Cloud Atlas (novel)

Did You Know?

• The book's style was inspired by Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler.
• Mitchell compared the adapters' work on the film to translating a work into another language.
• The novel was adapted to film by directors Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis, with production beginning in September 2011 at Studio Babelsberg in Germany.

Plot summary

The novel's structure is a set of six interlocking stories, each one encountered by the main character of the following tale as the timeline moves forward to the central sixth story. The first five narratives all break off at a crucial point, and after the sixth story concludes, the others are finished in reverse order, moving backward through time. In the 1800s on the Chatham Islands, an American lawyer named Adam Ewing writes in his diary while his vessel undergoes repairs. He sees a Māori overseer whip Autua, a Moriori man who is enslaved. On the ship, the only friend Ewing has, Dr. Henry Goose, tells him he has a deadly parasite. Autua hides in Ewing's cabin. When Ewing tells the captain, Autua shows he is a capable sailor and is permitted to work for his fare to Hawaii. In 1931 near Bruges, a broke and disowned English musician, Robert Frobisher, corresponds with his lover Rufus Sixsmith. He works as an assistant to the aging composer Vyvyan Ayrs, turning a simple tune Ayrs provides into a piece called Der Todtenvogel that receives acclaim. Feeling confident, Frobisher starts writing his own music. He has an affair with Ayrs' wife Jocasta, which makes her daughter Eva suspicious. He secretly sells some of Ayrs' rare books, finds the first part of The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, and asks Sixsmith to locate the rest. As the season changes, Jocasta thanks him for sparking Ayrs' renewed inspiration, and Frobisher agrees to remain through the next year. In 1975 in Buenas Yerbas, California, journalist Luisa Rey meets an older Rufus Sixsmith in a broken elevator and mentions her father, who was a war correspondent. Sixsmith warns her that the Seaboard HYDRA nuclear plant is dangerous, and he is later found dead in what looks like a suicide. Luisa thinks the plant's executives are getting rid of whistleblowers and retrieves Frobisher's letters from Sixsmith's hotel room. A plant worker named Isaac Sachs gives her a copy of Sixsmith's report, but before she can release it, a hitman named Bill Smoke forces her car off a bridge. In early 21st-century London, publisher Timothy Cavendish, age 65, enjoys a sales spike after one of his authors kills a critic. Fearing the author's brothers, he looks for a safe place, but his brother Denholme tricks him into a cruel nursing home that Cavendish first thinks is a hotel.

Background and writing

Mitchell said the book's title was inspired by the music of the same name by Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Both Ichiyanagi and John Lennon, whose music inspired Mitchell's previous novel number9dream, were husbands of Yoko Ono. Mitchell stated that the title and the book address reincarnation and the universality of human nature. He said that Vyvyan Ayrs and Robert Frobisher were inspired by English composer Frederick Delius and his amanuensis Eric Fenby, and noted the influence of Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker on the Sloosha's Crossin' story.

Reception

The BBC's Keily Oakes said that although the book's structure could be challenging, Mitchell had taken six wildly different stories and melded them into one fantastic and complex work. Kirkus Reviews called it sheer storytelling brilliance. Laura Miller of The New York Times compared it to the perfect crossword puzzle, challenging but fun. The Observer's Hephzibah Anderson called it exhilarating and commented positively on the links between the stories. A. S. Byatt wrote in The Guardian that it gave a complete narrative pleasure that is rare. The Washington Post's Jeff Turrentine called it a highly satisfying and unusually thoughtful addition to the expanding puzzle book genre. The New Yorker called it virtuosic. Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson found it a new, science fiction-inflected variation on the historical novel. Richard Murphy said in the Review of Contemporary Fiction that Mitchell had taken core values from his previous novels and built upon them. Criticism focused on the book's failure to meet its lofty goals. F&SF reviewer Robert K. J. Killheffer praised Mitchell's talent and inventiveness but noted that for all its pleasures, Cloud Atlas falls short of revolutionary. Theo Tait of The Daily Telegraph gave a mixed review, focusing on clashing themes, saying it effectively pastiches everything from Victorian travelogue to corporate kill-speak to airport thriller but spends half its time wanting to be The Simpsons and the other half the Bible. In 2019, Cloud Atlas was ranked 9th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. In 2020, Bill Gates recommended it as part of his Summer Reading List.

Textual variations

While researching the novel, scholar Martin Paul Eve discovered major differences between the American and British editions. He described the level of variation as "astonishing" and noted that one chapter had been "almost entirely rewritten." Author David Mitchell, who approved both versions, explained the situation. The original editor for the US publisher left mid-project, leaving the American manuscript untouched for a long time. Meanwhile, Mitchell, his UK editor, and copy editor kept revising the manuscript. These updates were never sent to the US publisher. Later, when a new US editor took over and made their own changes, Mitchell did not ask for those to be applied to the British edition, which was nearly ready for printing. Mitchell admitted that his inexperience early in his career meant he did not realize having two different texts of the same novel across the Atlantic would create a difficult question about which version should be considered the definitive one. As a result, he never ensured the American edits were added to the British version or vice versa.