Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is such a tangled web of interlocking story threads that it's hard to know where to begin talking about it.

For me, the easiest clew to begin picking at has to be "Half Lives", the story of Luisa Rey, because it's anomalous within the greater structure of the novel.  Unlike the other 5 stories, Rey's does not purport to be factual -- it's presented as a thriller (and not a particularly good one).  The other 5 stories are first-person accounts of events that have (purportedly) happened to the narrator/journalist/correspondent.

And yet, Luisa Rey's story also fits into the over-arching narrative themes.  Rey reads Frobisher's letters from the previous section, she listens to the Cloud Atlas sextet, later on, Sonmi will re-experience Rey's fall in the car, and so on.  Her story is linked to the other 5 as much as any of them are linked.

My first thought is that, although Rey's story is particularly outrageous, Mitchell starts to cast doubt on his stories early on.  Frobisher finds Adam Ewing's journal from part 1 and comments that the writing style doesn't feel authentic.  In "Sloosha's Crossing," Zachry the narrator is telling us the story long after the fact, and his son tells us that he was often given to "yarning."  From there, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to deciding that Cavendish's story is, at least, heavily embellished -- the second half reads more like a sitcom than anything else.

On the other hand, it's just plain unsatisfying to see that they're all supposed to be "false," whatever that might  mean in a fictional work.  I think the most satisfying answer is to say that all of these stories are somewhat-edited versions of actual "true" stories, and that Mitchell is also working in the idea of the teller's bias making the "true" story unknowable.

From this, we can go to the idea that maybe all 6 stories are reflections of some deeper story that underlies all of them.  All 6 stories are stories of oppression and suppression, sometimes on a large scale, sometimes just person-to-person.  When looked at this way, I think the ending has a real resonance -- Ewing's declaration is a fitting close, applying not just to his story, but to all of them.

There's a lot more to say about this book, and maybe some day I'll say some of it :-).  One side note...  In contradistinction to some of the commentary I've read, I don't think this is really a novel of reincarnation.  Rather, I think the comet-shaped birthmark is another leitmotif linking the stories together.