Cloud Atlas

"Shortlist"

"There’s a great novel by the Italian postmodernist Italo Calvino called If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller . In that novel, you get the beginning of a story, and then within that story, the characters find a diary, and you get the diary. In the diary, the protagonists find some letters, and then you get the letters. So you have lots of the first half of stories but no ending, no closure. It is funny and moving, but it is also quite frustrating. David Mitchell has learned from Calvino in Cloud Atlas , which is a sort of science fiction novel that has been hugely successful. In this novel, you find stories that interlock like Russian dolls. But here, you also get the second half of all the stories, so your desire to hear the whole story is met. That is an obvious example of a writer learning clever postmodern tricks, but domesticating them. The novel has a strong storyline, and offers a sense of closure. Post-postmodern writers are keen on restituting a sense of narrative. Yes, indeed, and with writing as a technology. When you are reading a Dickens novel, you try to ‘go through’ the writing to the actual events. You become so wrapped up in the novel that the writing somehow disappears. But postmodernism and post-postmodernism are constantly drawing attention to the technology of writing itself. They constantly remind you that what you are reading is only a story. One of the things that David Mitchell plays with is different technologies of writing. The story is told by means of a diary, pulp fiction, a film script, and a science fiction orison which is a sort of communication device from the far future. Then the middle story is a type of folktale told in an invented language. So the novel is very interested in the technologies of its own representation, and how they change over time."

"LS: I read this novel before I even knew what existential risks were; I’ve loved it for a long time. I really like the narrative structure; it’s a technical and stylistic masterpiece. What made me pick it for this subject is that it starts off being not overtly apocalyptic, but there are little signs announcing that something is coming. There are little Easter eggs that slowly lead to the central section of the novel, dedicated to a post-catastrophe world set in the far future. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . SB: This is the perfect book if you want to read about human extinction but you still need to be ‘seduced’ into it. If you start with The Last Children , your exploration of existential risks might be cut short by the very depressing aspect of the story. Cloud Atlas is cleverly written, because its unusual narrative structure means that if you want to know what happens to the half-finished stories set in past centuries, you have to go through the middle section dedicated to the catastrophe. LS: The six stories contained within the book are very interesting in the way they’re nested together, almost like a literary Matryoshka doll. And they’re also completely distinct in style: you have a hard-boiled 1970s California cop drama, but also a 19th century Herman Melville-type elegiac story. I really loved this book; don’t watch the film though! SB: The book also has a nice coda at the end: the character from the 19th century story actually writes about human extinction, and what he thinks is going to happen to humanity in the future. He predicts that if we keep on being too greedy, or try to outdo one another instead of cooperating, then there is no way that civilisation will carry on forever without causing a massive catastrophe. Interestingly, New Scientist wrote an editorial in early 2018, basically saying that existential risk research was great but that researchers kept focusing on ‘traditional left-wing’ issues about capitalism, overpopulation, and environmental concerns. They were asking if this wasn’t politicising the research. We had a discussion at CSER about it. But my view is that there is a set of premises about what society should strive for – which are traditionally, though not universally, seen as being right-wing – such as short-term profit maximization, ‘creative destruction’, individualism, externalization of risks, and so on, then you can’t run that model forever and not end in some kind of disaster. It’s not an attack on anyone for being right-wing; all this is saying is that the long-run equilibrium of that model will almost inevitably include some kind of global catastrophe, so any system built on it is likely to be very unstable. It doesn’t mean we should all be marxists or socialists, those models are also flawed, but it does mean that there is indeed a problem with the current way we operate in our world."

"I have four copies of David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas," which is probably obsessive."

"This was the present I gave everyone I knew for three years. It’s six different stories told in different time periods and genres: One is historical fiction, another is a ’70s thriller mystery, the sixth is a post­apocalyptic story. It’s one of the most beautiful, entertaining, challenging books—something that takes all your attention. I think the stories are meditations on violence, specifically the necessity of violence. The book ends with a beautiful exchange: ‘…only as you gasp your dying..."