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 may 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 tales that open his novel serves as a plot element in the succeeding story, and usually in a surprising way.
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