ANNA FUNDER:
Well, I think it's very clever.
Laughter.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Oh! For… Oh, this cleverness!
ANNA FUNDER:
And I think that… I don't know how you find it so uplifting, because the stories are really about predation. They're about power and people doing terrible things to people under their power — whether it's Timothy Cavendish in the old people's home, or whether it's Adam Ewing being poisoned by someone who's meant to look after him, or… They're all about being preyed on, except for the one in the middle, where the prescient comes back and helps somebody after the fall, you know, when civilisation has fallen. So there's this tiny bit of hope. But they're really quite dystopian. I think they're sort of a little bit… you know, Lord Of The Flies-ish really. And I think that if you tried to find a secret heart to this, it's very hard to find. He doesn't let you become emotionally connected at all, and because he wants you to think about the idea of what people would do to one another. So, it's a sort of intellectually driven, rather than a character-driven or emotional book.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
But that's the thing. If he had just gone up on the trajectory, and came out at this 2200 and this collapsed civilisation, but he doesn't. He takes you through that and back to the 1850s. So you have this sense of the… we all find our own way through.
ANNA FUNDER:
Did you like the way the comet bird-shaped birthmark reappeared, as if it's sort of one soul in all those different forms?
JENNIFER BYRNE:
That was a bit clever.
Laughter.
JASON STEGER:
A bit too clever.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Too clever.
JASON STEGER:
I mean, I must admit every time the comet birthmark appeared, I thought, 'Oh, no! Here we go. Yep, right.'
ANNA FUNDER:
Well, it throbbed at one point, and that is pure Harry Potter, because I'm reading that — it throbbed.
JASON STEGER:
But, I mean, he does… Frobisher writes the Cloud Atlas sextet, doesn't he? Which he describes as 'a sextet for overlapping soloists'. Which sort of tells you all you need to know about the structure of the book. I don't agree that it's pessimistic, though. It's not… Because the end of the book is in the middle of the book. And so, when you get back to the earlier chapters for the second time, you sort of know, you know what's going to be happening, and you know that there is going to be an element of survival.
ANNA FUNDER:
When I said to people I was reading this, I got a lot of reactions among really literate people, and they said to me, 'Oh! I haven't read it,' with this combination of awe and dread and guilt. And they really did, and I think this is the Kokoda Trail of literature. Because people treat it like this thing that if you're going to be a literate person, you have to have read this, but everyone's scared of it, no?
JASON STEGER:
There's no reason for people to be scared of it.
ANNA FUNDER:
No. Not at all.
JASON STEGER:
There is no reason.
MARIEKE HARDY:
But, I heard… I mean, I said that I was reading it to a lot of literate people as well, and they said, 'This is the greatest book ever written.'
ANNA FUNDER:
Oh.
MARIEKE HARDY:
If you don't like it, you're an idiot.'
ANNA FUNDER:
We have different friends.
MARIEKE HARDY:
That's kind of what… My friends are very rude.
ANNA FUNDER:
We have such different friends.
MARIEKE HARDY:
But… but I had that same thing, and I really didn't know much about it beforehand, and the passionate reaction…
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Yeah.
MARIEKE HARDY:
..of people saying, 'This is… Hands down, this is, you know, peerless.' They were very…
JENNIFER BYRNE:
I've got to say, re-reading it after, what, 6+ years on the Club, I realise this is actually one of my top three books. One of the reasons why I love it and it was emotional for me — I hear what you're saying that you admire it rather than love it — but, you know that famous picture of… when they took from the Moon of Earth this beautiful thing, and that was one of the real elements of joy for me, because it makes you realise how beautiful, and how perfect this moment — for us anyway — is. And so, in the post-apocalyptic, where Zachry talks about, with absolute awe, that he believes there was a time when people would stand, and lozenges of water would come and wash them clean, and you thought, 'Oh! That would be a shower.' And it made you realise how… It just made me see the world like that perfect globe of Earth.
MARIEKE HARDY:
See, I thought that stuff was quite clunky.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Oh…
MARIEKE HARDY:
Sorry! I'm sorry! But I… that seems to me… That's the same with the… My note as well was, 'Oh, God! We're in the future!' That was exactly the turning point for me, because I did find quite a lot of delight in the first half and then a lot of those characters. But a lot of the stuff — 'Oh! Fast-food companies end up taking over the world. Ha-ha! What's that funny thing with water coming? It's a shower.' I just thought that was very… clever. And, you know, I really… the future stuff is really where I started letting go of the book.
MAX BARRY:
Oh, I loved the future stuff. I enjoyed both of those future stories.
JASON STEGER:
I knew you'd love…
MARIEKE HARDY:
You knew what that thing meant on the front of the book. You're a confessed geek.
MAX BARRY:
You sa, you know, we're admiring the book rather than loving it. I loved the book, I just feel it was an abusive relationship, because he kept making fun of me for enjoying his stories.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Did you enjoy the individual chapters?
MAX BARRY:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
And you admired the overarch… Well, what's your problem?
Laughter.
MARIEKE HARDY:
She's getting defensive now.
MAX BARRY:
Because every time I started believing it, he made fun of me for believing it.
MARIEKE HARDY:
Mm.
JASON STEGER:
But actually, the book is quite fun, full stop, I think.
MAX BARRY:
Mm. It's very playful.
MARIEKE HARDY:
Yeah. You got a sense of… He was madly in love with everyone he wrote about, and that completely comes across on the page, that he's really… he's delighted writing this book, and I think that comes through.
JASON STEGER:
And it is nice to read a book that is different, that tells a story in a different way.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
It's radically different.
JASON STEGER:
Yeah.
MARIEKE HARDY:
See, it's fine. We're only saying nice things.
JASON STEGER:
It is radically different, but it's also… You know, I don't think people should be frightened of it, though.
ANNA FUNDER:
No.
JASON STEGER:
I really don't.
ANNA FUNDER:
No, I don't think so.
JASON STEGER:
It's… Because you trust… You've got to trust an author of Mitchell's calibre, and, you know, I think he takes you there.