Six stories. Six eras.


1850: A young American lawyer aboard a ship crossing the Pacific contracts a mysterious illness.

1931: A caddish young composer, disinherited by his rich family, weasels himself into the good graces of a syphilitic old composer at a castle in Belgium.

1975: A reporter for a fluff magazine stumbles on a deadly conspiracy at a newly-built nuclear power plant, and soon finds her life in danger.

Present day: A self-important old man, struggling with the instant success of his vanity-publishing outfit, finds himself trapped in a retirement home.

The not-so-distant future: A cloned fast-food waitress overcomes her programming and seeks to become something more, in the process threatening an empire.

The far-distant future: An illiterate young tribesman in Hawaii befriends a strange woman who comes visiting from one of the last bastions of civilization in the dying world.


What do these stories have in common?

Nothing. They are told in vastly different styles, belong to different genres (from noir to farce to postapocalyptic science fiction), and follow very different arcs. At first glance, it's mystifying why they're all thrown together in the same book.

The first clue to their connectedness is the structure of the book itself. It moves chronologically through the stories, but each one stops abruptly halfway through. In the next story, we learn that the characters have also been following the same story, but for one reason or another, they too were stopped halfway through. Robert Frobisher, the young composer, was reading a copy of the lawyer Adam Ewing's journal, but half the book is missing. Luisa Rey, the reporter, discovers the first half of a set of letters Frobisher wrote to his friend Sixsmith. Timothy Cavendish, the publisher, receives the first half of a novel about Rey as a submission. Sonmi-451, the clone, is watching a film about Cavendish when the police raid partway through. And Zachry, the futuristic tribesman, finds a 3-D recording of an interview with Sonmi, but is interrupted before he can watch it in full.

Zachry's story is the only one told complete without interruption, and then we move backwards again, as each character concludes their story and finds the second half of the interrupted one.

In a sense, then, the book is essentially Zachry's story, with the other ones acting sort of as concentric ripples, fanning out from the elegiac apocalyptic tale at the center. The stories tie Zachry to the past, moving further and further away from him in time, but held together through the influence each holds on the character that reads or watches it.

There are deeper connections, too - dreams and echoes and other mystical intimations that pull these characters together in bizarre and truly breath-catching ways. There are so many little moments, perfect little passages of connection that just left me speechless. Oh. Oh, of course. Oh.

Perhaps they are all the same person, the book postulates. Perhaps each is, in some sense, a reincarnation of the last. Literally perhaps, but figuratively - thematically - definitely. "EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED", the trailer for the new film of Cloud Atlas blares at us in all caps. And yes, that is the major theme of the book, but presented in a much subtler, less cinematic way. Across time, across lives, some things remain the same. Like, as the book repeatedly describes, an atlas of clouds. Each individual cloud is ephemeral, but the types, the patterns repeat endlessly. Like Frobisher's masterpiece, the Cloud Atlas Sextet, which mirrors the nesting-doll structure of the book, the theme repeating across six interrupted movements, each featuring a different instrument.

And if this really is Zachry's story, as he looks back (and looks back and looks back) from his vantage point at the end of humanity, we see how the same patterns of cruelty and destruction writ large and small again and again across hundreds of years have led to this inevitable terminus. But not only cruelty and destruction - there is also so much goodness and love and hope. Some of the story arcs end in triumph, some in tragedy, and some - like Zachry's - are ambiguous in the end. Maybe nothing ever really resolves. Maybe the pattern never really stops. Everything, everyone, exists and then bleeds away, making way for the next story.

Perhaps they are all the same person. Perhaps so are we all.

And so what do these stories have in common?

Nothing. But oh, everything.


This is a perfect book.