It's getting on toward the middle of February, which I sometimes feel is the longest month, at least it seems so in anticipation of a return of spring. I had thought that after moving back to Texas I might feel differently, but this has been an unusually bad winter by central Texas standards. Last year was perhaps not a completely faithful prediction of things to come. We had a few cold days, but no real sustained winter weather. This year those old Texas northers started back in November and have continued well into February. We've had some breaks, with temperatures rising back into the 70s and nearing 80 on a few occasions. I even got out and worked in the yard on the weekend. But always the warm spells are followed by the next winter blast from the north, sometimes accompanied by freezing rain and icy conditions lasting most of the day, which is the current forecast. That said, winter here is pretty much a walk in the park compared to what we learned to accept and endure back in northern Virginia.
Nevertheless, winter is winter, and both J and I tend to hibernate rather than embrace the cold, which has meant a bit more of reading lately. So far I've read five books, and will likely read one or two more before this month is out. I've just finished David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which was quite an experience. Some of those in my Men's Book Club had mentioned this earlier book by Mitchell when we turned our attention to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. It sounded interesting, and my experience with Jacob de Zoet left me wondering what it might be like. When I picked it up and started reading the first of the six interlaced stories, I suspected I was in for more of the same. Cloud Atlas begins with a journal written in 1850 by Adam Ewing while on a South Seas voyage, where we are introduced to his new found friend, another polymath philosophical physician, named Henry Goose.
But with the first abrupt shift of the narrative everything changes, and the novel becomes a series of letters written to one Rufus Sixsmith in 1931 by a talented but somewhat dissolute young English student, who after leaving university and being dispossessed by his family, has traveled to Flanders where he convinces an aging composer to take him on as his amanuensis. I won't go into all the various plot twists, but while in residence with the composer, the student, Robert Frobisher discovers and begins reading a copy of the journal of Adam Ewing. When Frobisher's letters break off, we find ourselves reading a mystery thriller set in 1975 in California. While investigating potential nuclear hazards at an atomic energy plant revealed by a suppressed report written by the English scientist Rufus Sixsmith, the protagonist Luisa Rey comes across the letters of Robert Frobisher and tracks down his only composition "Cloud Atlas Sextet."
Like the previous sections of the novel, Luisa Rey's mystery breaks off, this time with a genuine cliffhanger, as her VW is forced into the sea from a bridge. Next we read the rather comic narrative of present day English publisher, Timothy Cavendish, whose brother helps him escape from thugs by, without his knowledge, checking him into what turns out to be a nursing home instead of a remote little hotel. I was not entirely surprised to discover that the book Cavendish is reading and considering for publication just as his ordeal at the nursing home begins is called Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery. Unfortunately for Cavendish, his hopes of escaping from the nursing home and getting on with his reading and publishing are dashed by a sudden stroke, not of bad luck, but the genuine article.
From here the novel segues into science fiction and we're reading the report of a rebel fabricant who works with dozens of her identical sister clones in an underground fast food restaurant in what turns out to be a futuristic post-corporate totalitarian Korea, where purebloods (what's left of the human race) are served by fabricant slaves. Having recently re-read Brave New World, I kept thinking I was picking up references or at least echoes -- cars referred to as fords, recording devices as sonys -- but then most post-industrial, futuristic dystopian cultures probably have certain things in common. Anyway Sonmi~451, our heroine, has been somehow chosen as an experiment in enlightenment, or ascension, and her report or confession catches us up on the results. This part of the novel breaks off as Sonmi is watching a movie based on the adventures of, yes you probably already guessed it, Timothy Cavendish.
The final part of the novel, the sixth, is a central story of post apocalyptic earth, set in Hawaii in an even more distant future, where a goddess called Sonmi is now the object of cultic worship by one peaceful little settlement of what remains of humanity. This part of the story is told by an old man, Zachry, who speaks a rather degraded form of English -- it reminded me a bit of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. Just when you start to have reason to hope the world may be saved by a mysterious little group of advanced humans, known as prescients, who still have access to some of the old advanced technology, it turns out that they too are dying from plagues and bad genes, and that doesn't even take into account the evil degenerate raiders from the other side of the island who want to kill or enslave everyone else.
Well, at least this section isn't interrupted by a cliffhanger, or not exactly, but with its conclusion the novel sets about revisiting and resolving each of the previous five nested parts. First we learn Sonmi~451's fate, and then Timothy Cavendish's, and Luisa Rey's, and Robert Frobisher's and so on to the conclusion of Adam Ewing's voyage and journal. I'm still not entirely sure what I think of the book, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. There's a good deal more to ponder than I've included or even alluded to in this little summary. And I've discovered that there are many readers who really love David Mitchell's books. Certainly, he's a very talented and imaginative writer, and while some of the linkages and nesting effects of Cloud Atlas seem a little bit contrived, nevertheless it's fun and often ingenious. Even so, although I might take a look now at the movie of Cloud Atlas, I doubt I'll undertake another of Mitchell's books anytime soon. It was entertaining, but there's a great deal of other stuff I want to read. And looking outside I see it's definitely a good day for reading.
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