Cloud Atlas is not your typical fiction novel. There are six different stories in the book, all intertwined and divided up. While I love the way Mitchell's novel is sort of like a puzzle, it can be a little confusing at times. For example, I was close to page 40 of the book (The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing) when one of his entries ended and a completely different section of the book started (Letters from Zedelghem). Although this intrigued me, it took me several pages of the next section to fully understand what the author was trying to do-connect Adam Ewing to Robert Frobisher, the writer of these letters-and how he was trying to do it.
Surprisingly, an entry that at first seemed bewildering, Sloosha's Crossin' An' Ev'rythin' After, turned out to be one of my favorites. The particular language of this section caught my attention from the start: since it is narrated by a semi-uneducated man living on a tropical isle, Zachry, the grammar and pronunciation of his words are odd and at times difficult to understand. I did notice, however, a similarity to the way Black Swan Green, a later novel of Mitchell's, is written while reading Zachry's narration. There were some similarities in Timothy Cavendish's narration (The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish) as well, since Timothy is an authentic Englishman and speaks as one would expect an authentic Englishman too.
Going back to Sloosha's Crossin', I was able to see a sort of transformation in Zachry, different from the ones I saw in other characters. When he first started narrating, I disliked Zachry. I couldn't understand why he'd purposefully let a savage Indian tribe kill his father and brother, and I disliked the way he treated Meronym, a woman from another island, while she was staying in his home.
However, there were distinctive moments of clarity which made the transformation progress and helped me gain a better understanding of what was going on with Zachry and the novel in its whole. For example, Zachry describes how he'd fallen in love with a girl and planned to marry her, but after their first child was stillborn, she'd left him for someone else. This shows how Zachry hardened up and did not perceive love in the same way from that point onward. In addition, when his younger sister Catkin is dying, Zachry confesses some of his darkest secrets to Meronym, desperate and overwhelmed, and in turn Meronym is able to find a way to help Catkin, which makes Zachry respect her more.
One of this book's most fascinating and important details is a comet birthmark. It is one of the main connecting elements of the novel, which brings the six stories together. The fact that Mitchell uses a comet feels symbolic; a comet is cosmic, brilliant and often short-lived, just like a single human life when compared to the infinite time span that stretches before us. The comet birthmark also bears a similarity to Mitchell's references to clouds in the sky being like souls crossing the sea of time, thus tying in the title to the story lines.
All in all, this book was amazing. Despite some difficulties reading it, I thoroughly enjoyed it and would love to read it again. I recommend it to anyone who is looking for a good adventure story or a novel that is "different" from the conventional. Boy or girl, young or old, you are sure to greatly enjoy it.
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Cloud Atlas Review by Courtney Justus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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