Cloud Atlas

Finished reading 'Cloud Atlas' a bit ago. Started writing an article about it, then stopped, because i didn't have anything original or interesting to say. A few days later, and i've realised that this is the internet goddamnit, this isn't about original or interesting. Still, this page is more half-sensical reminders to myself than anything else. Just in case you missed that:

Under Construction. 1998. Knows it.

• First up, i thought it was quite good. This is not an attempt to bash the book.
• Let's face it, it was complete rubbish.
• Well, no, alright, not complete rubbish. But definitely not a lasting contribution to literature. Super-definitely not even close to the hype. Definitely a classic work of middlebrow fiction - make the reader feel clever and sophisticated without actually making them work too hard, or giving them any of those annoying 'ideas'. The last thing someone on a long plane trip, or lying on a beach somewhere, or on the tube to work, needs is ideas, after all.
• To me, it read like someone who doesn't know about SF trying to write SF - like that Kazuo Ishiguro clones book. At least when Salman Rushdie dabbles with SF, he's got a good few decades of reading X-Men comics behind his efforts.
• I'd been led to expect a book which had mind-blowing cosmic scope or something. I wasn't expecting Stapledon - Stapledon's dead - but maybe some more conventionally literary version of him, doing to modern humanity (anatomically modern humanity, that is) what Olaf did to the fullest sweep of humanity, and the universe it lives in. I didn't get that. I got some competently written but ultimately idea-free stories.
• Yes, idea-free. Am i wrong? Did i miss the ideas? The disparity between people's descriptions of this book and my perception of it is so great, i am quite ready to believe that i simply failed to get it, that there's a treasury of good stuff in there that went straight over my head (although i did get the 'Funes the Memorious' reference, which made me happy). Or could it simply be that the people who rave about this book are people who haven't read a lot of SF, and so for whom Mitchell's cack-handed attempt at scope was genuinely new? Is mainstream literature really so intellectually bankrupt that this is a genuinely outstanding book there?
• Anyway, yes, the ideas. Apparently, this is a book about humanity's will to power (sorry - Humanity's Will To Power, this is serious stuff!). I know that because it says so on the back. And in Niall's review. And, in case i didn't read any of that stuff, every few dozen pages, a character turns round and delivers a monologue to remind you. And, apparently as an afterthought, the conclusion of the book (which, incidentally is halfway through - or is it? D'you see? Genius!) is that humanity's will to power ends up - get this - destroying humanity! Oh noes! David Mitchell is confronting me with a mind-wrenchingly novel concept which has shattered all my bourgeois preconceptions with its postmodern intensity!
• Seriously. Not trying to be funny now - that is literally what the book does. It shows you successive scenes of people being selfish and nasty, and the end result of humanity self-immolating, and i guess expects you to applaud, as if this was somehow different to virtually every work of Western literature of the past century.
• Jesus.
• Some humans seem to be impressed by the fact that the book hopscotches through the centuries. It always tickles me when people are impressed by that, as if it was new. I'm pretty sure i wrote a story with that structure when i was at school; i think i was probably ripping off the Isaac Asimov's 'The Last Question'.
• The recurring motifs (the birthmark, the permutations of the phrase 'cloud atlas' itself, etc) and links between the stories (the denouement of the Louisa Rey story taking place in the shadow of the ship from the Adam Ewing story, the heroine of the Zachry story having learned to ride from the tribe who live on the land previously occupied by the reactors in the Louisa Rey story, etc) pissed me off. They were cute, definitely, and they could have been used to real effect, but they ended up being purely decorative. To waste that amount of symbolic power on ornamentation is, to my mind, a dereliction of duty in a writer.
• Ooh, just got another one: Luisa Rey, "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" - Thornton Wilder, 1927, people dying on a bridge, description of five not-quite-separate lives.
• Taking the book as a collection of short stories, and forgetting about the alleged serious overtones, i like it a lot more. The Frobisher story is a rather good and beautifully lightly written character study, i think. The Louisa Rey story was an enjoyable and slightly Tarantinoesque pastiche of 70s American political stories. The Cavendish story brilliantly blends farce and abject horror - i really liked that one.
• Looking at the book this way still doesn't leave you with a work of any great intellectual heft, though. I didn't come away from that book, read from either angle, with any new ideas, or any challenged preconceptions, or any new ways of seeing things. People have described Cloud Atlas as 'thought-provoking'; i'd be interested to hear what thoughts it provoked. I found it quite wanting-a-cup-of-tea-provoking, but little more.
• I was impressed by the futurespeak in the Sonmi bit - futuristic language is famously very hard to do convincingly, but i thought this was an excellent effort, not at all in-your-face, but definitely perceptible. I do wonder how it'll read in ten or twenty years, though!