Cloud Atlas is one of those books that has been sitting on my shelf for years. A book I find at a used book store and I am excited to buy and bring home and not read. Every time I go to look at my shelf to pick out a new read, it sits there, judging me. “You bought me five years ago, and all I’ve done is sit here between Ulysses and Great Expectations. Are you ever going to, you know, read me?” ‘Sure, some day’ I think as I grab the first book in another fantasy series I’m never going to finish.
Well, I finally got around to it. Enough years had finally passed from watching the film adaptation that I felt a desire to read the novel without the movie version skewing my opinion, though I admit I was unable to read the Frobisher chapters without Ben Whishaw’s voice in my head.
My biggest compliment is to the pacing and structure of the book. The sequencing of chapters going in order until the middle, and then reverse order to the end seems like such an obvious convention that I am surprised I have not seen it more often. To clarify, the book begins with a chapter from the perspective of Character #1. The next chapter is Character #2. So, it goes in order 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. It begins in the distant past, and arrives in a strange post-apocalyptic world in the middle chapter, before going back in through past to the ending.
Whenever I read a book with this many different point-of-view characters, I usually find there is one or two characters that I really enjoy reading, and the others I am just kind of speeding through to get back to the ones I prefer. With Cloud Atlas, that was not really the case. While the Frobisher and Luisa Rey chapters were my favorites, most of the other chapters were almost equally enjoyable. The only exception for me is the middle chapter which became a bit of a slog. I won’t go into too much detail, but a good deal of the text is written in a broken form of English which was not always easy to understand. I frequently had to stop and re-read whole paragraphs to comprehend what certain characters were saying. By the time I found the rhythym of it, the chapter was over and so was that writing style.
I would also commend how each chapter neatly runs into the next. There are large jumps in both time and location from chapter to chapter, but each one ties into the other in a unique way. Each character feels distinct with their own voice and personality, and yet they coalesce into one narrative that does not feel messy or divergent.
To anyone else who has had this sitting on their shelves for years, I highly recommend finally cracking it open.