Cloud Atlas (2004)
By David Mitchell
Biological determinism; Cloning; Darwin
A series of interlocking tales that span generations examine social and biological developments through the complex interaction of genetic transformations and collective philosophies.
Cloud Atlas is composed of a series of interlocking tales, organized around a matryoshka-doll model of time. Beginning in 1850 with Adam Ewing’s Pacific Voyage, where the pious notary details his struggles with a rare brain parasite, his narrative abruptly ends as a series of letters from Robert Frobisher to friend Sixsmith begins. In 1931, Frobisher is fleeing a series of debt collectors, so he works as amanuensis to famous, syphilis-stricken composer Vyvyan Ayres. The narrative jumps to the 1970s, where intrepid reporter Luisa Rey is investigating a tip from elderly atomic engineer Rufus Sixsmith, who has written a report indicating that a new energy compound planned on Swanekke Island is actually an inevitable nuclear disaster. From Luisa’s perilous investigation, the action moves to present day: publisher Timothy Cavendish enlists his brother’s help to avoid extortionists, only to be tricked into a nursing home. Next, we encounter Somni-451, a genetically-engineered fast food worker in the corpocratic Korean superstate of the future. Somni has managed to “ascend” above the daily propaganda, soothing drug doses and limiting genetic composition to reject her genetically-determined station in favor of a central position in the Union, a resistance movement that believes that the cloned fabricants should have the rights afforded to the purebloods. From Somni’s oration, dictated shortly before her execution, the narrative becomes Zachry’s; Zachry lives in one of the few civilized communities on Earth, after much of the world has fallen into a state of uninhabitability as a result of gross abuse of the world’s resources. The action then hurdles back through the time, touching once more on each of the stories and illustrating how the characters are connected in spite of geographical and temporal distance.
That the characters from earlier generations continue to reappear leads to questions about humanity’s direction: do collective social beliefs, karma or genetic composition determine the trajectory of human development? Ewing notes in his journal the various ways in which Darwin’s new theories are practically applied; from ship hierarchy, to native tribes exterminating and enslaving one another, humans’ survival depends on cunning and brutality. From these very observations, Ewing determines that a purely predatory world, one devoid of compassion or mutual support, would eventually consume itself. His theory of extinction through selfishness plays out through the series of narratives; seeds of a society increasingly concerned with wealth are planted during Luisa’s exploration of a greedy organization less concerned with the environmental implications of their product than with the profits it might deliver. By Somni’s time, humanity is rapidly slipping into a morass of genetic mutations and uninhabitable environs, but the corpocracy continues to produce fabricants because disposable clones are necessary in a society dependent on increasing consumption. The enslavement of the Morioris by the Maora in Ewing’s narrative is reproduced in the corpocratic enslavement of clones to the Kona’s savagery of Zachry’s fellow Valleysmen. Zachry’s barren globe seems the natural result of a self-extinction born of strict adherence to starkly brutal principles of social Darwinism.
Evaluation: Mitchell masterfully experiments with narrative form to create a delicately complex series of plot, each of which addresses the influence of scientific and technological developments on the human species. While some of the individual narratives deal more directly with evolution or genetic transformations, the overarching theme of human transformation parallels evolutionary theories.
– Natalie Champ