Slacks for Ella Funt

I went about reading David Mitchell books backward. I read Black Swan Green last spring, before I read Cloud Atlas. When Cloud Atlas came out, I thought it would be one of those overly long postmodern things that E likes so much and I’m not so crazy about. So I bought it for him to read and skipped it myself. He really liked it, but I still hadn’t planned on reading it until I read and really liked Black Swan Green.

Cloud Atlas turned out to be much more engrossing than I had originally expected. In structure, it’s a series of stories about different characters in different eras. Mitchell is showing off here, because clearly there’s not anything he can’t do—historical epistolary stories, modern thrillers, ironic farce, futuristic sci-fi. I got into each story, only for it to end midstream. It was very frustrating, until I flipped ahead and realized that he was going to pick up each story again in the second half of the book. The only story I didn’t like was the center story, in a post-apocalyptic future. It was longer than the other stories, since it was all one piece, and it felt too long. Also, it was in dialect, and I hate reading dialect.

The question with books like this that have separate storylines is how they are eventually going to connect. The connections between the stories here seemed a little contrived—a birthmark shaped like a comet, letters from story appearing in the next story, etc. It seems like Mitchell wasn’t really concerned about making connections as much as demonstrating his themes: the perils of progress and the risks of survival of the strongest. In the end, it left me thinking more of 2001: A Space Odyssey than anything else.