Cloud Atlas, David
Mitchell
As a pre-schooler, I would tell my Irish Catholic mum that
in my last life, I was a Jewish man who was killed in an accident where a
balcony over a railway collapsed. She
nearly collapsed. No, I was not and
never had been Jewish, I was not a man and couldn’t have ever been one, and as
a little Catholic girl, I was not to believe in reincarnation. The whole thing was just wrong.
As I would insist, describing details of my winter overcoat,
my baldness, the state of disrepair of the balcony, the relatives’ voices
warning me off the balcony, my stubborn insistence on peering down at the railway
tracks, my mother would grow truly harried.
Reincarnation did not and could not exist, and furthermore it was not
allowed. When I then went on to tell her
of another death involving a Victorian hot air balloon she really popped.
Today I’m not totally convinced in the theory of
reincarnation, but I do warm to the idea.
I’d rather live in a universe where we reincarnate, rather than one
where we don’t. So when the trailers
came out for the movie, Cloud Atlas,
I was intrigued. It didn’t have a very
long run in the theatres, so I tried to find it on pay per view, and
couldn’t. It finally appeared on our
regular cable one night, so I PVR’d it.
Luckily I did, as I needed to rewind it umpteen times to understand the
dialogue and quick time shifts.
Eventually I was onto my third go around with it, still stumped by
certain passages. Quickly I downloaded
the book and fell into a deep and fascinating well.
These are six stories nested into one another, like Russian
dolls. They begin in the 1800s, move forward
and backward among the 1930s, 1970s, 1980s, 2100s and perhaps the 3000s,
although it’s hard to tell, since that narrator’s concept of numbers leaps from
the hundreds suddenly to the millions.
By that time frame, civilization is mostly gone, aside from small tribal
groups of nuclear survivors in Hawaii, and an even smaller group of travelling
individuals who still possess technology, but their numbers have dwindled to a
mere handful. The individuals in these
stories are the same throughout the time frames, although they aren’t
necessarily reincarnated into the same bodies that the movie depicts.
Stylistically, the novel is challenging. The sections from the 1800s use the
vocabulary and speech patterns used then, so the language is much more elaborate
and convoluted from how we speak. But
the sections from the future, especially the far future rely on very strange
word changes and groupings. Not only
does the language shift over time, but the nuclear catastrophe that wipes out
civilization has a huge impact on the language.
If you loved Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky”, and if you enjoyed
figuring out what those slithy toves were doing gyring and gimbling in the
wabe, then you’ll enjoy the linguistic puzzles in the furthest future story.
As far as literature therapy goes, this novel does raise
questions about reincarnation, but more importantly about the development of
the human race. We like to think that we’re
improving with every generation and incarnation, but it will be up to you to
see if the author sees improvement or decline.
This novel also questions the concept of civilization. Who is civilized? What does it mean to be civilized? Are we more or less civilized than our predecessors?
Whether you believe in reincarnation or
not, whether you remember past lives or not, reflecting on your own degree of
civilization will always do you good.
Read this book! It will be good
for you!
And if this book triggers any past life memories, please do drop me
a line to share!
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