If
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell had been a piece of music, rather than a novel,
it would probably have taken the form of a gigantic Bartok arch. Its apparently
simple, but rather disconcertingly foreign-sounding start would develop into
something that sounded quite new, but also strangely familiar. It would reach a
central climax at its keystone, but a climax that would not satisfy in the
conventional way that music often does, by achieving a stable tonic tutti in a
home key, expressed via harmonies that reassure, confirm and reinforce. No,
this climax would be violent, but also strange and disconcerting, offering as
much question as confirmation. And then it would retrace its steps, but
revealing them transformed by the very process of revisiting them. It would progress
through its stages of development until it returned to its opening theme,
mildly but intellectually transformed.
And
it would be here that we would realise that all the material the piece had
presented was in fact derived from the same basic idea, transformed via style,
tempo and time to appear different, despite its progress through different
episodes, which only now appear to be linked. At the end of the process, we are
sure where we have been taken, but not at all sure where we have arrived. It might
look and sound like the beginning, but we now see it anew, transformed, perhaps
even distorted, even a little devalued, a reality newly interpreted.
But
Cloud Atlas is a book, a literary, not a musical journey. The territory visited
in the atlas, however, is like any inhabited by any artist, that of the human
intellect and psyche. Like Julian Barnes’s A History Of The World in 10½
Chapters, it appears to meander from story to story, from setting to setting,
with only barely random links. We begin on a nineteenth century Pacific voyage
of assumed cultural superiority, graduate to a nineteen-thirties cooperation
between a famous, syphilis-ridden composer and a young, naïve and bisexual
amanuensis and then suffer a brush with corporate vengeance as a journalist
seeks to expose safety risks with an atomic energy installation. A British
vanity publisher, vainer than most of his clients, suffers success with a
gangster memoir and walks straight into demands for a greater slice of what he
assumes is his own action. Many decades later we encounter a dystopia, where a
humanoid bred purely for service graduates threateningly to a more enlightened
state. Into a further indeterminate future, we find a complete disjunction
between rich and educated versus peasant and poor, groups who do not even share
the same environment. And thus we reach the keystone in the arch, when the
characters of a dystopic future cooperate to complete a mission that appears to
be in both their interests. They share a design, a motivation, perhaps even
values.
Then
in turn we revisit each scenario we encountered on our way up. Each still
occupies its own place in space, time and perception, a state in which they
know their past but must speculate on their future. Even if we go backwards,
time still progresses. By the time we have descended the other half of the
arch, we are back where we began in the nineteenth century Pacific. But
strangely, it seems that this earliest of the characters in time knows
everything about all the others and can describe their lives.
But
as we work through these apparently different stories, we begin to perceive a
thread. There are obvious links. In some shape or form, each new scenario
demonstrates an awareness of what preceded it. But these obvious links are not
the real thematic threads. We are interested in each story because we meet
characters pursuing both cooperation and competition. We find people driven by
belief, internally driven by motives they themselves cannot control. But it is
this drive that forces them to act, and it is their actions that provoke
responses, cooperative or competitive, in others, differences usually driven by
perceived interest. And perhaps
inevitably they all judge. They all seek personal advantage, but sometimes this
is pursued via shared or group identity, alliances that both define and
protect. We compete as individuals, but we also live by cooperation, applying
judgment via assumption, presumption and prejudice, alongside what we excuse as
intellect.
Thus
Cloud Atlas examines the human condition. As an atlas it fixes certain aspects
of humanity as constants, the ever-present belief, motivation and the need to
act, to cooperate and compete. But the cloud is the nebulous form these
constants may take in different time and place. We are driven by common traits
towards unpredictable outcomes, the consequences of which our own future must
accommodate and share. In Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell perhaps there is
permanence along the way, but each scenario finds characters apparently forced
by mere circumstance to act, to respond, to initiate, but only ever with
partial sight of possible outcome. As the arch reveals its completion, we are
back where we began, but we are richer for the experience, transformed by the
journey. We might know where we are, but how do we respond? There, perhaps, is
the permanent question.
