Progressing backwards

Cloud Atlas is a novel that transcends time. There are six narratives and consequently six main characters that fill its pages. Each story is intertwined with the others in a unique way to create a Russian-doll effect. They are also pulled together by several common features that appear in almost every story, such as a character with a comet shaped birthmark, boats and the Cloud Atlas sextet by Frobisher, which itself is written for six instruments that overlap each other.

The first story is the nineteenth century Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing. Ewing is an American notary who observes the history of Chatham Island in the Pacific and discovers the fate of the native Moriori tribe at the hands of the aggressive Maoris. The journal ends mid-sentence, and the reader is thrown into the story of Robert Frobisher – Letters from Zedelghem – set in the 1930s. He is from a privileged English background, but has been cast out from his family because of his wayward behaviour. His letters to his friend and lover Sixsmith record his search for Vyvyan Ayrs, a reclusive English composer who Frobisher wants to join as an assistant in order to earn a living. He travels to Zedelghem, Belgium, to find the ailing man, and manages to talk his way into a job. He is regarded with suspicion at first, but eventually succeeds in infiltrating the Ayrs family, charming both Ayrs and his wife.

In the third story – Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery – the reader meets an older Rufus Sixsmith. We are now in mid-1970s California, where a chance meeting with Luisa Rey in a lift, and Sixsmith’s subsequent death turns Rey into a detective because she suspects something is amiss. Rey is searching for a report that will ruin Seaboard, a massive corporation that runs an unstable nuclear power station. She quickly discovers that the search for this report could lead to her death, and a tale of intrigue and corruption unravels. In the fourth story - The Ghostly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish -  we discover that this Luisa Rey mystery is in fact a novel by Hilary V. Hush, the manuscript of which has reached Timothy Cavendish. Cavendish Publishing is in a spot of trouble because it owes royalties to Dermot Hoggins, the author of Knuckle Sandwich. Hoggins is now in prison and his burly brothers have come knocking on Cavendish’s door. Cavendish sensibly decides to flee, but by enlisting the help of his brother he unwittingly signs himself into an old people’s home, and finds there is no way out.

The fifth tale, entitled The Orison of Somni~451, moves the novel into the future and the setting to Korea.  The story is told by Sonmi~451, who is being interrogated by an Archivist about her rise to notoriety. She is a ‘fabricant’, created in an artificial womb and destined to serve at Papa Song’s fast food outlet for her twelve working years. However, Sonmi~451 is different from the other servers because she has been altered to allow her to experience feelings of dissention. She is an experiment who is used by various groups in their struggle for power in this technological but highly volatile world. The sixth and central story is also set in the future, but it presents a very different world. Sonmi has become an unlikely goddess for the people in the Valley Tribes of Zachary who are living in a time after ‘the Civ'lise Days’- an age after ‘the Fall’ in which humanity has virtually wiped itself out. This is exactly what Adam Ewing predicted when he wrote that this ‘purely predatory world shall consume itself.’ After this last story, the narratives swivel round and we hear in reverse order how each of the five other stories end.

Mitchell has carefully structured Cloud Atlas to take us through history and explore the progression of society from 1850 to some unknown future date. The reader can chart the scientific advances that have been made as each new story is introduced. In the first story, Adam Ewing records a pre-industrial society. By the time we get to ‘The First Luisa Rey Mystery’, nuclear power has been invented and the world is shown to have greatly progressed. We are then taken through to the future to meet the fabricant Sonmi ~451 who, like thousands of others, has been created for slavery. It is a world dominated by big corporations where science has moved into the realm of genetic modification. These developments have been at the expense of nature, the folly of which is revealed in the last story where the only humans left are a few mountain tribes living in squalid conditions. Human greed has led to the destruction of everything. Mitchell seems to be suggesting here that human society can move both forwards or backwards. The leaps forward in technology have been outweighed by the catastrophic fall backwards that has occurred. The valleys of Zachary are far more primitive than the world of Adam Ewing, so ultimately all the scientific and technological advances have done nothing for humanity at all.

The problem is not the technology itself, but human nature. In The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing we are shown how colonialism has made slaves out of some and masters out of others; Sonmi~451 and her fellow fabricants are born as a slaves; in Sloosha’s Crossdin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After, the Zona tribe seeks to make slaves of the smaller tribes around them. All of these examples highlight the way in which the strong try to abuse the weak. Greed, selfishness and thirst for power are traits found in many of Cloud Atlas’s characters, regardless of what era they inhabit. The novel seeks to show the consistency of human behaviour throughout time. However, this is not a novel that seeks to condemn humanity outright.  There is a real awareness among most of the characters of their own failings and weaknesses, and this makes these characters refreshingly honest.

Cloud Atlas explores the role that faith plays in human society. Adam Ewing is a Christian believer, and the islands he visits have missionaries living among the natives. However, this is not a positive portrayal of Christianity. The missionaries have created authoritarian regimes on the islands, feel no regret for the deaths this has caused and seem more interested in money than God. After that first story, as time moves on, we are not presented with other examples of individual faith. In fact, the only other story that explores faith is Sloosha’s Crossdin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After, where the remaining human tribes believe in reincarnation and worship Sonmi~451 as their god, even though they know nothing about her. This seems to suggest that as society and technology progress, faith is no longer needed and is therefore dispensed of. Essentially, Cloud Atlas regards religion as something belonging to primitive times, and suggests that a well-educated and scientific society cannot sustain a belief in God.

However, this dismissal of God leaves the characters with unanswered questions. They are aware of their own moral failures, yet they have no explanation for them. They know that human society is corrupt and greedy but have no hope of anything better; in fact, there seems to be a resignation to the world’s destruction throughout. This is where God, as he reveals himself through the Bible, is highly relevant to the novel’s characters and our world today. The Bible explains that all humans have rebelled against God as the ruler of their lives, and have chosen to live for themselves. We have an in-built and God-given conscience that lets us know when we’ve gone wrong. Our ultimate need is for forgiveness, as our rebellion against God and moral failure deserves judgment. God has sent his son Jesus Christ to bear our punishment and die for us on the cross, which brings forgiveness to all who accept it. Therefore Mitchell’s portrayal of faith as something needed only in primitive cultures is false. We do not need to worship unknown gods and look to reincarnation for our future. If we accept God’s forgiveness through Jesus now, we can be sure of an eternity with God in heaven where human corruption will no longer concern us. Cloud Atlas may present a frightening future for humanity, but the certain hope of going to heaven that Christians have is a future full of joy where fear plays no part.

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