19 Cloud Atlas-David Mitchell

David Mitchell uses a variety of genres to portray 6 amazing story lines: diary, epistolary, mystery novel, memoir, interview, and a sort of third person limited storytelling. The variety of forms reminds me of Melville’s efforts at stylistic variety in Moby Dick. Yeah, I’ll make that comparison, deal with it.

The birthmarks on the shoulders are part of a motif connecting the stories. I found it subtle, but I understand how one could find it unnecessary. There are other gems of transitional bliss inside each story, either preceding or following. The structure is important to note; one half of each story is told in chronological order starting in the 1800’s. The sixth story takes place in a future when mankind has returned to its hunter-gatherer roots; this story is told in its entirety. The reverse order of stories unfolds as we return to the 1800’s.

“The Pacific Journal of Patrick Ewing” provides the experience of a San Francisco notary in route home from assignment. Pious and inexperienced, he contracts a sickness and a doctor friend makes efforts to preserve his life. The opening journal entry finds Doctor Goose searching for teeth on the beach (brilliant). The “eat or be eaten” theme, and the baseness of mankind are introduced subtly.

“Letters from Zedelghem” gives us a 25 year-old composer in 1931, Robert Frobisher. RF writes letters to his friend (and possible lover) Rufus Sixsmith in London. RF sends him mail from Belgium, but ended up there as a result of being down on his luck, and games of chance were the cause. As he fled his creditors in England, he decides on a whim to offer his skills at musical notation to a famous yet retired composer. Love, loss, and humor, particularly the upper class ironies Jane Austen would love, should be enjoyed here. “Her laughter spurts through a blowhole in the top of her head and sprays all over the morning.”

“The Luisa Rey Mystery” brings death to the forefront. The dangers of a nuclear power plant are revealed by the Sixsmith report, yes the same Sixsmith that received Frobisher’s letters. Keeping all parties quiet takes some murder. A page-turner, and the one story I was upset about having to wait 200 pages to learn the second half. “Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.” p.396

“The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” is the dud of the group. Connection to the Luisa Rey mystery comes through his being an editor. Somehow he gets locked away in a convalescence home. More is being said about the nature of society not respecting septuagenarians. Meh.

“Orison of Somni-451” is fucking awesome. This is a clone future in a Korea rife with genetic engineering. Movies are dubbed disneys, smart phones are sonys, and clones don’t have souls. Except for one Somni-451. She is used by a rebellion to prove the immorality of cloning. She is being interviewed before being put to death for her part in trying to overthrow the system.

“Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ ev’rythin’ after” is the story of Zachary Bailey, a native of Hawaii, the Big I. His experience as a goat herder gets interesting as his pagan god-fearing society allows a visiting anthropologist to stay for several months. Zachary is cautious of her “smart” but begins to trust her after she shares her knowledge of the world before “The Fall.” Dialectically challenging, the violent and peaceful societies on the islands would give any historian an education in atrociology.

Many of these stories could be worthwhile as novellas, but together they speak to the apocalyptic future that our way of life has in store. This has definitely moved to #1 on my list for the year. At 500 pages it was surprisingly quick, but the depths of thought ranged from life and death, philosophy to humor, and conscience to responsibility.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

There is a moment early on in David Mitchell's Black Swan Green that I found quite chilling: the protagonist, Jason Taylor, is skating alone--or so he thinks--on the frozen lake when he notices that another kid is following his orbit, staying just out of his line of sight. He calls out to the kid, but there is no answer until Jason guesses that the skater must be the ghost of Ralph Bredon, a boy who supposedly slipped through the ice and drowned years ago. "Is it cold?" Jason asks. You get used the cold, Ralph says. And then Jason asks Ralph what it is like--what it is like to be dead, one guesses--and then slam, takes a near-crippling spill on the ice.

It's a well-executed piece of near-fantasy that reminded me of the better portions of Mitchell's previous book, Cloud Atlas. But the unfortunate thing is that this episode, some twenty or thirty pages into the novel, was the high point of Black Swan Green for me, which never deigns to slip into that sort of is-it-real-or-is-it-not mysticism for the rest of its length.

It isn't that Black Swan Green is bereft of ideas; in fact, episode-by-episode Mitchell's inventiveness is frequently on display. It's impossible not to love scenes like the one in which Jason is inducted into his classmates' secret fraternity, the Spooks, by running across six backyards without getting caught, or the penultimate episode in which Jason works up the sac to crush a bully's calculator in a shop vise. But in spite of the conceit--which follows Jason for almost exactly one year--there is little cohesion to tie these episodes together. True life is messy, of course, and not at all focused, but Mitchell's richly symbolist writing works best when it's complimented by a strong sense of structure, like in Cloud Atlas. Mitchell attempts to give the novel the illusion of a plot arc by mapping Jason's experience onto the slow unraveling of his parents' marriage, but it is this facet of the book that is least interesting, the most lacking in pathos and insight.

Instead, Black Swan Green can't overcome how scattershot it is; the most interesting threads drop from the novel without warning. Some, like the introduction of a local band of gypsies, come so late in the novel that they seem shoe-horned in and lose whatever impact they might have had. The worst offender is the appearance of Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, and elderly foreigner who beings to tutor Jason after reading the poetry he's pseudonymously published in the church gazette. De Crommelynck is one of the most interesting characters from Cloud Atlas, and her presence here suggests the kind of big-picture orchestration that Cloud Atlas promised as a Mitchell hallmark. But two chapters into de Crommelynck's appearance, Jason comes to be tutored only to find her packed up and gone, deported. She's barely mentioned for the rest of the novel--so much for the epiphany, eh?

By contrast, Black Swan Green is at its best in chapters like "The Bridle Path," which follows Jason on a spur-of-the-moment journey down an old decrepit bridle path to find the legendary secret tunnel on the other side in the Malvern Hills, only to be beset on all sides by the agents of cruelty and lust. The result is Homeric in tone, as one suspects Mitchell desired of the novel as a whole, but Mitchell seems to forget that at the heart of The Odyssey is a sense of physical movement. Black Swan Green is too static, too unfocused to really succeed.

I know Brent loved this book, and I liked it too, but I thought I'd go for the dissenting voice in this case. I will say that it hasn't dampened my interest in reading Mitchell's earlier work, Ghostwritten and number9dream.