Nietzsche's Coming to Get You: *Cloud Atlas* continued

Last week (or in the strangely ahistorical world of the internet, about twenty five centimetres below), I criticised David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas for its failure to create a convincingly realised diary from 1850. The fact that I hadn't read the rest of the novel at the time was a bit of a risk, admittedly, and indeed later that day I read the section in which one of the characters suggests that the 1850 section may be a fraud. Perhaps, then, this was leading up to some amazing intertextual twist in the closing pages? Well... no.

Cloud Atlas struggles under the weight of its own tricksy structure, six broken-backed stories arranged symmetrically and which 'follow' each other as characters 'read' the following/preceding sections. The trouble is, the novellas themselves aren't quite interesting enough to exist outside the gimmicky structure; yet that same gimmicky structure isn't quite ingenious enough to justify the content. The idea that characters in one section have read other sections of, gosh darn, the novel that you're reading right now, is now so dated (going back to at least 1860 and Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, and probably even further back to Laurence Sterne) that it doesn't really count as structural ingenuity any more. Similarly, I was expecting a bit more narrative intertwining than the idea that one man's writing makes for another's reading. As for the novel's theme of historical recurrence and the eternal return (yep, Nietzsche is in there, peeping out from 'Letters from Zedelghem'), it's the kind of thing Peter Ackroyd made a career out of in the eighties, but with more depth and resonance. Admittedly, Ackroyd's novels are also characterised by a certain kind of social conservatism (if the past just keeps coming back, what's the point of change?), something Mitchell is at pains to avoid, but with only moderate success.

So much for the structure. Once past this, the content of the six novellas is somewhat variable. "The Pacific Diary of Adam Ewing" is hamstrung by its clumsy prose, which is at least rather less cringeworthy in the second half (incidentally, that suggestion of fakery never becomes more than a suggestion, and comes across as an insurance policy for Mitchell in case the chapter isn't wholly convincing). "Letters from Zedelghem" is a so-so account of sentimental education; "Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery" starts well, but its second part is something of a let-down (the resolution seems ludicrously hurried, and the Russian doll construction of the novel means that by the time I'd got to the second part, I'd largely forgotten who was who in this section). "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" also starts well as comedy, but becomes weirdly inconsequential when the focus moves to Cavendish's escape from the retirement home in which he has become trapped. "An Orison of Sonmi-491" is the most interesting section, but loses focus towards the end (there's a theme developing here). Finally, "Sloosha's Crossin' and Ev'rythin After" is another ostentatious attempt to capture a particular voice; as the only narrative in the novel not to be split in two (being at the centre), it seems to go on for a little too long.

It's not as if the novel is awful - "Luisa Rey," "Timothy Cavendish" and "Sonmi-491" are quite compulsive in style - but this kind of historical scope and structual ambition requires a better pay-off than Ewing's final meditation that the will to power will eventually undo humanity (you think so?). I'm also not sure if the novel's recurrent structure means that we're meant to find Ewing's final optimism for a better future misguided, or if the inherent reactionary politics of the idea of the 'eternal return' simply undoes the novel's critique of the desire for colonial and corporate ascendancy. Although on reflection, that ambiguity may probably be the best thing about the novel.

NeoVictorian Bandwagon in Wheel-loss Incident: or, the first chapter of David Mitchell's *Cloud Atlas*

Just a brief note this time, primarily because of an urgent need to complain about something everybody else thinks is great (cf. Kylie Minogue, J. K. Rowling, Russell T Davies). This week I finally got around to picking up my copy of David Mitchell's much touted novel Cloud Atlas, of which I have only heard good things (although these include the damned-with-praise Richard and Judy thumbs up - never forget that these two (or more accurately, their researchers) gave an actual, proper, award to Dan Brown for his cliche compendium The Da Vinci Code)). For those of you who have missed all this, Cloud Atlas is composed of texts from various historical periods (including the future) and genres, which combine to form some kind of quasi-postmodernist time-bending extravaganza. I can't explain this more clearly at the moment, because I'm only halfway through the second chapter. I write now because I found the first infuriating.

The novel opens with "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," a diary purporting to be from 1850. As you might have guessed by now, it's dreadful; the worst kind of pseudo-Victorian prose where 'tis and 'twas are bandied around like it's 1746 and long words are dragged out because that's, like, how they spoke in olden days, innit? Some choice cuts: "No more tatterdemalion a renegado I ever beheld" (9), "circumambulating" (19), "terraqueous globe" (11). "I fancy he is a Bedlamite" (4) already sounds far too dated for the mid-nineteenth century (it might not be, but it sounds like it). The word 'and' is taboo, since the ampersand apparently lends much more historic kudos (it goes on & on & on...). Nobody actually says 'egad' or 'gadzooks,' but they're thinking about it. If this were a play, you can be sure that everyone would be rigid backed and bowing at each other continually, or punctuating conversation with waves of a handkerchief like some kind of heritage semaphore. It's 1850, but not as we know it.

There are also mistakes littered throughout. Adam is clearly from California, but his spelling is English (any decent edition of Dickens' novels clearly demonstrates the reach of American linguistic conventions) - glances at later pages of the novel reveal that other American texts have their spelling intact. Adam mentions himself as being a Yankee, which really refers specifically to one from New England or the north-east more generally (where one definitely cannot find San Francisco). But the real clincher (for me, anyway), comes on page 35: "I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism, 'To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom.'" I hope later chapters reveal Adam's father-in-law to be Charles Dickens, who invented the word 'boredom' two years later in Bleak House (1852).

Of course, anyone demented enough to thoroughly cross-reference any historical novel with the OED is going to come up with inaccuracies (to be fair, pre-1852 instances of 'boredom' are my own alarm bell, and I hope to catch out Derek Acorah some day soon). But the problem is that Mitchell fails to write something that generally sounds convincingly and specifically Victorian; his idea of the period seems to belong to the later eighteenth century, and it's difficult to read this chapter as existing in the same precise period as, say, David Copperfield. Of course, I'm also taking a risk in making these complaints without finishing the novel; later chapters may well reveal the text to be a fake (in which case, I told you so). But I had to say something, egad.