Published twenty years ago now, it took me quite some time to get around to it. What was this strange collection of disparate stories claiming to be a novel? I was annoyed by the vagueness of the blurbs. I assumed that there had to be some connective tissue between the six stories but it was not obvious what that would be. Now that I have finished the book, it seems like there are a constellation of recurring motifs but that the overarching theme has to do with how an individual relates to structures of domination.

Mitchell on the overarching themes:

Literally all of the main characters, except one, are reincarnations of the same soul in different bodies throughout the novel identified by a birthmark ... that's just a symbol really of the universality of human nature. The title itself Cloud Atlas, the cloud refers to the ever changing manifestations of the Atlas, which is the fixed human nature which is always thus and ever shall be. So the book's theme is predacity, the way individuals prey on individuals, groups on groups, nations on nations, tribes on tribes. So I just take this theme and in a sense reincarnate that theme in another context …

The opening scene, the doctor digging up teeth on a beach, where cannibals have discarded bones after consuming their owners. Dr. Henry Goose will take the teeth to London to mortify a social nemesis. Teeth, which are symbols of the theme of “predacity” that Mitchell calls out, become reinstrumented from their original use (consuming food) into a social form of predation.

As interesting as I found the book, I take issue with the reductiveness of a phrase like “fixed human nature,” which is often deployed to justify greed or cruelty. As if there is just one “fixed” thing that we could describe as human nature. What kind of inhuman arithmetic would it take to weigh humanity’s inclinations toward avarice against care, love, creativity, playfulness, and the rest? There is nothing fixed about the nature of humans. Our brains are highly plastic. We are in flux.

Thus the cloudiness, which Mitchell frames as a kind of theme and variations. One singular theme and six versions. There is a reason that this is a less common musical form. It can get boring if not executed with a certain level of virtuosity. (Think Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Queneau’s Exercises in Style.) Mitchell rises to this challenge as a stylist and the novel is a kind of beautiful puzzle that invites the reader to perceive patterns among the otherwise shifting landscapes.

The way that the narratives consume one another – one reader imbibes the story of the previous one – this is part of the pleasure of the novel and its mystery. If “predacity” is the fixed nature of the human, what does our hunger for narrative have to do with the kind of Nietzchean will for power that we see in some of the characters in the tableau? The publisher, Timothy Cavendish, consumes narratives of others for his own profit. He’s a kind of parasite in the ecosystem of narrative. As he reads the manuscript that was sent to him, it’s through the eyes of its commercial potential.

But for the future Hawaiians, the story of Sonmi is a religious fable that gives them hope, albeit potentially false hope. The stories of the past become grist for future reinterpretation and reappropriation.

Deep in this story, we come across reflections on what constitutes a “savage,” a term that bristles with imperialist assumptions about a hierarchy of human nature and racist colonial projects. But Mitchell’s character defines the term in terms of the kind of predatory behavior that the novel examines from various angles: “The savage sat’fies his needs now. He’s hungry, he’ll eat. He’s angry, he’ll knuckly. He’s swellin’, he’ll shoot up a woman. His master is his will, an’ if his will says-soes ‘Kill’ he’ll kill. Like fangy animals.”

The narrative reflects on the satisfaction of base desires, as the “savage” condition to be transcended. In its movement backward and forward through time, Cloud Atlas drives toward a post-apocalyptic horizon that forces us to confront the question of whether the progress of the world is linear or cyclical, are we just repeating the same old tune again and again – the struggle against rapacity in all of its different variations or is there a movement forward, upward?

I like that the novel ends with Adam Ewing’s resolution to combat the slave trade. It’s a hopeful moment. A high note. But there’s a grim futility in the way that it’s positioned as a temporary measure – a means of abating one guise of cruelty and predation for a few hundred years maybe before Sonmi’s dehumanizing world takes shape. Ultimately, the Nietzschean slogan that feels most apt is amor fati.