Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I don't much go in for literary novels. However, every once in a while I will read one (Michael Chabon's 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay' or China Mieville's 'Perdido Street Station', for example) that makes me think I might be missing something. This is a highly celebrated novel as both a literary novel (nominated for the Man Booker Prize) and science fiction novel (nominated for the Clarke and Nebula Awards). I will just come right out and say it: I don't get it. Let me qualify that statement some. I get that the book has a complex style. There are six very loosely-related novellas, told in overlapping sections. But in order for this complexity to have a greater meaning or depth, the novellas must have something more in common. Unless I missed something, the only relation between the various protagonists is that they all have a comet-shaped birthmark between their shoulder and their collarbone. That's it. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up. I wish I could find a deeper thread to the narratives and then I wouldn't feel like I had wasted the last five or six days reading it, but I can't. So I did. Mitchell is successful at giving each protagonist a distinct voice, but he resorts to some cheap tricks to do so. In the novella of Somni~451 he takes every word that begins with 'ex' and truncates that to just 'x'. Pretty weak stuff for a Man Booker Prize nominee. In Zachry's story he uses a un-educated patois reminiscent of Anthony Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange'. Yes, it gives the novella's narrator a unique voice. The problem is that, like all the other narrators in 'Cloud Atlas', he doesn't really have anything interesting to say. First off you have a young American attorney, Adam Ewing, crossing the Pacific from Australia who rescues an escaped slave. This story is told by means of a diary Ewing keeps which is read by... Robert Frobisher, a cad, conman and composer who is trying to steal music and heirlooms from a syphillitic dying composer (not to mention the composer's wife and daughter) in 1930s Belgium. This novella is told through a series of letters to one Rufus Sixtsmith. Sixtsmith becomes a whistle-blower to... Luisa Rey an aspiring investigative reporter who exposes an unsafe nuclear reactor in late 1970s California. Next we hear the story ('Ordeal', rather) of Timothy Cavendish, a British publisher in contemporary times. Then we jump to Somni~451, a condemned clone-slave (fabricant) who achieves a higher consciousness and becomes a catalyst for a revolution. Finally we hear a story of Zachry, a tribesman in post-Apocalyptic Hawaii who is visited by Meronym a member of the last technologically advanced civilization. The stories are told thusly: 1a Adam Ewing 2a Roberth Frobisher 3a Luisa Rey 4a Timothy Cavendish 5a Somn_451 6 Zachry 5b Somni~451 4b Timothy Cavendish 3b Luisa Rey 2b Robert Frobisher 1b Adam Ewing Throughout each novella are links to other novellas (with the exception of Zachry's story which is self-contained and is not interrupted). The problem is these are meaningless flourishes. Apparently at some point Timothy Cavendish's story (along with Zachry's tale almost completely pointless) is made into a film which Somni~451 watches the first half of. Great. So what? I am sure when Mitchell outlined the structure of the - an aside: it's not really a novel; it's a collection of novellas - book that must have really looked great to the editor and publisher but without substantive links, it's a gimmick nothing more. I will say that of the six novellas, I enjoyed Somni~451's the most. Somni is a slave working in a future Korean fast-food restaurant. Her existence revolves utterly around the franchise for which she works (Papa Song's) and serving her customers. Fabricants (as they are known) are not supposed to have aspirations and are supposed to be barely capable of higher thought. However, she is unwittingly subjected to an experiment that causes her ascension (development of a higher consciousness) and she is then removed from the fast-food franchise and thrust into the middle of a burgeoning civil war. Now, I say interesting but that is only in relation to the other novellas. In the Somni~451 novella we are shown a world of cruel corporatism and soul-less consumerism run amok. In fact, in the future, monetary transactions are conducted via the Soul, a subcutaneous chip implanted in purebloods ('real' people as opposed to fabricants). In Somni's future, brand names have been co-opted as nouns. Similar to aspirin now being a common noun and not a brand, in the future a gun is a colt, a computer is a sony and a cigarette is a marlboro. As social criticism it's about as subtle and deep as an Occupy Schenectady rally. And like the entire Occupy movement (and I use that term loosely) it's long on criticism but very, very, very short on solutions. In fact, Mitchell himself as much as admits he doesn't have one because the next novella in the sequence, Zachry's story, takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting. I picked up this book because I had heard from a friend that this movie got rave reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival. Well, it must have some pretty stunning visuals to have garnered such a reaction because it sure as heck isn't the story..