A Screening of "Cloud Atlas," with Background on Context and Locale

When we read "Cloud Atlas" several months ago, we planned on having an outing to see the movie. However, that never happened because the movie was released and disappeared from theaters almost on the same day! Finally, the time has arrived -- I'm hosting a "Cloud Atlas" screening at my house at the beginning of June. There will be lots of food from the various countries represented in the book, lots of wine, and lots of hard liquor options. Let's keep in mind that this movie tops off at 3 hours in length! While trying to remember what happened in the book, I stumbled across a great blog that had a comprehensive summary of this very long and convoluted story (see Book Drum for details on locales and plot lines.) So, without further ado, I hope this helps you get through the highly acclaimed, and also much-maligned, film adaptation of "Cloud Atlas." 

A Much-Needed Table of Contents to “Cloud Atlas”
Page #	Who	What	When	Where
1-39	Adam Ewing	American lawyer and notary	1849	At sea between South Pacific Islands and San Francisco
41-86	*Robert Frobisher	English musician, and composer	1931	Brussels, Belgium
87-142	*Luisa Rey	American journalist	1975	San Francisco
143-181	Tim Cavendish	English publisher	2012	London and Hull, England
183-236	*Sonmi~451	Korean cloned waitress	2144	Seoul, Korea
237-309	*Zachry	Hawaiian valleysman	2321	Big Island, Hawaii
311-349	Sonmi~451
351-387	Tim Cavendish
389-436	Luisa Rey
437-471	Robert Frobisher
473-509	Adam Ewing

* Individuals with comet-shaped birthmark

Cloud Atlas Context and Summary
From Book Drum and Wikipedia

This novel is composed of six interlacing narratives, each one housed within the next, so that the first is a book read by a character in the second, the second a series of letters cherished by a character in the third, the third a populist novel being considered by a publisher in the third, and so on. To fully realize this Russian-doll experiment, Mitchell divides each tale in half and places them, sandwich fashion, at opposite ends of the book. Thus, the opening narrative is the last to be concluded, the second the penultimate, etc. At the center of the novel lies the indivisible doll, an unbroken post-apocalyptic tale wrapped fivefold. Despite this symbiotic, intra-textual concept, further emphasized by the unifying themes of recurrence and predation, each narrative stands as a novella in its own right.

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing – South Pacific Ocean, 1849: An 18th century maritime romp in diarized form, written by Adam Ewing, an American notary. Ewing has come to the Chatham Islands to conclude a business arrangement with Reverend Gilles Horrox for his father-in-law, Haskell Moore. While awaiting repairs to his ship, he hears a detailed and brutal account of the indigenous people. He also witnesses the whipping of a Moriori slave, Autua, who stows away on his ship and convinces Ewing to advocate for him to join the crew as a freeman. Aboard the tyrannically captained schooner, he discovers that his medical companion, Dr. Henry Goose, is slowly poisonings him to steal his valuables. After narrowly escaping loss of life and property, Ewing returns to the United States, where he and his wife, Tilda, denounce her father's complicity in slavery and leave San Francisco to join the Slavery Abolitionist Movement.

Letters from Zedelghem – Brussels, Belgium, 1931: Epistolary form documenting the final months of the bipolar, bisexual musician, Robert Frobisher. Fleeing from his debtors in England, he arrives in Brussels to serve as amanuensis to Vyvyan Ayrs, a dying world-class composer. While aiding the old genius in the creation of a masterpiece, he finds the time and inspiration to compose his own masterpiece, "The Cloud Atlas Sextet." He also sleeps with his Ayrs' wife, surreptitiously sells off some of his property, and then falls in love with his daughter. When Ayrs demands taking the credit for Frobisher's work and threatens to expose his scandalous background if he resists, Frobisher, who has read a partial copy of Ewing's journal, shoots Ayrs and flees to a hotel, where he finishes his own magnum opus. After his final fit of manic creativity, he commits suicide just before the arrival of his lover Rufus Sixsmith.

Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery – San Francisco, 1975:  Populist prose style that reworks the classic "intrepid journalist takes on ruthless captain of industry" formula. It is 1970s California, where Rey meets an older Sixsmith, now a nuclear physicist, who tips her off to a conspiracy regarding the safety of a new nuclear reactor run by Lloyd Hooks. Hooks’ hit man, Bill Smoke, assassinates Sixsmith before he can give her a report proving that the much-hyped nuclear power plant is not as safe as it seems. Rey finds and reads Frobisher's letters to Sixsmith, then receives a copy of Sixsmith’s report from Isaac Sachs, another scientist at the power plant. However, Smoke assassinates him then runs Rey's car off a bridge. With help from the plant's head of security, Joe Napier, she evades another attempt against her life, which results in Smoke's death, and exposes the plot to use a nuclear accident for the benefit of oil companies.

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish – London and Hull, England, 2012:  Comic tale of an over-educated, underachieving vanity publisher who unexpectedly finds success, when Dermot Hoggins, a gangster author whose book he has published, propels a scoffing reviewer from a rooftop. When Hoggins' associates threaten Cavendish's life to get his share of the profits, Cavendish asks for help from his brother Denholme. Unfortunately, his brother tricks him into hiding in a high security nursing home in Hull, where he is held against his will. Along with two of the homes more spirited inmates, Cavendish masterminds an escape plan that delivers him into a bucolic, wealthy retirement financed by the receipt of a manuscript and subsequent publication of a novel based on Rey's life. He also benefits from a screenplay about his own story in the home that has been made into a movie.

An Orison of Somni~451 – Seoul, Korea, 2144: A dark, dystopian tale of a futuristic world where eugenics and corpocracy have combined to create a nightmarishly Orwellian world and everything is dictated by a state intent on maintaining power. Sonmi~451, a laboratory-controlled, genetically engineered fabricant (clone) server at a restaurant, evolves beyond her existence to become a martyr for the abolitionist cause. Rescued from her compliant life of servitude by Commander Hae-Joo Chang, a member of a rebel movement known as “Union,” she watches a film based on Cavendish's adventure. She later learns that fabricants are killed and "recycled" into food for future fabricants and realizes that the system of society based on slavery and exploitation is intolerable. Hae-Joo is killed in a firefight and Sonmi is captured then brought to Hawaii to make a public broadcast of her story and manifesto, after which she is executed.

Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After – Big Island, Hawaii, 2321 (dated "106 winters after “The Fall” in the book): A grim post-apocalyptic narrative where survivors have reverted to a primitive tribal civilization. Valleysman Zachry lives in "The Valley" after most of humanity has died during "The Fall" and where Sonmi is worshiped as a goddess. His village is visited by Meronym, a mysterious dark skinned member of the "Prescients," an advanced society that retains remnants of technology from before The Fall. In exchange for saving his sister, Catkin, from death, Zachry agrees to guide Meronym into the mountains in search of Cloud Atlas, a communications station from where she is able to send a message to Earth's colonies about her location. While there, Meronym reveals that Sonmi was a mortal and not a deity as The Valley tribes believe. After returning to his village, Zachry kills the Kona chief after discovering that the Kona have slaughtered his tribe. After Meronym saves Zachry and Catkin from the Kona tribesmen, they say goodbye to her ad the Prescients as their boat leaves the Big Island.

The More Distant Future – Big Island, Hawaii, ~2361 (several decades after the action on Big Island): This seventh time period is featured in the film's prologue and epilogue. Zachry is revealed to have been telling these stories to his grandchildren on a colony of Earth located on another planet, confirming that Meronym, who is present at the site, succeeded in sending the message to the colonies and was rescued along with him.

*****

Q and A: Book World Talks With David Mitchell

The Washington Post
Sunday, August 22, 2004

We found the author of "Cloud Atlas" in the Irish fishing village of Clonakilty, where he lives with his wife and daughter. Born in the English town of Seaport 34 years ago, he also has lived in Sicily and Hiroshima, Japan.

BW: What was the inspiration for "Cloud Atlas"?

DM: There wasn't really a single Eureka moment. For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed. That said, three important sources spring to mind. First, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino -- an experimental novel in which a sequence of narratives is interrupted but never picked up again -- made a big impression on me when I was an undergraduate. I wondered what a novel might look like if a mirror were placed at the end of a book like Calvino's so that the stories would be resolved in reverse.

Second, a mention of the Moriori people in Jared Diamond's multidisciplinary Guns, Germs, and Steel led to a trip to the Chatham Islands and an encounter with New Zealand historian Michael King's A Land Apart. His idea that there is nothing inevitable about civilization caught my curiosity. Knowledge can be forgotten as easily as, perhaps more easily than, it can be accrued. As a people, the Moriori "forgot" the existence of any other land and people but their own. When I heard this, my novelistic Geiger counter crackled.

Third, a book by Frederick Delius's amanuensis, Eric Fenby, Delius: As I Knew Him, was worlds away from the Moriori but gave me the idea of Fenby's evil twin, and the struggle between the exploited and the exploiter.

Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting. (This needn't be as bleak as it sounds -- a consequence of getting can be giving, which presumably is what love is about.) Once I had these two ideas for novellas, I looked for other variations on the theme of predatory behavior -- in the political, economic and personal arenas. These novellas seemed to marry well with the structure I had in mind: Each block of narrative is subsumed by the next, like a row of ever-bigger fish eating the one in front.

BW: What did you learn in the process of writing it?

DM: I learned that art is about people: Ideas are well and good, but without characters to hang them on, fiction falls limp. I learned that language is to the human experience what spectography is to light: Every word holds a tiny infinity of nuances, a genealogy, a social set of possible users, and that although a writer must sometimes pretend to use language lightly, he should never actually do so -- the stuff is near sacred. I learned that maybe I should have a go at a linear narrative next time! I learned that the farther back in time you go, the denser the research required, and the more necessary it is to hide it.

BW: Did you write it as six separate stories?

DM: I did, but put indications where I would later cut and paste the novel into its final shape. The day I decided to do it that way was one of the major finishing posts of the novel. (I went to feed the ducks.)

BW: What was your model (which is something quite different from inspiration)?

DM: Each of the six sections has a model. My character Ewing was (pretty obviously) Melville, but with shorter sentences. Frobisher is Christopher Isherwood, especially in Lions and Shadows. Luisa Rey is any generic airport thriller. Cavendish is Cavendish -- he has a short part in the "London" section of my first novel, Ghostwritten. The interview format for "Sonmi" I borrowed from gossip magazines in which a rather gushing hack interviews some celeb bigwig. Zachary owes (of course) a big debt to Riddley Walker, a novel by Russell Hoban, though some reviewers point to "Mad Max 3." (Thanks guys.) I can't claim that Don DeLillo's monumental Underworld is a model for Cloud Atlas, but reading him always encourages me (like drinking) to take literary risks. (Both books, I just noticed, have upbeat endings, against the odds.)

BW: What, in your mind, distinguishes this book from your others?

DM: It has more of a conscience. I think this is because I am now a dad. I need the world to last another century and a half, not just see me to happy old age.

*****

Locales in the Story

The Chatham Islands

Chatham Islands

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing is written on a voyage home from the Chatham Islands. The ten islands that form the group have belonged to New Zealand since 1842. They are approximately 800 km east of New Zealand. Only the two main islands are inhabited. The present inhabitants have European, Maori and Moriori origins. William R. Broughton visited the largest island in 1791 in the HMS Chatham, giving the island its current name.

 Chatham Islands today -
Credit: Villie Miettinen

Bruges, Belgium

Bruges, Capital of West Flanders

Bruges - Credit: Neill Thompson

Much of Letters from Zedelghem takes place in Bruges, knicknamed the 'Venice of the North' for its picturesque canals. Bruges is the largest city in the province of West Flanders, where some of the worst fighting of the First World War took place. 
Today, just over 100,000 people live in Bruges. The medieval 
center has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 
Neerbeke is a fictional village.

California, USA

Location of nuclear power plant in the U.S. -
Credit: U.S. Nuclear  Regulatory Commission

Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery takes place in Buenas Yerbas, a fictional district in California, the most populous state in the US. California owes much of its present wealth to the 19th century Gold Rush, thus providing a link with The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing. 

Most US nuclear power plants are found along the east coast, but Mitchell chooses to locate his fictional HYDRA on the west coast in California. Nuclear reactors require huge amounts of water as part of their cooling process, so they are often located along coastlines. Almost 20% of electricity 
in the US is produced by its 104 nuclear reactors. 
More are planned.

Anti-nuclear protests
following the accident
at Three Mile Island

By the 1970s, the anti-nuclear movement in the U.S. had built up a great deal of momentum. Those who protested against nuclear power plants generally did so for the following reasons: 1) Damage to local ecosystems from the release of heat into the environment; 2) Fear of radioactive emissions during normal operations; 3) Fear of a major accident involving a massive release of radiation. Protestors succeeded in preventing Pacific Gas and Electric from building the first commercially viable nuclear power plant in the US in the early 1960s but failed to prevent the construction of the Humboldt Bay Power Plant located, like the HYDRA reactor, on the Californian coastline. Protests were triggered all over the world following the accidents at Chernobyl as well as at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania (1979). The Fukushima Daiichi disaster of 2011 has further set back the prospects of the nuclear industry.

Hull, England

Panorama of monotone Hull - Credit: David Miller

In The Ghastly ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, Timothy goes into exile in Hull. Located at the edge of the Humber estuary, the City of Kingston-upon-Hull is a fishing port boasting the Humber Bridge (from which a legion of hapless folk jump each year), the po-faced poet of despair Philip Larkin, and the street brawling ex-Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.

Hull is, perhaps unfairly, the butt of many an English joke and is known for its comparatively low standards of living: high crime, teenage pregnancy, and unemployment rates; bleak urban landscape; and the stench of fish that permeates the air. It can claim pole position in that most venerable of publications Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places To Live In The UK. Lying in his soiled cot, the infantilized Cavendish may have had time to reflect upon the irony that he is incarcerated within the cradle of Britain's most famous civil rights campaigner, William Wilberforce.

Seoul, South Korea

Landmarks of Seoul, the 2nd largest
city in the world

An Orison of Sonmi~451 takes place in Nea So Copros, a future version of present-day South Korea. Many of the characteristics of Nea So Copros are nightmarish exaggerations of South Korea’s current system of aggressively capitalist government. Between 1960 and 1990, South Korea boasted the fastest growing economy in the world and it was recently recognized as the world’s most innovative country. The Republic of Korea was at one stage infamous for its system of crony capitalism in which vast family businesses, like Samsung, LG, and Hyundai, were state sponsored. Indeed, in Nea So Copros, state and business work hand in glove to create a murderous 'corpocracy'. Perhaps the most alarming parallel is  that the South Korean government once sponsored its own revolutionary movement, by which they were able to monitor seditious activity, as well as consolidate support by unifying citizens against a common enemy.  

Much of the action takes places in the capital Seoul and in South Korea's second largest city Pusan. The corpocratic hierarchy of 
Nea So Copros is presented in diagrammatic form below.

Corporatic Hierarchy of Nea So Corps - Credit: Geoff Mills

The Big Island, Hawaii

The Big Island, Hawaii - Credit: mccready, Flickr

Sloosha's Crossing an' Ev'rythin' After is based in the Hawaiian Islands, particularly the largest of the eight main islands, known as the Big Island. David Mitchell visited and researched the island on a travel scholarship from the Society of Authors. This section of the book pays close attention to the geography of the eastern side of the Big Island, and readers can trace Zachry's movements on google maps or the annotated map below. 

The Big Island, Hawaii -
Credit: Steve Dunleavy

Hawaii is the newest of the US states and the only one composed of a group of islands. Its beautiful scenery, tropical climate, active volcanoes, and intriguing wildlife make it a popular tourist destination as well as a draw for scientists of many disciplines.

Europeans first graced the archipelago when Captain Cook discovered the islands in 1778. His second visit in 1779 proved fatal: he was killed by natives in a skirmish over a stolen boat. The native population dwindled when visitors and traders introduced the usual array of European diseases. The islands retain their own language, although English is used alongside it. The current demographic of 1.3 million is mixed, but the most dominant groups are white Americans, Asian Americans, and white Europeans. This section of the novel draws on the oral tradition, a return to the days of pre-civilization when the spoken word took precedence over the written.

Big I, according to Zachry

1) Mauna Kea - the mountain which Zachry and Meronym climb to discover the observatories.

2) Waipio Valley - through which runs the River Waipo. It is in this valley where the Kona murder Zachry’s father and kidnap his brother. 

3) Kona territory.

4) Mountain Kohala - where Zachry herds his goats. He crosses the mountain razorback to escape from the Kona and deliver Meronym to Ikat’s finger.

5) Hilo - site of a different tribe.

6) Honokaa - site of the annual intertribal barter. Also site of the Kona attack, where Zachry is captured.

7) Waimea Town - Roughly its position, from where Zachry and Meronym begin their ascent of Mauna Kea.

8) Nine Valleys - home to Zachry’s people, the valleysman, so called by Zachry because there are nine individual valleys which cut into the land on the northeastern side of the island.   

9) Kukuihaele - through which the valleysman pass on their way to the barter in Honokaa and where the Kona gathered before their assault on the Nine Valleys.

10.) Ikat’s Finger - probably the location of the spit of land for which Zachry and Meronym are headed after the Kona attack.