The preview for “Cloud Atlas” gave me chills. The movie looks big and grand and sweeping, and Tom Hanks is in it. He is my very favorite Famous Tom. (Sorry Jones, Petty and Cruise.) So after watching the preview I was 99 percent sure I wanted to see the movie and 100 percent sure I wanted to read the book, which was written by David Mitchell and published way back in 2004.
(How is it possible that 2004 was so long ago? Who sped up my years?)
Other people must have felt the same, because there was a rather long wait for it at the library. I eventually was able to check it out, though, and I started reading it almost before I got home. But not actually before I got home, because I was driving and driving and reading “Cloud Atlas” is probably illegal and if it isn’t illegal it should be.
“Cloud Atlas” is a big, sweeping book that takes place over a long, long, long period of time. It’s split into 11 sections that kind of form a Time Sandwich. The first and last sections are set in the 19th century, and the centermost section is set in some undefined distant future. The others are in the ’30s, the ’70s, somewhere around right now and in a not-quite-as-distant future. And they’re all connected. That’s all I’ll say about that, because finding out how they were connected was what I was most looking forward to when I picked up the book and I’d hate to ruin that for you.
I found myself unfavorably and perhaps unfairly comparing “Cloud Atlas” to David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” the entire time I was reading it, and not just because they were both written by guys named David. I was expecting “Cloud Atlas” to be both as challenging and as ultimately rewarding as “Infinite Jest,” but in the end I didn’t find it to be either.
(That sounds terribly jerky of me, but it’s true so I’m going to go ahead and leave it. Let’s just accept that sometimes I’m a bit of a jerk and move along.)
Ultimately I thought it was a well-written story with a clever conceit, but it left me feeling depressed. I’m still interested in seeing the movie, though, if for no other reason than to see how they bring the Story Sandwich to the screen.