that. It doesn't take much to make up a language for dystopian robots and post-apocalyptic savages. Because it's made up. If anything, it just makes the story really confusing and hard to read. Robotic sentences like,
"The amnesiads in my Soapsac were reduced, accordingly, and ascension catalysts instreamed," (p. 197)or incoherent sentences like,
"Windy mornin' it was, yay, I mem'ry well, sand'n'dune grass whippin' an' bloodflower threshin' an' surf flyin' off scuddin' breakers" (p. 258).I'm not impressed.
Oy. I was doing alright with stories B, C, and D, perhaps actually enjoying them, and then we get to crap in the future, and I hit a wall. It's just not my style.
The book is structured A B C D E F E D C B A, with the sixth, post-apocalyptic story being the only one told in full in one sitting. Having just finished this one, I still don't see the point. I mean, maybe I can gather that it's about souls drifting through time, but if that's the over-arching theme that ends up tying them all together...well, COME ON [insert Gob Bluth voice here]! I'm just not understanding why all this is necessary to make that point. Because so far, it's not made very well.
I'll write an update once I finish the second half (once I revisit the previous five stories and once I am happily far away from the much hated sci-fi sections) to see if my opinions change. And once more after book club, when hopefully, a group discussion will add a lot to it. But for now...
this book is far too smart for me.
