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Articles and Reviews: BOOKS
Cloud Atlas
By David Mitchell
What variety! What value! Cloud Atlas, David
Mitchell’s third novel after Ghostwritten
and the Booker-nominated number9dream, is
really six books in one. It stretches through time
and space, from the mid-nineteenth century to far
into the future, and features six different narrators
whose stories overlap and intersect, echoing and paralleling
each other in subtly reflexive ways. The first five
are interrupted in mid-flow, and then continued again
in the second half of the book, in reverse order,
making the whole converge on the middle section, which
depicts a primitive, post-nuclear society, the most
distant fast forward, but also the most savage and
backward environment.
The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing has a naïve
San Franciscan notary voyaging reluctantly home across
the ocean from the South Sea islands in 1850, appalled
by the casual cruelty of the captain and first mate
of his ship, while being slowly poisoned by his quack
doctor. He also learns much about the subjugation
of the Moriori by the Maori on the way, and of colonists’
justification of ‘the ladder of civilisation’.
In Letters from Zedelghem a disinherited
young struggling composer is blagging a precarious
livelihood in Belgium between the First and Second
World Wars, as amanuensis to a more famous but now
dried-up composer, while having an affair with his
employer’s wife and falling in love with his
daughter. Half-Lives - The First Luisa Rey Mystery
is a hard-boiled Chandleresque detective thriller,
in which the high-minded investigative journalist
heroine risks her life exposing corporate duplicity
in Governor Reagan’s California. The Ghastly
Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish has a loquacious
vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors in
a contemporary Britain where the privatised rail service
is in a shambles, and inadvertently winding up imprisoned
in an old peoples’ home. An Orison of Sonmi~451
is the testament of a genetically modified ‘dinery
server’-cum-revolutionary on death row, in a
future Korea where ‘if consumers are satisfied
with their lives at any meaningful level…plutocracy
is finished’, and language has devolved to the
point where all shoes are ‘nikes’, all
cars are ‘fords’, all petrol is ‘exxon’
and all citizens are ‘consumers’. Zachary,
the semi-literate, oral narrator of Sloosha’s
Crossing an’ Ev’rythin’ After
is a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall
of science and civilisation and the return of tribal
warfare, reminiscent of Russell Hoban’s Riddley
Walker in his disintegrated language, which mirrors
his world.
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As compendious and arcane as Pynchon,
and with as large an appetite for pastiche as that great
connoisseur of the conspiracy theory displayed in his
historical novel Mason & Dixon, Mitchell
deftly points up the equivalence between the blind rapacity
of the nineteenth century European colonial project
and contemporary globalisation, a critique which shows
both enterprises as grossly exploitative exercises dressed-up
as the onward march of progress.
David Mitchell may well be possessed of genius. Even
if he isn’t, there is no doubting that he is talented
in the extreme. As well-plotted, entertaining narrative,
Cloud Atlas succeeds on many levels. As political
and cultural fable, with an unerring humanist sense
of the dangerous will to power that lies at the dark
heart of man, it’s visionary. More than Amis –
purveyor of class-ridden, public schoolboy fictions
– or Self – the body-morphing of whose characters
is becoming increasingly predictable –(and both
of whom are far too worried about what the London publishing/media
circus thinks about them), the internationalised Mitchell
(formerly resident in Japan, now living in Ireland)
is the Brit to watch.
He is in danger of once again giving the post-modern
novel a good name.
First published in the Irish Independent
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