Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas

Big and ambitious, nested episodes bookended, a set of Russian dolls novel. All linked. The lawyer’s diary recording his voyage and his stowaway slave, is found in the ageing, chronically ill composer’s library. The young, impecunious musician reads the diary. He writes to his mathematician lover, who, later, in the next section, tips off a young crusading journalist to a nuclear energy company’s hushing up safety issues he has identified.

This is the subject of a manuscript a vanity-publisher is reading (and he’s not impressed with it), in the book’s comic section the vanity-publisher is trapped in an institution owned by his brother, from which he plots his escape. This is recorded as a film, The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.

The central two sections are set in two natural science fiction futures: dystopian and post-apocalyptic. They are both written in new English. The dystopian future has written English pared down to a phonetic form: xzecs are the ruling class, with xtra privliges. The post-apocalyptic is easy to read (compared, say, to Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker – Hoban said it took him years after writing that novel to regain control of English) but still slows reading progress down with some extra effort needed: “First time I went inside the Icon'ry was with Pa'n'Adam'n'Jonas when I was a sevener. Ma'd got a leakin' malady birthin' Catkin, an' Pa took us to pray to Sonmi to fix her, 'cos the Icon'ry was a spesh holy place an' Sonmi was norm'ly list'nin' there. Watery dark it was inside. Wax'n'teak-oil'n'time was its smell. The icons lived in shelfs from floor to roof, how many there was I cudn't tell, nay, you don't go countin' 'em like goats, but the gone-lifes outnumber the nowlifes like leafs outnumber trees. Pa's voice spoke in the shadows, fam'liar it was but eerie too, askin' Sonmi to halt Ma's dyin' an' let her soul stay in that body for longer, an' in my head I prayed the same, tho' I knowed I been marked by Old Georgie at Sloosha's Crossin'.”

Sonmi~451 is a fabricant (that’s very close to a Bladerunner ‘replicant’), a manufactured human designed to work twenty hours a day for twelve years then go off for recycling. The fabricants carry out menial work for the purebloods. The world (or Korea anyway) has become completely dominated by the big corporations (how far from that are we now?) and consumerism reigns. Sonmi~451 escapes the drugged slavery of the fastfood chain she works in. Before her capture she watches The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. As well as a lot of other things, too.

In the central section, Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After, set after an event referred to as The Fall, valley farmer Zac worships Sonmi as a god, and deals with his past and having to host a visitor from a more advanced culture. This section plays out in full, before the five preceding chapters are closed out.

It was short listed for the 2004 Booker Prize, won by Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, and also short listed for the science fiction Nebula and Arthur C Clarke awards. It isn’t the best novel I’ve picked up this year, but it is big on imagination and scope, it’s ambitious, and it’s big on bigness, and those are all good things.

Richard and Judy recommended it. Well, you can’t have everything.