Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)

David Mitchell is one of those rare writers who can conjure enormously complex postmodern narratives which, when read, actually come across as brilliantly simple and organic storytelling. It's not, of course: I can't even conceive of how much research, travel, plotting and planning went into this book. It's an absolute literary behemoth, the type of book that leaves you walking away shaking your head at the sheer audacity of it. I suppose that Mitchell shares this quality with his nearest analogue, the great Salman Rushdie, but then, Rushdie was always a little too wrapped up in his own brilliance, whereas Mitchell seems admirably modest and unassuming. It somehow makes his books even more likeable.

I start this review with that preamble because I'm not even sure of how to start summarising this book for you. It has so many layers that I could still be writing about 'Cloud Atlas' tomorrow and not be close to finishing. So I guess I'll try and give you the short version. As with Mitchell's debut novel 'Ghostwritten', 'Cloud Atlas' consists of a series of interconnecting stories that are thematically and textually linked. The conceit of the novel's structure is that each character reads or watches the narrative of the previous character, but each narrative is interrupted halfway through. As the sixth arc closes in the middle of the book, the story arcs are closed in reverse order until the reader ends with the story that began the book. We thus move both forwards and backwards in time, towards the ultimate philosophical revelation that everything changes but humanity's essential selfishness does not. Furthermore, each of the protagonists in the book possess a comet shaped birthmark, indicating that they are one soul being reborn into different physical vessels. It is truly a wonderful experience to join the dots of Mitchell's narrative framework and yet also get caught up in each individual story.

The stories span such a range of historical periods and regions that it's impossible not to be impressed, especially as Mitchell manages to make each of them seem entirely authentic. He also experiments with a multitude of genres: a journal, a series of letters, a crime thriller, a burlesque, an interview and an oral memoir. His characters are equally diverse, as are his locations. We start with Adam Ewing, an American notary on a voyage across the Pacific from Australia to San Francisco who is, unbeknowst to him, being preyed upon by a charlatan doctor. This section is probably the most humdrum but it introduces one of the novel's defining philosophical conceits: that man inherently preys upon those weaker than himself. This is seen in the way Ewing witnesses the colonial rapacity of the English and the Dutch, as well as the recounted story of the island people the Moriori, who were themselves colonised by the Maori, who proved themselves "apt pupils" in the dark art of colonialism. It is also evident in the way Ewing himself is taken advantage of by the man he thinks is a doctor and his friend. Ewing's journal is read by the would-be composer Robert Frobisher in the early 1930s while he is staying at the Belgian chateau of the syphlitic composer Vyvan Ayres and working as his amanuensis. Frobisher writes to his friend and lover Rufus Sixsmith of the way in which he has inveigled his way into the graces of Ayrs' wife as well as how he is funding himself through finding rare books and selling them to a broker on Greek Street. The novel's title is taken from this section, as Frobisher is writing a musical work of his own, 'Cloud Atlas Sestet', six interconnecting movements which endlessly descend and ascend, much like the characters in the novel do. Frobisher's letters to Sixsmith are read by the protagonist of the next section, Luisa Rey, an investigative journalist embroiled in the attempts of an all powerful nuclear energy company to cover up the fact that their new reactor could be unsafe and cause a disaster. The strongarm tactics of the energy company throw light into the darker side of capitalism. The Luisa Rey mystery is read in the early 2000s by Timothy Cavendish, a hapless vanity publisher who happened on a huge hit after his gangster client killed a smug book reviewer. Cavendish escapes the attentions of his client's brothers only to wind up in a dictatorial nursing home, having been tricked into thinking it was a hotel by his brother. Cavendish's struggles are seen  by Sonmi-451 as a film after she escapes her life as an indentured fabricant worker at Papa Song's (a thinly veiled analogue for McDonald's). This section comes across as an even darker version of Huxley's 'Brave New World', as all work in Nea So Copros (Korea) is undertaken by fabricants who are brutally executed after 12 years of service. This dystopic world is brilliantly rendered through Sonmi's recollections of her life as a server and a her later life as a revolutionary. Mitchell cleverly uses brand names already in existence as eponyms: so personal televisions are "Sonys" and coffee is "Starbucks". The rapacity of capitalism in this section is portrayed as all consuming, leading inevitably to the end of humanity as we know it. I have always been a huge fan of dystopian fiction, so this section had me on the edge of my proverbial seat. The recording of Sonmi is watched by the next viewpoint character, Zachry, a tribesman on Hawaii whose tribe is threatened by the even more primitive, but very warlike Kona. Zachry is visited by Meronym, a member of the last known advanced society. Zachry's people worship Sonmi as a deity, without knowing anything about her history. This section is written in a form of broken English argot, which like any such effort (Orwell and Newspeak, Burgess and Nadsat) absolutely takes you in once you get past the initial page or so.

The finale takes the entire second half of the novel and is by turns dazzling, elegiac, haunting and triumphant. Having to wait for the conclusion of each narrative makes you want to turn each page that bit quicker. It's a book to obsess over, a book to devour and yet a book to savour too. I've noticed that there has been something of a backlash against this book in recent years, almost as if the universal acclaim it won when it came out is now seen as somehow indecorous. I cannot for the life of me imagine why anybody would not see this novel for what it is: a dazzling postmodern gem and a book which will be regarded as the undisputed classic of the 2000s. This is a book which will be studied and thought about for many years. I already want to re-read it.

Atomised (Michel Houellebecq)

Existentialism is widely held to be the experience of one's own freedom of thought and responsibility and the angst created by the realisation that all of our acts are essentially futile. In France, this school of philosophical thought has long been prominent, and I personally first encountered it while studying A Level French, when I studied Albert Camus and his seminal novels 'L'Étranger' ('The Outsider') and 'La Peste' ('The Plague') in the original French, with later re-reads in translation. As an impressionable and angst-ridden teenager, these books had a profound effect on me and seemed to fit my world view better than anything else I had come across. The master of modern Existentialist Fiction is another Frenchman, Michel Houellebecq, whose novels have caused a substantial stir with their frank (some would say pronographic) representations of modern sexuality and their blunt take on the phenomenon of death. A substantial theme in Houellebecq's work is the decay of modern society, and his debut novel 'Atomised' ('Les Particules Eléméntaires' in the orginal French) takes on this theme with wit and brio.

The plot is narrated by a detached third person figure of complete omniscience, who cooly and logically tells us of the lives of two half-brothers, Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clément. Michel is an introverted molecular biologist who once dreamed of being a physicist like his hero Nihls Bohr and has no interest in sex, women or friendship. As the novel opens he is taking a leave of absence from his post at the university to rethink his existence. Bruno is a theoretical libertine, a sex addict who has no outlet for his lewdness and for whom therapy for his sex addiction has no effect whatsoever. The opening of the novel sees  leaving therapy and on his way to a hippy retreat where he hopes he will find the meaningless sexual encounters he so craves. The brothers are entirely different, but their inability to make sense of the modern world is the same, and through them, Houellebecq is able to make the ultimate Existentialist point: that it is love that holds the human race back.

'Atomised' has an interesting structure, in that it begins in 1999 with Michel taking his leave of absence, then recounts the dysfunctional childhood the brothers experienced, then moves into the brothers experiencing chances at redemption that ultimately fall flat, and finally to the ultimate revelation that a scientific discovery made by Michel changed humanity forever. I did find the very last section of the book to be forced and found it unsuccessful in applying a kind of 'Brave New World' dystopian feel to the novel. It felt very tagged on, to me, even though it was clear from the start that the narrative was being framed by knowledge of a very different future to the present being described.

Overall, this novel has a dark, broodingm, foreboding tone that makes it fit perfectly into the troubled years leading up to and following the last millenium. The characterisation of the two protagonists is perfectly observed and the plot has plenty of dark nooks and crannies to hook the reader into continuing to turn the page. Is this as good a book as its influences? No, not at all. But is it a significant achievement in the field of Existentialist literature? Absolutely.