Reviewed by Ted Gioia

In adopting the term “conceptual fiction” to describe a
body of modern writing—which I have done in more
than fifty essays and reviews to date—I have aimed to
draw attention to an area of experimentation in
contemporary storytelling that is
still poorly understood.

These works of conceptual fiction
cut through the great divides in
criticism: divides between high-
brow and lowbrow, genre and
mainstream, popular and literary.
They represent the fruition of a
quasi-hidden alternative tradition
in modern writing, with its own
genealogy and masterworks. As
such, they deserve—but rarely
receive—a response from critics
and scholars that is sensitive to
this larger framework.

These works have their deepest roots in the often
despised—but more often merely neglected or
patronized—science fiction and fantasy books of the
middle of the 20th century. This alone explains much
of the incoherent response to this tradition, which
treats half of the defining books as hack work, and
bows down before the others—Márquez, McCarthy,
Saramago, Rushdie, Auster, Murakami, etc.—but only
after isolating them (safe from contamination) in a
different section of the library. Yet this is only part of
the richness and complexity of the conceptual fiction
tradition: an even longer lineage can be constructed,
back to Verne and Wells in the nineteenth century,
even further to Swift’s Gulliver Travels, Thomas
More's Utopia, and eventually to the earliest stirrings
of conceptual fiction in myths and folktales. In short,
the tinkering with conceptions of reality and delight in
the fanciful—key qualities of these works—are as old as
storytelling itself.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is almost a textbook
example of how this tradition is enlivening
contemporary fiction. It is an exemplar of this vital
area of development in modern writing—all the more
vital because it manages to be bold and experimental
without destroying the key elements of narrative
structure, character development and linguistic
comprehensibility that earlier progressive movements
often ignored at their own peril. The power of a book
such as Cloud Atlas is amplified because its higher level
complexities don’t require the ground floor level of the
story be burnt, pillaged and destroyed. Instead of
trying to keep up with the Pynchons and Gaddises,
who only live in the penthouse, Mitchell occupies the
whole building, even the boiler room and broom closet.

On its simplest level, Cloud Atlas is a set of six sharply
contrasting stories, each one capable of standing alone
as a complete tale, but only revealing its full resonance
when viewed in the context of the total work. The
stories cover a wide range of territory, writing styles
and psychological perspectives. We find here a travel
journal of a pious and gullible 19th century notary; an
epistolary novella about a morally bankrupt young
composer from the 1930s; a pulp fiction conspiracy tale
set during the Gerald Ford administration; a comic tale
of a vanity publisher who finds himself confined
against his wishes in a home for the aged; a sci-fi story,
in Q&A format, about clones working in an
underground fast food restaurant; and an account of
tribal warfare in a post-apocalyptic island society.

The structure of the novel is palindromic. The five
opening sections each represent the opening of a tale
that will be concluded, in reverse order, by the five
final sections of the book. This same form is adopted by
the composer Robert Frobisher, the protagonist of the
epistolary novella, who describes it as follows:

“Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking
my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping
soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin,
each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the
first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the
second, each interruption is recontinued, in order.
Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's
finished, and by then it'll be too late.”

This composition is called the “Cloud Atlas Sextet,” and
the passage above might seem to unlock the meaning
of the title of Mitchell’s novel. Yet the concept of a
“cloud atlas” appears elsewhere—for example, as a
symbolic representation of the transmigration of souls
—or in a rare recording of Frobisher’s composition that
figures as a plot elements in a separate story. The
multivalent meaning of this one element is an example
of the many prefigurings and reverberations that give
depth and suchness to this ambitious novel.

As a result, the linkages between the six narratives are
difficult, perhaps impossible, to summarize. But let me
propose a (Philip K.) Dicksian way of approaching this
interconnectivity. Imagine that the defining stories of
our lives are not rooted in reality, as many critics
assume, but in other stories. This may seem a radical
notion, but upon reflection, you can see that this is
simply another way of expressing the lineages of fiction
described above—or, for that matter,  most oral / aural
storytelling traditions. In this instance, the connection
is made explicit in Michell’s narratives for “overlapping
soloists.” Each of the five half-tales that open his novel
serves as a plot element in the succeeding story, and
usually in a surprising way.

We have thus entered the world of the “meta-
narrative,” where stories build their house of cards
within the framework of other stories. Yet, in a marked
departure from the way such meta-narratives are
typically constructed—i.e., flamboyantly with the
author’s presence constantly felt—Mitchell remains
hidden from view throughout Cloud Atlas. The writing
style of each of the sections is perfectly matched to the
tale, with even the flaws of the genre mimicked with
perfect fidelity. The novelist is clearly dealing the
cards, and playing them brilliantly, but he is about as
hard to second-guess as those poker champions on TV,
with their wraparound sunglasses, floppy hats and
other accessories designed to maintain a face of
mystery to all onlookers.

On top of this intriguing structure, Mitchell
superimposes echoes of Nietzsche’s theory of eternal
recurrence. You may recall that this odd and seemingly
implausible philosophical concept proposes a universe
that does not advance chronologically, but merely
repeats itself, over and over again. This cyclical concept
of history does not presuppose any theistic doctrines,
but can be made congruent with a belief in
reincarnation. Mitchell clearly draws on this
metaphysical angle, and sets in motion story elements
that imply that the characters in his six tales may be
reincarnations of each other.

Of course, none of this is presented in the blunt, point-
by-point way that I have just outlined it. Mitchell
works his changes subtly, and even at his most
philosophical, he “clouds” his points in a fog of
ambiguity. He is, after all, a storyteller and not a
theoretician, and the narrative is never dislodged by
the higher order meanings. They merely float above
the action. After a lifetime of reading novels that
proclaim their “message” in heavy-handed ways, I
found this immersion in the loosely defined and
amorphous to be one of the most endearing aspects of
Mitchell’s extraordinary novel.

Then again, that might be just what one should expect
from a cloud atlas.


The article originally appeared in Blogcritics.  
conceptual
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by David Mitchell
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