I remember when we lived in London, this novel was in all
the bookshop windows. It had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004, and
may have outsold the winning title that year.
With the movie coming out in 2012, I thought it time to play a little
catch-up and read this 500-page novel.
It consists of six
separate, but remotely interconnected stories that take place in different
locations and in different times. The
opening story is set in the South Pacific in 1850 and was immediately
captivating and had me pulling out atlases and googling facts to find out if
they were historic, or merely fiction.
When the first story broke off in mid-sentence I cursed my Nook,
thinking that it was a transcription error in the electronic copy. No, it was just the concept of the book, the
first narrative a fragment of a diary that a subsequent character reads, only
later finding the remainder propping up one leg of a bed in a Belgian chateau—that’s
the level that in which stories are interconnected, and the fact that the main
characters in each episode are revealed to share a comet-shaped birthmark.
There was one segment, an episode that takes place after
environmental and societal collapse in the far future, that really bogged me down with its nearly
impenetrable lingo. It was a little like reading A Clockwork Orange. Maybe that’s
why it took me a month to finish this book, because after I left post-apocalypse
Hawaii, things moved along quickly again.
Anyway, Cloud Atlas might be considered difficult, but it’s
fascinating and rewarding. Some of the stories were so
compelling that I wanted the whole book to be about them. All in all the segmented structure works, which I’m not so sure
was the case with the movie version, based on what I’ve heard. A very unique and memorable novel.
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