CLOUD ATLAS (BY) DAVID MITCHELL

Published 2004, 528 pages
Characters: B+
Writing: A
Plot: A
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: A

When I'm walking around a bookstore scouting for something to read, it's always irritating when books are missing a summary — as if publishers are knowingly trying to kill impulse buys and give Amazon more business. A lot of times, of course, the summaries on the backcover are so vague or poorly written that they might as well not be there anyway.  It would be difficult to tell what kind of book Cloud Atlas is just by giving it a quick look-over, so while the back cover summary may seem frustratingly elusive, this happens to actually be the kind of book that can't be captured in Marketing Speak.  With Cloud Atlas, the events that occur aren't as important as the structure of the narrative, the way the pieces fit together.  Because this book isn't one story, but five separate narratives nested within each other like Russian dolls.  Each takes place in a different time period, moving forward chronologically, and therefore each is written in a radically different voice, style and genre from the others. The first is a sort of Victorian adventure novel, the second a novel of letters set in 1931, both written in the style of their time, and thus distinctly archaic sounding.  The following two pieces are the closest to modern novels — the first, set in the 70's, mimics a pulpy paperback thriller; the next is the only tale set in the present day, a first person account from a cantankerous old man trying to escape his life's many debts.  After that we move into the future, and finally, the distant future.  Making a plot summary even more impossible, the first four "threads" of the novel are split in half, each ending in a cliffhanger before jumping to the next time period.  Only the fifth and final tale is told in one piece, and when it ends we travel back to the previous stories in reverse chronological order, so that the novel ends where it begins, having spanned a few hundred years of human history.

Difficult to explain, of course, and after all that I've not even attempted to summarize what actually "happens" in Cloud Atlas.  It's somewhat beside the point, but if Cloud Atlas is about anything, it's reincarnation.  Smaller threads and minor themes begin to tie each of the five stories together, and it's strongly hinted that many of the protagonists are the same soul, reincarnated.  It's a remarkably bold concept, and Mitchell executes it brilliantly.  Though he at times spells out the reincarnation bits a little too explicitly, he has a lot of fun throwing clues to the reader here and there.  After crossing the halfway point and realizing I would again be returning to each of these worlds to discover its unique conclusion, the experience became one of the most satisfying and thrilling I've had with a novel.  Mitchell builds up his themes gradually, letting characters make their points as best they could based on their lives and social atmosphere, but these personalities all add up to a few stunning, beautiful statements about life and the burden of being human.

Mitchell's ability to switch between styles and genres is nearly superhuman, and though he never holds back, it doesn't seem as if he's showing off either.  He plays these genres against each other, and against themselves, often re-appropriating tired genre cliches by placing them adjacent to a wildly different storyline, adding new meaning through context.  Read any other way, one would not think to compare the smaller details, the universal constants — but here, together, Mitchell is able to draw attention to the fundamentals of each world by the reader's natural tendency to force comparisons, instead of heavy-handed narration.  If one were to critique some of these stories on their own, a few of them likely would not hold up... but that's okay.  "Half-Lives," the 70's thriller about a corrupt nuclear energy company, is written like an airport novel, and therefore bears all the faults of the genre — awkward 3rd person narration, internal monologues delivered in italics, dastardly villains that seem to know everything at every turn, a preposterous conspiracy that seemingly everyone and their mother is in-on.  It may appear to be poorly written at first, but it's done intentionally, and in the context of the novel, it works.  The first section, "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," is somewhat tedious to get through, as it reads like a journal from the 1850's actually would, and is certainly the slowest-paced thread in Cloud Atlas. None of these issues are necessarily flaws, and they don't detract from the novel's overall impact.  Mitchell's writing in other places ranges from deadly accurate to beautiful.  His plotting is precise and creative, and it's impossible not to admire the easy grace with which these stories were assembled.

Mitchell doesn't necessarily have one direct message to impart, or one clear story to tell, and the significance of the novel may accumulate in your mind rather than dropping on you all at once.  Themes of slavery, oppression and endurance somewhat tie everything together, but hints of reincarnation and the vast scope of the novel make everything more profoundly melancholy than any of it would seem on its own.  Indeed, simply struggling through each character's individual problems knowing how encased and limited their lives are, both physically and existentially, is quite affecting.  While Mitchell could have taken this concept in any number of directions, the result is pleasantly subdued, letting the results speak for themselves without getting too flashy in their delivery.  I have never read another novel quite like Cloud Atlas, and while it's often a challenging, strange hybrid of styles, it's also one of the best books I've read in recent years.

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY (BY) PAUL AUSTER

Published 1990, 308 pages
Characters: B+
Writing: A-
Plot: A
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: A

When I first read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy two years ago, I did not know what to make of it.  It's a purposefully obscure book, with each of the three interconnected novellas offering its own difficulties, despite each telling similar stories.  I thought I liked it, but I could not have told you specifically why.  To appreciate the Trilogy, you should probably enjoy detective fiction, meta-narratives, elaborate, abstract metaphors and writers writing about writers writing about writers (often with more layers and levels than Inception).  After this second read of the Trilogy, I still can't claim to understand everything that Auster was trying to convey, but I can say that the New York Trilogy is probably now on my list of favorite books. It's difficult, it's depressing and bleak, it's slowly paced and full of possibly impossible riddles, but Auster writes with confidence and deliberation that few other writers can match.  There is always the sense that he is simply that much cleverer than you — the Trilogy is willing to hold on to its secrets, but you could unravel them with enough effort.  As the narrator reiterates throughout, there is never a wasted word, never an insignificant thought.

It would be nearly impossible to describe the plot of these novellas without sabotaging the book's meticulous construction, but there are general themes and structures that hold each together.  Each story is, in a way, the same story: that of a detective stuck on a dull, uneventful case for such a long time that he eventually turns his analytical eye upon himself and faces an existential crises.  In two of the novellas, the "detective" is only a writer forced by chance to play the role of a private eye.  By necessity, then, nothing happens for long periods of time, so it's easy to see how some could become bored with this.  (It's almost inevitable that you will be frustrated, if not bored — I certainly was, even the second time around).  The Trilogy has all the trappings of a noir at the start, but it's only a detective novel in the meta sense, turning the conventions and grittiness of noir on their end in order to unravel the identity of character, writer and reader.  It's a brilliant move by Auster, and though the book is certainly paced on the slower side, I was never once bored.  Everything is so carefully constructed, literally no image or abstraction is wasted.  It's certainly a complicated novel, but the narrative itself moves forward linearly, and it's never difficult to discern what's actually happening — it's only difficult to figure out the significance of what is happening.  The mysteries here are of a vague, internal sort, sprinkled with strange subplots and metaphorical overtones.  One side character is obsessed with the Tower of Babel, and a detective is forced to follow him on cryptic scavenger hunts throughout the city as this man attempts to create a new, perfect language.  In the second (probably most obscure and frustrating) story, every character is named after a color: Black, Blue, White, etc.  The narrator of the third story claims that he wrote the first two, and elements from each bleed into one another — sometimes names, mostly themes, and surely the anxiety each narrator faces.  Another winking discussion involves the true author and significance of Don Quixote, and its many implications — characters-as-writers and writers-as-characters, duplicity and subversion — likely serve as a linchpin to unraveling the meaning of the entire Trilogy.

Auster is as careful with his language as he is with his plotting, and his assurance that every obscurity has its secret meaning is what keeps the Trilogy from becoming another pretentious exercise in lazy ambiguity.  His workmanlike prose fits the style of the stories, and though I would call his writing poignant and sharp, it rarely tries to be beautiful on its own.  This is not a poetic novel, and Auster wisely refrains from stacking metaphors and similes upon each other in order to describe the difficult world of his characters.  The prose is descriptive, clean, precise, but grounded in reality, making the strangeness of the plots seem all the stranger.  In this sense, The New York Trilogy could almost be considered magic realism, a genre that should contrast sharply with noir.  Yet it works, mostly because Auster has something to say.  So much to say, in fact, that it doesn't seem to matter if you miss a lot of it.  Unlike a detective novel, it's not the specifics that are meant to add up.  It's the general feeling of unease, the realization that there's more than you can possibly keep track of, more details than you can make sense of — there is significance in this, not the specifics themselves.  The feelings that the Trilogy leaves are not comfortable ones.  This book is never graphic or disturbing in the conventional sense, and there's almost no violence at all, but certain scenes and thoughts left me feeling unsettled and unhappy, even horrified.  It would be easy to transpose those negative feelings back onto the novel.  But then, you realize what Auster has done.

RED HARVEST (BY) DASHIELL HAMMETT

Published 1929, 216 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B
Plot: B+
Pacing: A-
Poignancy: B-

The protagonist of Red Harvest is a man known only as the Continental Op, a jaded, semi-moral agent for a powerful detective agency in 1920's California.  A ruthless voice of justice who seems to lack any ambitions or passions of his own, Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op would shape future detective characters, an early hardboiled noir anti-hero, just as Hammett's stylish narratives helped to glamorize the nation's prohibition-era problems of gang violence, crooked cops and bought-out politicians.  The details of the Op aren't particularly important, his background left to speculation, and even his motivations often ambiguous.  He's hired to solve a murder in the corrupt mining town of Personville, and when he realizes that no one crime could be solved without cleaning up the whole place, he sets out to shake down the town and set Personville's warring gangs against each other.  Like most noir, the specifics of the plot are often confusing or hard to grasp, and it's generally not worth trying to parse out all the twists and turns. It's style that carries the book.

As a sort of proto-noir, Red Harvest is lean and streamlined despite the intricacies of its plot.  Noir hadn't been around enough at the time for genre conventions to come into effect, so femme fatales in Red Harvest aren't quite what you'd expect, and the Continental Op doesn't spend much time in shadowy bars or dark alleys.  Yet one can see how Hammett became a trendsetter in the genre — his writing style is perfectly suited to taut, no-nonsense crime drama, even if his plotting is a little loose and unnecessarily convoluted.  Scene changes happen fast, like everything else — almost too fast, especially given the number of players involved.  The Op makes wisecracks, sneers at danger; the dames are strong-willed and sassy.  Everyone is corrupt and out to cause trouble, but there's little drama in it, since no-one's motivations are revealed until after the fact.  Hammett's two main leads are reliably interesting characters, easy to follow and successful at carrying the narrative momentum.  But there are dozens of bit players, most of whom aren't alive long enough to be notable.  Some add nothing to the story at all.  Halfway through the book, the Op calls his agency headquarters and asks for backup.  He gets it, in the form of two other detectives sent to work on the same case — something that's certainly not common in noir, so often built around a lone-wolf anti-hero.  But in the end these two other characters are no more than two new names to keep track of, and they vanish from the story off and on, adding nothing but a slight touch of realism and scale.  Which is nice, but there's already a lot to keep track of in Red Harvest, and the Op's unrealistic detective abilities don't make things any easier.  Solutions to crimes aren't solved so much as announced, and then quickly passed over.  The murder that opens the novel could have easily sustained most of the plot, but it ends up as only a minor step along the way.  The Op often just knows — who killed who, and why — but the reader hasn't a chance of keeping up with his revelations until he dishes them out.  It's a little disorienting, and makes each new reveal seem weightless and insignificant.  Still, there's no doubt that the book's pacing is exhilarating, and the action is always fun, the dialogue always snappy.  Hammett was a genuinely skilled writer.  The narrative shares the easy, pushy confidence of its protagonist, so you won't find a dull page here.  I expected Red Harvest to serve mostly as an interesting glimpse into history, a genre retrospective, but its punch still feels fresh.  There's no point in trying to keep up — this is a roller coaster ride, a fun one, but there's no chance of straying off the tracks or even guessing where they're headed.