The Simple Message and the Complicated Style: Cloud Atlas

The third of my book groups to discuss David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas did so last week, and I've been musing about our discussion ever since.

Each time I've read the book I've been able to make a bit more sense of it.  There are six interlocking stories, as you may know either from reading it or seeing the movie.  Five of them are told in two parts, separated by the sixth which is a dystopia set hundreds of years in the future where humans are confined, it seems, to Hawaii.

The first part of the first five stories ends in a cliff hanger, at least once literally.  Things go from bad to worse and our expectations aren't great, but we're compelled to keep reading. The stories are all told in different styles, from a pseudo-documentary 19th century travel diary through a Ross Macdonald-type West Coast mystery and a Kingsley Amis satire through Russel Hoben-like science fictioin.  This  allows Mitchell to show off a bit, and also keeps the doom, gloom and suspense from being unbearable. 

Mitchell indulges in some fancy symbol-dropping, too.  References to sixes (the sign of the Beast?) abound, a birthmark  reoccurs over generations,  several of the characters muse about clouds and souls and their resemblances.  The group this week found looking for this sort of thing satisfying the way solving puzzles can be.

In the second part of the book things look up: I'd figured that much out before our discussion.  The actual end of each story is hopeful, a way toward a less terrible world is sketched out.  And, as we talked, it became clear that gestures of kindness were always rewarded, that terrible things might happen, but individual acts had implications far beyond the immediate. Indeed the book ends with the 19th century traveller vowing to go back and fight against slavery in the US, because while one person's actions might seem no larger than a drop  of water, the ocean in made up of nothing but drops of water.

Okay, that's a pretty good take-home lesson, one I'd subscribe to.  What each of us does matters.  The question I found myself asking is this: why did Mitchell go to such trouble obscure it?  Why does he make us work so hard to arrive at the heart of the matter?

Because, I've decided, in doing so he makes us take if far more seriously.  Which is what a writing wants most, I think.