David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

When I saw that a movie called Cloud Atlas was based on a book. I wanted to read it before I saw the film. This is not necessarily the type of book I normally read, but I did enjoy it.

The book is a collection of several different periods in time. The first is back in the time of slaves, a man who is traveling across the sea with a doctor, bringing with him a large amount of money. The second story is about a man who is working with a musician to write new works of music as well as try to create a name for himself. The next is about a female journalist who is trying to get a story about a local nuclear power plant. There is then one about an editor/publisher whose client shoots a critic at party and suddenly finds the book is selling like crazy until he he is sent to an institution and then has a stroke. The next two are set in the future. In South Korea there are sort of like clone humans, Somnis, who live to serve people until one of them starts to stand up to the system. And the final story is after a fallout of sorts and the few people still around live on an island with a volcano with very little technology.

The stories are each told in half in chronological order and then the second half is told in backwards chronological order so we start and end with the same narrative.

There is one defining feature of one character in each book and it's a comet shaped birthmark on some part of their body. The characters can be different genders and even different ethnicities, but they share the mark. I was wondering how the title would come into the book and it's well done as well, simple, rather subtle, but valuable.

The writing style changes for each story, especially as far as the way people talk.  I actually found the language in the far future story to be difficult to understand at times (if you've seen the movie you'll know what I am talking about). Certain words are replaced with generic words, like how people say Kleenex to mean facial tissue or Coke to mean soda. It was easy enough to know what was meant by the words, and some interesting choices.

The theme/number six is used often. There are six stories, there is a last name, Sixsmith, and the title of the story is related to six too. Somni's story in particular references six a lot. I am not sure what the value of this theme was, but it's there.

Author David Mitchell does a wonderful job of interweaving six seemingly unrelated stories together with a theme of redemption and a flair of historical fiction and an idea of what the future might looks like. I do admit that the movie is a little different from the book, but for the most part they are quite close and I thought the movie did a good job of bringing the book to life. I enjoyed this book a lot even though it was a little bit confusing sometimes.

Recommend this product? Yes