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 highbrow 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.