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Cloud Atlas’s Theory of Everything

November 2, 2012

Warner Brothers

Larry and Lana Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas , the unlikely new adaptation by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer of David Mitchell’s ingenious novel, should do well on DVD, a format whose capacity for endless replay will enable viewers to study at leisure the myriad concurrences binding the movie’s half dozen plots. Better yet, the directors should hire their friend the philosopher Ken Wilber to provide expert commentary and spare us from having to hit “pause” and “reverse.”

Ken Wilber? In academic circles, Wilber remains obscure. A sixty-three-year-old autodidact, he is the author of an ambitious effort to reconcile empirical knowledge and mystical experience in an “Integral Theory” of existence. Yet his admirers include not only the alternative-healing guru Deepak Chopra—who has called Wilber “one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness”—but also the philosopher Charles Taylor, the theologians Harvey Cox and Michael Lerner, and Bill Clinton. Wilber’s generally lucid treatments of both Western science and Eastern spirituality have earned him favor with a coterie of highly literate seekers for whom the phrase “New Age” is nonetheless suspect. He’s an intellectual’s mystic, short on ecstatic visions and long on exegeses of Habermas (whom he regards, for his perception of “homologous structures” in human individual and social development, as something of a kindred spirit). At the Integral Institute, a Colorado-based think tank inspired by Wilber’s ideas, scholars like Jack Crittenden, a professor of political theory at Arizona State University, strive to apply his approach to “global-scale problems,” from climate change to religious conflict.

All of which makes Wilber a natural ally of the Wachowski siblings, whose films tend to reflect a similar grandiosity of ambition. In 2004, Wilber was one of two thinkers—the other was Cornel West—that they invited to deliver a “philosophers’ commentary” on a DVD edition of the Matrix trilogy, their brainy sci-fi masterwork. In Wilber’s take, the movies’ ostensibly Manichean premise—good humans and evil machines duking it out on an illusory electronic terrain—conceals a sophisticated philosophical allegory about a fallen world groping toward enlightenment. He is particularly taken with the trilogy’s concluding minutes, in which Neo, the hacker hero, willingly succumbs to Agent Smith, his digital nemesis, and both dissolve into streams of light. This final twist, Wilber contends, is a sign that the necessary “reintegration” of body (humans), mind (the matrix), and spirit (machines) is underway, not to mention proof of an unusually developed directorial consciousness. “To think they had the nerve to put that stuff into a commercial blockbuster like this is an absolutely rare deed!” he exclaims at one point.

kenwilber.com

In their Matrix commentary, Wilber and West name-checked most of philosophy’s leading lights, from Plato and Descartes to Schopenhauer, Emerson, and the ancient Hindu authors of the Upanishads. A similar list of influences on Cloud Atlas would surely include Wilber’s own name somewhere near the top. The film, which runs to nearly three hours and careers through time, places, genres, and storylines, relying on a small ensemble of big-ticket actors to play as many as six roles each, has largely baffled critics . Manohla Dargis, of The New York Times , called it a “megabucks hash of time, space, and cinema” that “weaves together multiple stories through a lot of airy cosmic convenience and a cavalcade of false noses.” Much of the bewilderment may be explained by the Wachowskis’ philosophical predilections; their movie appears to owe as much to Wilber’s brand of cerebral mysticism as to Mitchell’s fiction, a circumstance that, at least with respect to box-office revenue, is likely to be a disadvantage.

Cloud Atlas the novel is a marvel, a singular parable about the human race’s dueling capacities for self-annihilation and survival comprised of six disparate sections, sliced and shuffled, as in a card trick, to yield a suggestively resonant whole. The strands include an American notary’s maritime diary of a voyage through the South Pacific in the 1840s; the letters of a dissolute musical prodigy in pre-war rural Belgium; the final testimony of a genetically engineered fast-food worker awaiting execution in a twenty-second-century police state; and the oral epic of a goatherd living hand-to-mouth on a Hawaiian island in a distant, post-apocalyptic future, a place where English has devolved into a memorably salty pidgin. (“I’d got diresome hole-spew that day ‘cos I’d ate a gammy dog leg in Honokaa….”) Mitchell’s fecund imagination and skill as a ventriloquist have been amply noted ; the novel’s six narrators are utterly distinct yet equally eloquent.

The virtuosity extends to the book’s Russian doll construction: each section becomes a text that is read—or, in one case, a film that is viewed—by a character in the succeeding one. Thus Robert Frobisher, the musical prodigy, is entranced by the diary of Adam Ewing, the seafaring notary, which he discovers in his room at the Belgian chateau belonging to the syphilitic composer to whom he is serving as amanuensis. In turn, Frobisher’s letters preoccupy Luisa Rey, the heroine of the third section, an intrepid reporter in 1970s southern California intent on exposing a corrupt oil company. Rey retrieves Frobisher’s letters from a hotel room where his lover, now an aging nuclear scientist, was murdered. Then, in the fourth section, Rey’s saga arrives as a manuscript submission by an aspiring crime-thriller writer in the mailbox of Timothy Cavendish, a hack publisher in contemporary London. And so on.

Other mysterious bonds connect the sections, including a comet-shaped birthmark shared by five protagonists, men and women both, living hundreds of years apart. The reader encounters all but one of the sections twice, first in chronological order, and then, after the sixth section, in reverse, so that the novel collapses in on itself like a folding telescope, ending where it began, with Adam Ewing’s diary, in the 1840s.

Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, elaborated over the course of thirty-five years and in more than twenty densely argued books, features a similar nested design. In simplified form, it says something like this: reality is composed exclusively of holons , a term borrowed from Arthur Koestler to denote that which is simultaneously an autonomous whole and a part of something larger. Just as a brain cell is both a self-contained unit and part of a larger organ, so, too, a human being exists as a single individual and as part of a larger collective—a family, an ethnic group, the human race, all living things—in a pattern that extends indefinitely in both directions. It’s holons all the way up and all the way down.

According to Wilber, even consciousness evolves in holarchical fashion, so that the “amount of consciousness” in any given holon is greater than that of its constituents, which it incorporates and transcends, yielding distinctive new forms. He is less interested in definitions—as he points out, there’s no consensus about what consciousness is, let alone which life forms have it—than in the grand pattern. “It really does not matter, as far as I’m concerned, how far down (or not) you wish to push consciousness,” he writes in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality . “The important point…is simply that each new and emergent interior holon transcends but includes, and thus operates upon, the information presented by its junior holons, and thus it fashions something novel in the ongoing cognitive or interior stream.”

Wilber is an ecumenical taxonomist; he doesn’t choose between materialist and idealist accounts of consciousness. Competing schools of knowledge, he suggests, merely reflect limitations of perspective, a problem that conveniently disappears once all more or less plausible points of view are properly integrated, “not on the level of details—that is finitely impossible; but on the level of orienting generalizations.” He is big on labels and diagrams. No doubt part of his appeal is a talent for reducing complex phenomena to a flowchart. Who wouldn’t want a map of reality that fits in a wallet?

www.kheper.net

A diagram elaborated by Wilber to explain Integral Theory

In his schema, the highest form of consciousness is “transpersonal,” a state in which identification with the divine unity (“World Soul”) underlying all things is possible, if rarely achieved. Wilber, who is not known for intellectual modesty, told the science writer John Horgan that he can sustain this “nondual” awareness in deep sleep, something he claimed not even the Dalai Lama can do. But even as we take baby steps toward enlightenment, human history is stuck on endless repeat. “The mystics are pretty sure about this,” Wilber told Horgan. “This has happened a gazillion times; it’ll happen another gazillion.”

With Lana Wachowski, Wilber apparently established an instant rapport. “You and I both are, you know, we’re integrally informed,” he remarks during a 2004 conversation with Lana—who is transgender and was then called Larry—according to a transcript posted on Wilber’s website. “You’ve been interested in this as long as I have, in terms of, you know, the span of your adult life. When you and I first talked on the phone…we spent three and a half hours, and it was non-stop talking about all these things.” Larry confirms Wilber’s account—“it was like one of those great moments where you meet someone, and you talk, and you have a confirmation or a validation about the world”—and tells him that she and her father are reading Sex, Ecology, Spirituality together.

Two years later, in a giddy blog post about the New York premier of V for Vendetta , which Wilber attended at the Wachowskis’ invitation (the siblings wrote the screenplay), he describes Larry as among the “most brilliant minds that I have jumped into a dance of intersubjectivity with,” adding,

Larry will begin a single sentence with a quote from the Upanishads and Schopenhauer, weave it through different interpretations of Chekhov and Tolstoy, and end up—in the same sentence, mind you—with their relationship to recent digital video games. I have honestly never seen anything like it.

(Wilber, who is apparently not so enlightened that he is immune to the ego-trip of the red carpet, also gives a breathless account of his limo ride, his encounter with John Hurt, and his date’s Alexander McQueen gown, in which she “outshone even Natalie Portman.”)

The Wachowskis are notoriously press-shy. One of their few explicit statements regarding their intellectual vision for Cloud Atlas is in a YouTube trailer , online since July, in which they and Tykwer invoke themes of “connectedness and karma,” while admitting that the movie is “hard to sell because it is hard to describe.” But their decision to have the same actors play characters in different storylines, and to shuttle among all the plots at once, is telling. With these gestures, the directors made literal what Mitchell had left playfully ambiguous: characters in later sections are the spiritual embodiments—reincarnations—of those in earlier ones.

Cloud Atlas

Thus, in the movie, Luisa Rey (Halle Berry), doesn’t just share a birthmark with Robert Frobisher, the musical prodigy; as Jocasta, the bored young wife of the aged composer Frobisher works for, Berry actually sleeps with him—and so, by the power of transitivity, does Rey. The bad karma racked up by characters Tom Hanks plays in earlier storylines, including a quack doctor who tries to poison Adam Ewing in order to rob him, is more than compensated for centuries later by Hanks’ heroic behavior as Zachry, the goatherd, who undertakes to save what’s left of the human race from certain self-destruction. (Got that?)

Characters with and without birthmarks are captured, enslaved, liberated, and transformed, and the actors who play them cross ethnic and gender as well as temporal barriers. The Korean actress Doona Bae plays both Sonmi-451, the futuristic fast-food drone, and, with far less conviction, Adam Ewing’s red-haired San Franciscan wife. Viewers are asked to take all this in while absorbing a steady stream of heady apercus—“From womb to tomb we are bound to others; with each crime and every kindness, we birth our future”—and hurtling between sets whose lavish detail far exceeds the requirements of plot and which are evidently intended as tributes to entire cinematic genres, including noir, anime, and Merchant-Ivory.

During the film’s opening sequence, as we are whisked through half a dozen scenes, each in medias res and taking place decades and sometimes centuries apart, Timothy Cavendish (the delightful Jim Broadbent) pleads forbearance: “If you extend your patience for just a moment, there is a method to this tale of madness.” Surely he’s right, and that’s part of the problem. So intent are the Wachowskis and Tykwer on delivering the movie’s mystical tidings—we’re not just bodies, but also souls (or even holons); the choices we make in one life affect who we become in another; we’re all connected to each other and to something bigger than ourselves—that the film risks the earnest impenetrability of a New Age infomercial.

It’s easy to see how Mitchell’s novel, with its nested construction, mysterious concordances, and perpetually recurring birthmark, could give off a Wilberite allure. And to be fair, Mitchell gave the film script his blessing (though he has also told reporters that he considered his book “unfilmable.”) Yet where the filmmakers evangelize, Mitchell treads lightly, with a mischievous wink. For every implied connection between two characters across time and space, another character pooh-poohs the very notion. As Timothy Cavendish, the London publisher, says when he accepts “Half-Lives: the First Luisa Rey Mystery” for publication:

One or two things will have to go: the insinuation that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example. Far too hippie-druggy-new age. (I too have a birthmark below my left armpit, but no lover ever compared it to a comet.)

And, of course, as Mitchell reminds us, “Half-Lives,” like the novel’s other sections, is a work of fiction, not to be confused with truth.

Mitchell has said that he doesn’t believe in reincarnation , at least not for human beings. (He told an interviewer that he intended the birthmark as a symbol of “the universality of human nature.” ) In his fiction, however, the same names tend to recur from one book to the next. In his first novel, Ghostwritten , Luisa Rey makes a brief appearance as a true-crime writer who calls in to a late-night radio show. Her name is itself an homage to a work of fiction: Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey , another imaginative exploration of the metaphysical bond connecting a seemingly random group of people. In that novel, a lonely society matron veers between despair that “the world had no plan in it” and a flicker of belief in what Wilder eloquently terms “the great Perhaps.” Belief in the great Perhaps suffuses Cloud Atlas the novel; the misstep of Cloud Atlas the film is to try to turn Perhaps into Certainty.

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Everything you need to know about Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004, David Mitchell’s ‘Russian doll’ saga remains one of the most original, unusual and polarising works in the Booker Library. As it celebrates its 20th anniversary, here’s our guide to the genre-defying work  

Written by Donna Mackay-Smith

What exactly is Cloud Atlas about?

Cloud Atlas , which was shortlisted for the /node/2929 Booker Prize in 2004, is a novel comprised of six interconnected tales, each written in a unique style and told from a differing perspective: a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified ‘dinery server’ on death row; and a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation. Each of David Mitchell ’s characters has a comet-shaped birthmark and names, dates and references reoccur, hinting at a greater connection between the six protagonists.

Beginning in 1850 and ending in a dystopian future, Cloud Atlas ’s stories all echo and impact on each other, showing how fates can intertwine. Together, they point to a terrifying vision of what is to come. Throughout his novel, Mitchell weaves a deep critique of the post-industrial age. But the heart of Cloud Atlas is a labyrinth of tales that delve into the human experience, which Mitchell tells through multiple voices.

Mitchell purposefully interrupts each of the stories to begin the next, and civilisation - as we know it - ends in the middle of the novel, only for the author to pick up with a post-apocalyptic vision of the future, allowing him to conclude each tale. His novel defies literary conventions and erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity’s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.

How is the book structured?

Cloud Atlas is comprised of six distinct stories, told in eleven parts. But while most novels conventionally use chapters to delineate sections of their plot, Cloud Atlas dovetails its own stories together, meaning one may simply end, abruptly and without conclusion, for another to begin. The following tale takes the reader to a new time and location, essentially to begin all over again, without acknowledgement of the previous narrative. After the sixth story ends, Mitchell then resumes the previous five stories at points further into the novel. 

Still with us? The book has been written in what’s called a ‘Russian-doll’ style structure, meaning each narrative sits within the following story. Each story is connected to the next by something placed within the text, such as mention of a document, a series of letters, or even a novel - containing a wry nod to the events of a previous chapter. 

Cloud Atlas is then brought to its conclusion in reverse chronological order in the second half of the book and things come full circle when Mitchell wraps up the opening narrative, as the novel’s finale. It’s complicated, but that’s really where the genius of the book lies. In a nutshell, think of it as six separate novellas with a small easter egg, nodding to the previous story, within each.

Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in the 2012 film adaptation of Cloud Atlas

Who is David Mitchell?

David Mitchell has written nine novels as well as essays and adapted his work for screen and stage. He was born in 1969 on the Lancashire coast, but was raised in Malvern, Worcestershire. 

As a child, Mitchell didn’t speak until age five, after which he developed a stammer at age seven. As a result, his childhood was often one of solitude, which meant he spent a lot of time alone with his head in a book. He spent his formative years reading J.R.R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin. Mitchell went on to complete a degree in English and American literature and an MA in comparative literature, after which he dedicated himself to writing. 

He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001 with his novel number9dream . But it was Cloud Atlas , Mitchell’s third book, that was his breakthrough. Published in 2004, it was shortlisted for the Booker that year and was listed for multiple other awards. The novel was acclaimed by critics and the literary community, too. 

Mitchell has now been nominated for the Booker Prize five times. In 2018, he won the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work.

David Mitchell. © Paul Stuart

What have people said about Cloud Atlas?

Cloud Atlas has garnered praise from across the literary world, and beyond, since publication. Microsoft founder Bill Gates wrote about it on his personal website, GatesNotes . In a blog titled ‘A wonderful, mind-bending novel’, Gates praised it as a wholly unique read, stating he had ‘never come across anything quite like it in a book before’ and was ‘eager to see how he would connect each story to the ones that came before’. The businessman turned philanthropist concluded that Cloud Atlas was ‘a grand tale about human nature and human values - the things that change and the things that don’t, over hundreds or even thousands of years’.

Critic and novelist A.S. Byatt , who won the Booker Prize in 1990 with Possession , wrote about the novel in the Guardian when it was published in 2004. ‘ Cloud Atlas is powerful and elegant because of Mitchell’s understanding of the way we respond to those fundamental and primitive stories we tell about good and evil, love and destruction, beginnings and ends,’ she said. ‘He isn’t afraid to jerk tears or ratchet up suspense - he understands that’s what we make stories for.’ 

More recently, Shehan Karunatilaka , the winner of the Booker Prize 2022, cited Cloud Atlas as a big influence on his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida . He read Mitchell’s novel ‘many times’ during the process of writing Seven Moons, as well as watching the adaptation. ‘I know some people say it’s confusing, but those people are wrong,’ he joked, when answering readers’ questions on video for The Booker Prize website earlier this year. 

Writing for the  Spectator , Philip Hensher said ‘Mitchell is a novelist who knows exactly what he is doing, and one who is always one or two steps ahead of the reader; and at the end it seems to evaporate like the best dream you ever had’.

But while there was plenty of acclaim, not everyone loved Mitchell’s work. In the Telegraph , Theo Tait wrote: ‘Mitchell’s ambition and his dedication compel respect’ but added ‘there is a mighty problem of tone’ stating ‘ Cloud Atlas spends half its time wanting to be The Simpsons and the other half the Bible’.

In the New York Times , Tom Bissell wrote that ‘the novel is frustrating not because it is too smart but because it is not nearly as smart as its author’. While acknowledging the novel’s expanse, they said ‘it might very well move things forward. It is also a book that makes one wonder to what end things are being moved’. 

In 2019, the novel made the top 10 in the Guardian ’s 100 best books of the 21st century , coming in at number nine. 

What has David Mitchell said about Cloud Atlas?

When writing in the Guardian in 2010, Mitchell acknowledged where the spark for Cloud Atlas came from. ‘I’d had an idea for a polyphonic “Russian doll” novel ever since Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller had wowed me at uni in the late 80s,’ he recalled. ‘Calvino’s book is made of interrupted narratives which are never returned to – my idea was to write a novel whose narratives would be returned to, and completed in reverse order,’ Mitchell said. 

The author spoke to the Guardian again in 2019 and, discussing some wider influences that helped shape both characters and plot, Mitchell acknowledged Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , as well as ‘pioneering SF classics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster – yes, that E.M. Forster’. He also said that Cloud Atlas contained ‘rich dollops of Blade Runner ’. 

The structure was something he purposefully chose to experiment with, he said, yet was unsure if it would pay off: ‘The Russian-doll structure gets remarked on a lot, often with the word “ambitious”. I can’t truthfully claim I set out to be ambitious: it was much more a question of, “What’ll happen if I try this?”’

This non-linear structure, while unusual, was something he - surprisingly - wrote in a more conventional manner. ‘I wrote the six novellas in order and then just spent a morning with the marvellous “cut and paste” function on Windows and assembled the novel in just about an hour or so’, he told the BBC when he appeared on their World Book Club in 2013.

Should I watch the film adaptation?

Despite being deemed ‘unfilmable’ by some commentators, Cloud Atlas was adapted for the big screen in 2012 by the Wachowskis, known for the Matrix films; alongside Tom Tykwer, director of Run Lola, Run ; with David Mitchell himself on writing duties. With a budget in excess of $100million, it was one of the most expensive independent films ever made. Structurally similar to the book, with six interlocking stories, it featured a cast who reappeared within each story in different roles, defying age, gender and race.  

But even a cast of Hollywood A-listers - including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Jim Broadbent - couldn’t save the ambitious movie from polarising reviews. Film critic and Pulitzer Prize-winner Roger Ebert called it ‘one of the most ambitious films ever made’, yet it only scraped 6.7 out of 10 on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes . In the UK, film critic Mark Kermode called it ‘an extremely honourable failure, but a failure’ and it was declared the worst film of the year by both the Village Voice and Time magazine. It seemed the fate of the film was not to follow that of the novel. 

But despite ultimately being deemed a flop upon release, the film has since garnered a cult following, with many film aficionados now claiming it to be one of the Wachowskis’ overlooked masterpieces.

Cloud Atlas

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Eight Booker Prize-nominated books for World Environment Day

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Six Booker Prize-nominated post-apocalyptic books

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CLOUD ATLAS

by David Mitchell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 24, 2004

Sheer storytelling brilliance. Mitchell really is his generation’s Pynchon.

Great Britain’s answer to Thomas Pynchon outdoes himself with this maddeningly intricate, improbably entertaining successor to Ghostwritten (2000) and Number9Dream (2002).

Mitchell’s latest consists of six narratives set in the historical and recent pasts and imagined futures, all interconnected whenever a later narrator encounters and absorbs the story that preceded his own. In the first, it’s 1850 and American lawyer-adventurer Adam Ewing is exploring endangered primitive Pacific cultures (specifically, the Chatham Islands’ native Moriori besieged by numerically superior Maori). In the second, “The Pacific Diary of Adam Ewing” falls (in 1931) into the hands of bisexual musician Robert Frobisher, who describes in letters to his collegiate lover Rufus Sixsmith his work as amanuensis to retired and blind Belgian composer Vivian Ayrs. Next, in 1975, sixtysomething Rufus is a nuclear scientist who opposes a powerful corporation’s cover-up of the existence of an unsafe nuclear reactor: a story investigated by crusading reporter Luisa Rey. The fourth story (set in the 1980s) is Luisa’s, told in a pulp potboiler submitted to vanity publisher Timothy Cavendish, who soon finds himself effectively imprisoned in a sinister old age home. Mitchell then moves to an indefinite future Korea, in which cloned “fabricants” serve as slaves to privileged “purebloods”—and fabricant Sonmi-451 enlists in a rebellion against her masters. The sixth story, told in its entirety before the novel doubles back and completes the preceding five (in reverse order), occurs in a farther future time, when Sonmi is a deity worshipped by peaceful “Valleymen”—one of whom, goatherd Zachry Bailey, relates the epic tale of his people’s war with their oppressors, the murderous Kona tribe. Each of the six stories invents a world, and virtually invents a language to describe it, none more stunningly than does Zachry’s narrative (“Sloosha’s Crossin’ and Ev’rythin’ After”). Thus, in one of the most imaginative and rewarding novels in recent memory, the author unforgettably explores issues of exploitation, tyranny, slavery, and genocide.

Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2004

ISBN: 0-375-50725-6

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

LITERARY FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

ABSOLUTE POWER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 18, 1996

The mother of all presidential cover-ups is the centerpiece gimmick in this far-fetched thriller from first-novelist Baldacci, a Washington-based attorney. In the dead of night, while burgling an exurban Virginia mansion, career criminal Luther Whitney is forced to conceal himself in a walk-in closet when Christine Sullivan, the lady of the house, arrives in the bedroom he's ransacking with none other than Alan Richmond, President of the US. Through the one-way mirror, Luther watches the drunken couple engage in a bout of rough sex that gets out of hand, ending only when two Secret Service men respond to the Chief Executive's cries of distress and gun down the letter-opener-wielding Christy. Gloria Russell, Richmond's vaultingly ambitious chief of staff, orders the scene rigged to look like a break-in and departs with the still befuddled President, leaving Christy's corpse to be discovered at another time. Luther makes tracks as well, though not before being spotted on the run by agents from the bodyguard detail. Aware that he's shortened his life expectancy, Luther retains trusted friend Jack Graham, a former public defender, but doesn't tell him the whole story. When Luther's slain before he can be arraigned for Christy's murder, Jack concludes he's the designated fall guy in a major scandal. Meanwhile, little Gloria (together with two Secret Service shooters) hopes to erase all tracks that might lead to the White House. But the late Luther seems to have outsmarted her in advance with recurrent demands for hush money. The body count rises as Gloria's attack dogs and Jack search for the evidence cunning Luther's left to incriminate not only a venal Alan Richmond but his homicidal deputies. The not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper climax provides an unsurprising answer to the question of whether a US president can get away with murder. For all its arresting premise, an overblown and tedious tale of capital sins. (Film rights to Castle Rock; Book-of-the-Month selection)

Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1996

ISBN: 0-446-51996-0

Page Count: 480

Publisher: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

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'Cloud Atlas': You're Better Off Reading The Book

David Edelstein

Zachry and Meronym are only two of the combined 12 characters Tom Hanks and Halle Berry play in Cloud Atlas . It is a challenge that bests both actors, according to David Edelstein. Jay Maidment/Warner Bros. hide caption

Cloud Atlas

• Directors: Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski
• Genre: Drama
• Running Time: 164 minutes

Rated R for violence, language, sexuality/nudity and some drug use

With: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant

First I need to talk about the book, because it's not as if Cloud Atlas the movie came from nowhere — and if you think it's only the movie you want to know about, I think you need a context for what's onscreen.

Author David Mitchell writes exquisite pastiches, and Cloud Atlas is in the form of six distinct and enthralling novellas set in six different eras with six different literary styles.

First comes the journal of a 19th century lawyer for a slave-trading company, then a series of early 20th century letters from a down-and-out composer who apprentices himself to an elderly musical giant. We jump to a 1970s paranoid conspiracy thriller; then a 2012 tale of a debt-ridden publisher tricked into signing himself into an old age home. In a totalitarian future, a South Korean restaurant is staffed by female robots called "fabricants," a couple of which are beginning to think for themselves with tumultuous social consequences. The last story is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which some denizens are hunter-gatherers, others cannibals.

From story to story there are echoes, counterpoints, variations, characters in one time aware of characters in the previous one through print or film or oral history, so it's as if a baton is being passed. The idea that everything in the universe is connected doesn't come from a character's speech — it seeps into you as you read.

Jim Broadbent and Ben Wishaw, seen here as Ayrs and Frobisher, also play five roles each. Both put forth stellar performances. Reiner Bajo/Warner Bros. hide caption

Jim Broadbent and Ben Wishaw, seen here as Ayrs and Frobisher, also play five roles each. Both put forth stellar performances.

The movie, directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Twyker, doesn't have discrete episodes. Every one of its stories is interwoven with every other — it's an epic hash of crisscrossing fragments tied together by music in a vain attempt at fluidity. I found it disjointed, distractingly busy; unlike the book, it telegraphs the theme from its first scene on.

The main actors have parts in all six stories, often in egregious disguises. They're a very uneven stock company. Tom Hanks speaking in a subliterate patois opens the film as a post-apocalyptic tribesman, then shows up with a putty nose and snaggle teeth in the 19th century — and so on. I like Hanks but when it comes to transforming, he's no Peter Sellers. It's always, "Hi, Tom!"

The even less versatile Halle Berry is primarily a gossip-rag reporter who ferrets out chicanery in the nuclear industry. Hugo Weaving plays sundry one-dimensional villains while Hugh Grant manages to embody a cannibal in war paint without losing his English lockjaw. Korean Doona Bae is the "fabricant": She has a lollipop head and a lithe body, but it's hard to detect much under the surface. There is one fine performance — Jim Broadbent as the publisher, and one splendid one — Ben Whishaw as the young composer.

Movie Reviews

Navigating the shift from complex to cineplex.

But the dialogue is full of flashcards and placards. Hanks gets to sum the film up in the episode in which he's a nervous nuclear scientist with blond hair in love with Berry's reporter.

Cloud Atlas is never dull; it's like a series of clunky but energetic B-movies inflated by lines like "Separation is an illusion" and "My life exists far beyond the limitations of me." It's certainly passionate. You can see why the Wachowskis were drawn to the book. They've expressed a belief in the transmigration of souls, the body but a weak and temporary vessel. And politically, they're radical: For them, every age has oppressors with unchecked power who preserve artificial boundaries — racial, sexual, economic, spiritual. As in The Matrix, the answer in Cloud Atlas is: Free your mind. Once you do there is but one possibility: Overthrow the Man.

My own mind was too dismayed by all the howlers in the dialogue and acting to be freed — the movie is too literal-minded to be a good head-trip. But I should add that audiences at the Toronto Film Festival premiere reportedly stood and cheered for 10 minutes. With its busy transitions and metaphysical heft Cloud Atlas could be this year's Inception . You'll travel farther, though, if you read the book.

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Tv/streaming, collections, chaz's journal, great movies, contributors, castles in the sky.

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We are republishing this review in honor of the 10th anniversary of the passing of Roger Ebert . Read why one of our contributors chose this review here .

Even as I was watching "Cloud Atlas" the first time, I knew I would need to see it again. Now that I've seen it the second time, I know I'd like to see it a third time — but I no longer believe repeated viewings will solve anything. To borrow Churchill's description of Russia, "it is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." It fascinates in the moment. It's getting from one moment to the next that is tricky.

Surely this is one of the most ambitious films ever made. The little world of film criticism has been alive with interpretations of it, which propose to explain something that lies outside explanation. Any explanation of a work of art must be found in it, not taken to it. As a film teacher, I was always being told by students that a film by David Lynch , say, or Warner Herzog, was "a retelling of the life of Christ, say, or 'Moby Dick.' " My standard reply was: Maybe it's simply the telling of itself.

Yet "Cloud Atlas" cries out for an explanation, and surely you've noticed that I've been tap-dancing around one. I could tell you that it relates six stories taking place between the years 1849 and 2346. I could tell you that the same actors appear in different roles, playing characters of different races, genders and ages. Some are not even human, but fabricants. I could tell you that the acting and makeup are so effective that often I had no idea if I was looking at Tom Hanks , Halle Berry or Jim Broadbent . I could tell you that, and what help is it?

I could tell you that each segment is a refashioning of the story contained in the previous one. That the same birthmark turns up in every period of time. That a repeated motif is that all lives are connected by a thirst for freedom. That the movie was inspired by the much-loved novel of the same name by David Mitchell . That in the novel, the stories were told in chronological order, and then circled back again from end to beginning. That the movie finds its connections through the reappearances of the same actors in different roles and deliberately refers to one story from within another.

Now are you wiser? I'm treading water. And now could follow a very long paragraph introducing and describing the different characters played by the actors. But you would lose your way all the same, because many of the performances and disguises are so cunningly effective. I could tell you that Halle Berry's work as a mid-1970s investigative reporter works well for me, and the gnarly wisdom of Tom Hanks as an old man telling tales is the most impenetrable.

I despair. I think you will want to see this daring and visionary film, directed by Lana Wachowski , Tom Tykwer and Andy Wachowski . Anywhere you go where movie people gather, it will be discussed. Deep theories will be proposed. Someone will say, "I don't know what in the hell I saw." The names of Freud and Jung will come up. And now you expect me to unwrap the mystery from the enigma and present you with a nice shiny riddle?

Sometimes the key to one movie can be suggested by another one. We know that the title refers to early drawings of the shapes and behavior of clouds. Not long ago I saw a Swedish film, " Simon and the Oaks ," about a day-dreaming boy who formed a bond with an oak tree. In its limbs, he would lie reading books of imagination and then allow his eyes to rest on the clouds overhead. As he read a book about desert wanderers, the clouds seemed to take shape as a ghostly caravan of camels in procession across the sky.

I was never, ever bored by "Cloud Atlas." On my second viewing, I gave up any attempt to work out the logical connections between the segments, stories and characters. What was important was that I set my mind free to play. Clouds do not really look like camels or sailing ships or castles in the sky. They are simply a natural process at work. So too, perhaps, are our lives. Because we have minds and clouds do not, we desire freedom. That is the shape the characters in "Cloud Atlas" take, and how they attempt to direct our thoughts. Any concrete, factual attempt to nail the film down to cold fact, to tell you what it "means," is as pointless as trying to build a clockwork orange.

But, oh, what a film this is! And what a demonstration of the magical, dreamlike qualities of the cinema. And what an opportunity for the actors. And what a leap by the directors, who free themselves from the chains of narrative continuity. And then the wisdom of the old man staring into the flames makes perfect sense.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Cloud Atlas (2012)

Rated R or violence, language, sexuality/nudity and some drug use

172 minutes

Jim Broadbent as Timothy, etc.

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Anthony Doerr’s Optimism Engine

A curious coincidence, of the kind favored by certain novelists, occurred in 2014 and 2015, when both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction were awarded in consecutive years to Donna Tartt, for “ The Goldfinch ,” and Anthony Doerr, for “ All the Light We Cannot See .” These novels, enormous best-sellers, are essentially children’s tales for grownups, and feature teen-age protagonists. In both books, the teen-ager possesses a rare object that has been removed from a great museum; the subsequent adventures of the object are inextricable from the adventures of the protagonist. In “ The Goldfinch ,” the object is an exquisite seventeenth-century painting, which thirteen-year-old Theo Decker has stolen from the Metropolitan Museum. In “All the Light We Cannot See,” Marie-Laure LeBlanc, sixteen years old and blind, ends up as the surviving guardian of a hundred-and-thirty-three-carat diamond known as the Sea of Flames, which once sat in a vault in the Museum of Natural History in Paris. As the Nazis closed in on the city, Marie-Laure and her father, who worked at the museum, fled with the gem to Saint-Malo.

The two novels end with loudly redemptive messages. On the final page of Tartt’s book, Theo informs us, “Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time.” Toward the end of Doerr’s novel, a character reflects that to behold young Marie-Laure, who has survived the Second World War, albeit orphaned, “is to believe once more that goodness, more than anything else, is what lasts.” Years later, in 2014, a now elderly Marie-Laure sits in the Jardin des Plantes, and feels that the air is “a library and the record of every life lived.” At each moment, she laments, someone who once remembered the war is dying. But there is hope: “We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”

For both writers, I think, the real treasure to be safeguarded is not a particular painting or jewel but story itself: Tartt’s novel shares its very title with the painting in question, and more important to Marie-Laure than the gem are Jules Verne’s adventure stories, which she carries with her throughout the novel; in a stirringly implausible episode, a German soldier is kept alive by listening to her radio broadcast of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” In both books, “goodness” is really just the presumed great good of story. We “sing” across the generations, and this song is first of all the novel we hold in our hands, and more generally storytelling itself. This is what lasts, or so these writers hope: history as an enormous optimistic library.

What was implicit in “All the Light We Cannot See” is blaringly overt in Doerr’s new novel, “ Cloud Cuckoo Land ” (Scribner). Scattered across six hundred and twenty or so pages are five stories, set in very different places and periods. In the nearish future, Konstance, a teen-age girl (here’s our hero-guardian, once again), is flying in a spaceship with eighty-five other people, toward a planet that may sustain human life, after its collapse on earth. (Reaching its destination will take almost six hundred years.) In mid-fifteenth-century Constantinople, Anna, a Greek Christian, awaits the assault that has long been threatened by Muslim forces. A few hundred miles away, Omeir, a gentle country boy, finds himself caught up in the Sultan’s army and its march toward Constantinople, and he eventually encounters Anna. In contemporary Lakeport, Idaho, a sweet-natured octogenarian named Zeno Ninis is minding a group of schoolchildren, who are rehearsing a play in the local library, while, outside the building, a troubled ecoterrorist named Seymour sits in his car, a bomb in his lap, about to make his great explosive statement.

These characters are explicitly connected by a fable (or fragments of a fable) that Doerr has invented, and that he attributes to an actual Greek writer, Antonius Diogenes, thought to have flourished in the second century C.E. Titled “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” the Doerr-Diogenes fabrication tells the tale of Aethon, a shepherd who tries to travel to “a utopian city in the sky,” a place in the clouds “where all needs are met and no one suffers.” After assorted escapades of a classical nature—the hero is turned into a donkey and a crow—Aethon returns to earth, grateful for “the green beauty of the broken world,” or, as Doerr capitalizes for the slow-witted, “ WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE IS BETTER THAN WHAT YOU SO DESPERATELY SEEK. ”

Each of the novel’s five principal characters finds his or her way to this invented Greek text. Anna stumbles across a frail, goatskin codex of the tale in a ruined library in Constantinople. Omeir and Anna eventually fall in love and have children, and together they guard and tend the magical manuscript. Zeno spends his later years translating the Greek fable—indeed, it’s his dramatic version of “Cloud Cuckoo Land” that the schoolchildren are rehearsing in the Idaho library. Konstance’s father, one of a small number of people on the spaceship old enough to remember life on earth (most have been born on board), used to tell embellished adaptations of the Greek story to his daughter at bedtime. Near the end of Doerr’s novel, Diogenes’ fragments reach even Seymour, now in the Idaho State Correctional Institution, where he is doing time for the deadly incident at the library: Seymour gets interested in Zeno’s translation, and asks one of his victims, the town’s former librarian, to send it to him. As he reads, the potent text emits its healing gas. “By age seventeen he’d convinced himself that every human he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption,” we’re told. “But as he reconstructs Zeno’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.”

What on earth—or even on Cloud Cuckoo Land—is this? It’s less a novel than a big therapeutic contraption, moving with sincere deliberation toward millions of eager readers. The author might reply, with some justice, that a fable is a therapeutic contraption, and so is plenty of Dickens. Doerr’s new novel, though, is more of a contraption, and more earnestly therapeutic, than any adult fiction I can recall reading. The obsessive connectivity resembles a kind of novelistic online search, each new link unfolding inescapably from its predecessor, as our author keeps pressing Return. The title shared by the Greek text and the novel comes, an epigraph reminds us, from Aristophanes’ comedy “The Birds.” Yet these characters are also bound to one another by larger ropes of classical allusion and cross-reference. Anna and Zeno both excitedly discover the Odyssey before they encounter the Diogenes text; Seymour, who appears to be somewhat autistic, develops a relationship with an owl, which he nicknames Trustyfriend (a borrowing from “The Birds”); when Konstance’s father was back on earth, he used to live in Australia, on a farm he called Scheria (a mythical island in the Odyssey); the spaceship is named the Argos (the name of Odysseus’ dog, and also suggestive of Jason’s ship, the Argo).

These characters are, necessarily, held together not only by “Cloud Cuckoo Land” the fable but by “Cloud Cuckoo Land” the novel. Having laid out his flagrantly disparate cast, Doerr must insist on that cast’s almost freakish genealogical coherence. This formal insistence becomes the novel’s raison d’être. We have no idea how these people or periods relate to one another, or how they rationally could. But storytelling, redefined as esoteric manipulation, will reveal the code; the novelist is the magus, the secret historian. Although the book is largely set in a recognizable actual world, largely obeys the laws of physics, and features human beings, storytelling, stripped of organic necessity, aerates itself into fantasy.

Novels that, like “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” follow the “ Cloud Atlas ” suite form provide an opportunity for authorial bravado. (David Mitchell has much to answer for.) Doerr’s new book and its predecessor open with narrative propositions. The reader is, in effect, presented with a vast map, pegged with tiny characters who begin very far apart. Slowly, these dots will get bigger and move toward one another. In “All the Light We Cannot See,” for instance, we open in Saint-Malo, with sixteen-year-old Marie-Laure. Two other characters—a tenderhearted German radio engineer and a Nazi gem hunter—are converging on Marie-Laure, and it will take the course of the book for them to do so.

Doerr likes to start in medias res, and then to go back to the origins of his stories and work forward again (or forward and backward and forward again, in alternation). He dangles that first picture, the confusing snapshot from the thick of things, as the prize awaiting the properly plot-hungry, plot-patient reader. So that novel begins in 1944, and promptly takes us back to Marie-Laure at the age of six, in Paris, in order to demonstrate how she and her father ended up in Saint-Malo with a diamond bigger than the Ritz. At the opening of “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” we’re presented with the incomprehensible tableau of fourteen-year-old Konstance hurtling through space in the Argos. She has recently discovered the connection between her father and Antonius Diogenes’ tale of Aethon. But the scene quickly gives way to the snatched preludes of two other stories: Zeno at the Idaho library with the children, Seymour in a parked car with his bomb. These stories, too, quickly reverse—we see Zeno at seven, in 1941, and Seymour at three, in 2005—in order to go forward once again more slowly. When we next encounter Konstance, a hundred or so pages after her first appearance, she is four years old. In this way, the reader is always playing Doerr’s game of catch-up, eager to reach a finale that has already functioned as prelude.

As a stylist, Doerr has several warring modes. One of them comes from what could be called the Richard Powers school of emergency realism. Omeir isn’t merely afraid; “tendrils of panic clutch his windpipe.” Anna isn’t merely very thirsty; “thirst twists through her.” When Seymour thinks, “questions chase one another around the carousel of his mind.” But Doerr’s habitual register is less obtrusive. He often writes very well, and is excellent at the pop-up scenic evocations required by big novels that move around a lot. Although the arcs of his stories may tend toward a kind of sentimental pedagogy, his sentences, in the main, scrupulously avoid it. He knows how to animate a picture; he knows which details to choose. Here is Zeno as a young infantryman, fighting in the Korean War. The supply truck he’s riding in has been ambushed by enemy soldiers:

A middle-aged Chinese soldier with small beige teeth drags him out of the passenger’s door and into the snow. In another breath there are twenty men around him. . . . Some carry Russian burp guns; some have rifles that look four decades old; some wear only rice bags for shoes. Most are tearing open C rations they’ve taken out of the back of the Dodge. One holds a can printed PINEAPPLE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE while another tries to saw it open with a bayonet; another stuffs his mouth with crackers; a fourth bites into a head of cabbage as though it were a giant apple.

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Zeno is captured, and put in a P.O.W. camp. Doerr deftly provides the equivalent of a cinematic establishing shot: “In winter stalagmites of frozen urine reach up and out of the latrines. The river freezes, the Chinese heat fewer bunkhouses, and the Americans and Brits are merged.” We’re up and running.

Yet his prose is regularly on the verge of formula, and too often capitulates to baser needs. “All the Light We Cannot See” recycles a goodly amount of Nazi tropes: impeccably dressed officers brush invisible specks of dust from their uniforms, or pull off their leather gloves one finger at a time. A boy is “thin as a blade of grass, skin as pale as cream.” In both novels, when Doerr wants to gesture at immensity, he . . . gestures. The telltale formulation involves the word “thousand.” From his previous novel: “At the lowest tides, the barnacled ribs of a thousand shipwrecks stick out above the sea.” And: “A thousand frozen stars preside over the quad.” And: “A thousand eyes peer out.” And: “A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours.” He’s at it again in the new book. Anna “practices her letter on the thousand blank pages of her mind.” Zeno, as a little boy, is afraid: “Only now does fear fill his body, a thousand snakes slithering beneath his skin.” Konstance, too, is on edge: “From the shadows crawl a thousand demons.”

It’s a minor tic, appealing even in its unconsciousness. But this double movement, simultaneously toward the enlargement of intensity and the routine of formula, tells us something about the strange terrain of Doerr’s novels, which leave so little for the mean, for the middle. Proficient prose supports an extravagance of storytelling; excellent craftsmanship holds together a flashing edifice; tight plotting underwrites earnestly immense themes. Every so often, a more subtle observer emerges amid these gapped extremities, a writer interested merely in honoring the world about him, a stylist capable of something as beautiful as “the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin,” or this taut description of an Idaho winter: “Icicles fang the eaves.”

“Cloud Cuckoo Land” has little time for such mimetic modesties and accidental beauties. Far more even than its predecessor, it is fraught with preachment. This novel of performative storytelling that is also a novel about storytelling is dedicated to “the librarians then, now, and in the years to come.” Two anxieties, reinforcing each other, are at play: the end of the book, and nothing less than the end of the world. Which is to say, the book is under threat both by the erosion of cultural memory and by the climate crisis. Doerr’s invention of the fable of Aethon is also Doerr’s fable about the precariousness of the book: a fragment that barely made it into the modern world, surviving only by the tenuous links between successive generations of readers. Books, a teacher tells Anna, are precious repositories “for the memories of people who have lived before. . . . But books, like people, die.” Elsewhere, another scribe reminds Anna that time “wipes the old books from the world,” and, likening Constantinople to an ark full of books, neatly twins this novel’s emphases: “The ark has hit the rocks, child. And the tide is washing in.”

The terminality of the message perhaps explains the frantic didacticism of all the theming. Libraries are everywhere here, from Constantinople to Idaho. In one of the book’s most tender episodes, Zeno meets an English soldier in Korea named Rex Browning, and surreptitiously falls in love with him. Rex is a classicist, who tells Zeno that he might be named for Zenodotus, “the first librarian at the library at Alexandria.” Later in the novel, back in England, Rex writes a book titled “Compendium of Lost Books.” The spaceship Argos offers an elegiac, troubling vision of life without actual libraries; its brain is a Siri-like oracle known as Sibyl, a vast digital library of everything we ever knew: “the collective wisdom of our species. Every map ever drawn, every census ever taken, every book ever published, every football match, every symphony, every edition of every newspaper, the genomic maps of over one million species—everything we can imagine and everything we might ever need.”

Gradually, you come to understand that the desperate cross-referencing and thematic reinforcing borrow not so much from the model of the Internet as from the model of the library. Just as this novel full of stories is also about storytelling, so this novel about the importance of libraries mimics a library; it is stuffed with texts and allusions and connections, an ideal compendium of “the collective wisdom of our species.”

It’s here, perhaps, that “Cloud Cuckoo Land” becomes an affecting document. As a novelist, Doerr is utterly unembarrassed by statement. For him, storytelling is entertainment and sermon; the novel is really a fable. Late Tolstoy might have approved. And since we are living in critical times, the lessons are made very legible: the book is at risk; the world is at risk; we should not seek out distant utopias but instead cultivate our burnt gardens. Above all—or, rather, underneath all—everything is connected. Seymour, vibrantly, morbidly alive to our self-destruction, realizes this:

Seymour studies the quantities of methane locked in melting Siberian permafrost. Reading about declining owl populations led him to deforestation which led to soil erosion which led to ocean pollution which led to coral bleaching, everything warming, melting, and dying faster than scientists predicted, every system on the planet connected by countless invisible threads to every other: cricket players in Delhi vomiting from Chinese air pollution, Indonesian peat fires pushing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere over California, million-acre bushfires in Australia turning what’s left of New Zealand’s glaciers pink.

If this sounds like it could almost have been written by Don DeLillo , there’s a reason. The apprehension that everything is connected is essentially a paranoid insight (and a useful one for the novelist, who can pose as esoteric decoder). What’s poignant here is the way one kind of connectivity helplessly collapses into another. Seymour’s Internet search, today’s version of a library search, is an exercise in scholarly connection, of the kind this novel also enjoys—everyone and everything is related by cross-reference and classical allusion and thematic inheritance. But “Cloud Cuckoo Land” embodies and imposes a darker connective energy, too. Climate change, after all, enforces an entirely justifiable paranoia: we are indeed part of a shared system, in which melting in one place arrives by flood in a second place and fire in yet another. One form of connectivity might be almost utopian; the other has become powerfully dystopian. History’s enormous optimistic library becomes reality’s enormous pessimistic prison. Each vision, as in Seymour’s alarmed search, fuels another in this book.

Artistically, this sincere moral and political urgency does the novel few favors, as the book veers between its relentless thematic coherence and wild fantasias of storytelling. But that urgency may also account for the novel’s brute didactic power; it is hard to read, without a shudder, the sections about the desperate and deluded Argonauts, committed to voyaging for centuries through space-time because life on earth has failed. A pity, then, and a telling one, that Doerr finally resolves nearly every story optimistically and soothingly. And Konstance’s hurtling spaceship? Oh, it turns out to be the biggest therapeutic contraption of all. ♦

A previous version of this article misstated the name of the Museum of Natural History in Paris.

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Reviews of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

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• Literary Fiction
• Speculative, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Alt. History
• 19th Century
• 20th Century (multiple decades)

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A brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles of genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian lore of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

Thursday, 7th November— Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints. Through rotting kelp, sea cocoa-nuts & bamboo, the tracks led me to their maker, a White man, his trowzers & Pea-jacket rolled up, sporting a kempt beard & an outsized Beaver, shoveling & sifting the cindery sand with a teaspoon so intently that he noticed me only after I had hailed him from ten yards away. Thus it was, I made the acquaintance of Dr. Henry Goose, surgeon to the London nobility. His nationality was no surprise. If there be any eyrie so desolate, or isle so remote, that one may there resort unchallenged by an Englishman, 'tis not down on any map I ever saw. Had the doctor misplaced anything on that dismal shore? Could I render assistance? Dr. Goose shook his head, knotted loose his 'kerchief & displayed its contents with clear pride. "Teeth, sir, are the enameled grails of the quest in hand. In days gone by this Arcadian ...

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10 Movie Adaptations With Better Endings Than the Book

The 10 worst comedy movies of all time, according to roger ebert, the 10 darkest thrillers, ranked.

[ This is a re-post of my review from the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.  Cloud Atlas opens today. ]

"My life exists far beyond the limitations of me," a character notes in Cloud Atlas . By the same token, The Wachowski Siblings and Tom Tykwer 's film exists far beyond the limitations of genre, narrative, identity, and time. It is a work of sweeping ambition, engrossing stories, compelling characters, and powerful emotions. The filmmakers have taken David Mitchell's novel, and rebuilt it into a captivating sextuplet filled with love, hate, redemption, damnation, bravery, cowardice, and more. Through skillful editing and astounding performances, Cloud Atlas is a cinematic experience like few others, and it will leave viewers in awe.

Cloud Atlas spans across six stories in six different time periods with the lead cast playing different characters in most or all of the narratives (I will use the names of the corresponding stories from the novel to make it easier to differentiate the tales later in the review) The six stories are: the voyage of Adam Ewing ( Jim Sturgess ) across the Pacific Islands in 1849 [ The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing ]; the relationship between amanuensis Robert Frobisher ( Ben Whishaw ) and composer Vyvyan Ayrs ( Jim Broadbent ) in 1936 Europe [ Letters from Zedelghem ]; reporter Luisa Rey's ( Halle Berry ) dangerous investigation into a nuclear power plant in 1973 San Fransisco [ Half-Lives: A Luisa Rey Mystery ]; the constant, but perhaps deserving, misfortunes of vanity publisher Timothy Cavendish (Broadbent) in 2012 England [ The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish ]; the fabricant Sonmi~451 ( Doona Bae ) and human Hae-Joo Im's (Sturgess) action-packed escape from authoritarian forces in 2144 Neo Seoul [ An Orison of Sonmi~451 ]; and Zachry's ( Tom Hanks ) perilous journey with the mysterious Meronym (Berry) in Big Isle, "106 Winters after The Fall" [ Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After ].

The movie opens with Old Zachry beginning a tale in front of an unknown audience, and then the filmmakers provide the opening scenes to the above stories in chronological order [To be precise, Tykwer directed Adam Ewing , Luisa Rey , and Cavendish while the Wachowskis handled Zedelghem, Sonmi~451, and Sloosha's Crossin' ]. From there, the film cuts between the narratives usually through visual rhyming, a shared moment (like a character entering a room in one story, and a character exiting a room in another story), or an actor who's playing two different roles (like cutting from Luisa Rey to Meronym). It sounds complicated, but the connections tend to flow elegantly, although it can be a bit distracting if there's no connective tissue. But these are minor bumps that are quickly forgotten as we're enraptured by the latest plot development in each tale.

And they're all terrific stories. In terms of their narrative breadth, they're relatively narrow. They're basically short films contained to a particular genre. There are two period pieces ( Ewing and Zedelghem ), a pulpy thriller ( Luisa Rey ), a comedy ( Cavendish ), and two sci-fi yarns ( Sonmi and Sloosha's ). Like all good adaptations, the filmmakers have streamlined the plots from the book, and come away with propulsive narratives that never lose their momentum. Anthology movies are almost always a mixed bag, but Cloud Atlas is the exception to the rule. The Luisa Rey story is a tad weaker than the others because it lacks an emotional arc, but there's not a single plotline where we check our watches and wait to go back to a story where care about.

Even if there was such a plotline, it would swiftly fade. The sweeping pace of Cloud Atlas is perfectly timed down to the second. Editors Alexander Berner and Claus Wehlisch have worked a miracle, and used cinema's unique quality—the edit—to its full potential. The film positively sings as it moves between stories and crescendos at narration that breaks the bounds of time and space. It is the most crucial element in the film's central theme of how we are all tied together through our actions and our fates.

Notions such as past lives and intertwined destinies can come off as hokey, and if they're to be explored, then the artist (or artists, as the case is here) must leap with complete abandon and total confidence. There is no half-measure in a film of this size, and the filmmakers' wholehearted commitment is why Cloud Atlas manages to transcend new-age notions that would be worthy of derision. Furthermore, such a reading is far too literal and misses the point shared by each story; a point perfectly summed up by one of the characters: "our lives are not our own." It is not simply a matter of the individual repeating throughout time. It is how he or she treats others.

Distilled into their basic element, each actor's major characters share a single defining trait. Hugo Weaving's characters are sadistic, Berry's characters are inquisitive, Sturgess' characters help the enslaved, etc. But not everyone is locked into a single trait throughout lifetimes. Before Cavendish, Broadbent's characters are selfish. It isn't until his experiences in Ghastly Ordeal that he is finally able to change. This isn't a matter of karma. It's a matter of giving to others rather than taking for one's own survival. Broadbent's overarching character makes this change in one story, but it's what Hanks' characters wrestle with over the course of the entire film. His characters move though thieves, liars, cowards, and finally to someone who must resist a devil that's followed him throughout time. Hanks' characters are not the center of the universe nor are anyone else's. None of these characters are giants of history. They simply continue to criss-cross across not only time and space, but also race and gender.

Cloud Atlas is greater than the sum of its parts, and its parts are stunning. Cavendish is hilarious, Sonmi is pulse-pounding, Zedelghem is melancholy, Ewing is treacherous, Luisa Rey is exciting, and Sloosha's Crossin ' is something else entirely. Sloosha's Crossin ' was my least favorite story in the book due to its unbroken length and the difficulty of reading through a slang-filled dialect. But in the film, it works marvelously and becomes a beautiful, unforgettable tale where we happily accept characters who call technology "smart" and call truth "true-true". Translating the story directly to film and leaving this bizarre dialect intact requires a glorious mixture of fearlessness, insanity, and unbound imagination.

This kind of imagination—to transcend genres, settings, and identities—requires a certain kind of genius. Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer have shown that genius with Cloud Atlas . It is an ambition rarely seen in modern cinema, and rarely realized due to budget constraints (the film was independently financed). The audacious, daring vision of Cloud Atlas is to be cherished because it pushes the bounds of what we've come to expect from movies. It is a forceful reminder of cinema's power, and why it stands apart from other art forms.

For all the complexity of its editing, its actors with multiple characters, and the jumps between genres and setting, Cloud Atlas is beautifully simple in its central theme. The characters narrate their philosophies, but it doesn't come across as moralistic. All of the characters are writers. They use different forms, but they're all narrating their lives. They're looking inwards to create connections, and in so doing, forge a legacy. They leave behind more than they were in a single lifetime. Even if their messages are misunderstood or reinterpreted, the authors' bold, declarative words still echo through the lives of others across time and space. Through the gorgeous, life-affirming lens of Cloud Atlas , our lives exist far beyond our limitations.

• Halle Berry

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History is written by the winners, the saying goes, and if there’s a theme to this week’s recommended books it might be that a little digging often reveals more to the story. Jessica Goudeau’s “We Were Illegal” uses the scrim of her own family tree to look at Texas’ long tradition of self-mythology; Edward O’Keefe’s “The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt” pulls the curtain on America’s most famously macho president to highlight the women who advised and influenced him; and Howard Markel’s “Origin Story” complicates our understanding of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and the toll it took on his well-being. Also up: a history of reality TV, a novel about an emergency room worker and a quicksilver collection of essays about reading and other pursuits by the Book Review’s poetry columnist, Elisa Gabbert. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

CUE THE SUN! The Invention of Reality TV Emily Nussbaum

Without sneering at its subject or its increasingly wised-up fans, this critically astute and deeply reported book describes reality TV through the eyes of the people who made it happen, offering cleareyed accounts of how exploitative and dangerous such shows could be.

“Exquisitely told. … With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail, Nussbaum, a staff writer for The New Yorker, outlines how such shows united high and low art into a potent concoction.”

From Eric Deggans’s review

Random House | $30

ANY PERSON IS THE ONLY SELF Elisa Gabbert

In her third essay collection, which weaves thoughts about reading with a loose running meditation on the impact of the Covid pandemic, the poet and critic (and the Book Review’s poetry columnist) celebrates literature and life through a voracious engagement with the world, and the word.

“It feels like an expression of gratitude for both the act of reading in itself and for reading as a route to conversation, a means of socializing, a way to connect.”

From Lily Meyer’s review

FSG Originals | Paperback, $18

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