Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

For fun, I’ll add Orlando, 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Mitchell’s previous novels,[*1] and Italo Calvino’s metafictional masterpiece If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Mitchell read Calvino’s novel at university, and he has said that he sees Cloud Atlas as “in conversation” with Calvino, who, in turn, saw his work as “clearly” influenced by Vladimir Nabokov.

There should be a word for “the melancholy that comes from learning that what is in a novel is fictional.”

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.

Broad smirks greeted my return & I assumed I was “the devil being spoken of,” but I learned the true reason when I opened my door:—to wit, Mr. Boerhaave’s ursine buttocks astraddle his Blackamoor Goldilocks in my bed in flagrante delicto!

Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands.

“Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and here only, were those elusive phantasms, the noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!”

The Maori proved themselves apt pupils of the English in “the dark arts of colonization.”

What moral to draw? Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.

Watching the sail unfurl, one of the “saltest” aboard, a dour Icelander & a sober, obliging & hardworking fellow, spoke his admiration for all to hear. “The darkie’s salt as I am, aye, he’s got fishhooks for toes!”

Cpt. Molyneux grunted approval & ordered Mr. Boerhaave to replace his gun, “But d— me if I pay a stowaway a single cent. He’ll work his passage to O-hawaii. If he’s no shirker he may sign articles there in the regular fashion. Mr. Roderick, he can share the dead Spaniard’s bunk.”

I asked Finbar if he thought the boy was “fitting in well.” Finbar’s Delphic reply, “Fitting what in well, Mr. Ewing?” left the galley cackling but myself quite in the dark.

Dover an utter fright staffed by Bolsheviks, versified cliffs as Romantic as my arse and a similar hue.

and then guess who came a-knocking at my door? The spud-faced steward, his shift over. Gave him rather more than a tip. No Adonis, scrawny but inventive for his class. Turfed him out afterwards and sank into the sleep of the dead. One part of me wanted that voyage never to end.

Played V.A.’s own Digressions on a Theme of Lodovico Roncalli, but before the first two bars were out, he’d uttered a six-birch expletive, banged on the floor with his cane, and said, “Self-gratification makes you go blind, didn’t they teach you that at Caius?”

Warmed to the woman somewhat, I admit it. She holds forth like a man and smokes myrrhy cigarettes through a rhino-horn holder.

Don’t know how you wire money or telegram it or send it in packets or whatever, but you’re the scientist, you find a way.

Old, blind, and sick as Ayrs is, he could hold his own in a college debating society, though I notice he rarely proposes alternatives for the systems he ridicules. “Liberality? Timidity in the rich!” “Socialism? The younger brother of a decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed” “Conservatives? Adventitious liars, whose doctrine of free will is their greatest deception.” What sort of state does he want? “None! The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.”

Ewing puts me in mind of Melville’s bumbler Cpt. Delano in “Benito Cereno,” blind to all conspirators—he hasn’t spotted his trusty Dr. Henry Goose [sic] is a vampire, fueling his hypochondria in order to poison him, slowly, for his money.

“A time is one’s own, Eva, when oneself and one’s peers take the same things for granted, without thinking about it. Likewise, a man is ruined when the times change but he does not. Permit me to add, empires fall for the same reason.”

“I dreamt of a…nightmarish café, brilliantly lit, but underground, with no way out. I’d been dead a long, long time. The waitresses all had the same face. The food was soap, the only drink was cups of lather. The music in the café was”—he wagged an exhausted finger at the MS—“this.”

When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.

To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!”

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves ...

Several dead bottles of Trappist beer later, I asked Elgar about the Pomp and Circumstance marches. “Oh, I needed the money, dear boy. But don’t tell anyone. The King might want my baronetcy back.”

Aide-de-camp? I’m his bloody general and he’s the fat old Turk reigning on the memory of faded glories!

Where Oh Where Is Margo Roker?

A trio of teenettes, dressed like Prostitute Barbie, approached, drift-netting the width of the pavement.

“Yeah? ‘None-hit wonders like Mr. Hoggins are the roadkills of modern letters.’ Notice how people insert the ‘Mr.’ before sinking the blade in? ‘Mr. Hoggins should apologize to the trees felled for his bloated “autobio-novel.” Four hundred vainglorious pages expire in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief.’

Dermot “Duster” Hoggins brushed his lapels, leaned over the balcony, and yelled: “So who’s expired in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief now?”

BBC2 commissioned a special documentary in which the lesbian who interviewed me edited my witticisms wholly out of context.

The American publishers, glory glory Hallelujah, they loved the Limey-Aristo-Gets-Comeuppance-from-Downtrodden-Gaelic-Son hook, and a transatlantic auction skyrocketed the advance to giddy heights.

I, had exclusive rights to this platinum goose with a bad case of the trots!

In a lucid dream I was looking after a little asylum-seeker boy who begged for a go in one of those rides in the corners of supermarkets you put fifty p into. I said, “Oh, all right,” but when the child climbed out he had turned into Nancy Reagan. How could I explain that to his mother?

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

I’m not a racialist, but I do believe the ingredients in so-called melting pots take generations to melt.

“Yurrin Hulpal,” the Modigliani answered. Arabic? My brain proposed the following: a Eurostar train had stopped at Adlestrop, I had boarded and slept all the way to Istanbul Central. Addled brain. I needed a clear sign, in English. Welcome to Hull.

His master’s nose, eyebrows, and lips were so pierced with ironmongery that a powerful electromagnet would have shredded his face in a single pass. What do these people do at airport metal detectors?

“Look, I’m sure you’re a reasonable woman.” The oxymoron passed without comment.

The day has come. Your stay can be miserable or pleasant. But your stay is permanent.

A sexless automaton brought lunch on a tray. I’m not being insulting, but I truly couldn’t tell if she or he was a he or a she. It had a slight mustache but tiny breasts too.

But as I pushed cold peas onto my plastic fork, a chain of firecrackers exploded in my skull and the old world came to an abrupt end.

If, by happiness, you mean the absence of adversity, I and all fabricants are the happiest stratum in corpocracy, as genomicists insist. However, if happiness means the conquest of adversity, or a sense of purpose, or the xercise of one’s will to power, then of all Nea So Copros’s slaves we surely are the most miserable. I endured drudgery but enjoy it no more than yourself.

Genomicists, for whom you are a holy grail, as you know, pulled levers on the Juche to have Rule 54.iii—the right to archivism—enforced against Unanimity’s wishes,

To mistake a book of fairy tales for Nea So Copros may seem laughable to you, a pureblood, but perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.

Your birthmark? I didn’t know fabricants have birthmarks. We do not, so mine always caused me embarrassment in the steamer. Ma-Leu-Da108 called it “Sonmi451’s stain.”

“Well, gentlemen, we have made a very ominous start to the Year of the Snake.”

My companion now xuded a grim authority that I realized had always been there.

The man I had known as Postgrad Hae-Joo Im, backdropped by a dead actor, playing a character scripted over a century ago, turned to me. “Sonmi451, I am not xactly who I said I am.”

One: Hands are burnin’, let that rope be not cut. Two: Enemy’s sleeping, let his throat be not slit. Three: Bronze is burnin’, let that bridge be not crossed.

My parents an’ their gen’ration b’liefed, somewhere, hole cities o’ Old Uns s’vived the Fall b’yonder the oceans, jus’ like you, Zachry. Old-time names haunted their ’maginin’s…Melbun, Orkland, Jo’burg, Buenas Yerbs, Mumbay, Sing’pore.