Who is that voice in my head?

Hearing the voice in my head change into someone totally unrecognizable is what happened to me on several occasions while reading “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell.  First and foremost, the Diary of Adam Ewing started this story off in a way which was totally unexpected and apparently set in “the spittoon of the South Pacific.”  For the entire first forty pages, I was unsure if this was the kind of story that I would enjoy because I was finding it difficult to relate to the narrator Adam because of his dialect.  Eventually I found my brain growing accustomed to the words on the page and I found my inner voice as that of Adam and I was able to wrap my brain around the story… and then it just stopped.  First it was there and the story was gone, vanishing into thin air. 

I thought my book was defective and I decided that I’d return it to the book store in a day or two and I continued on to the section about the “Letters from Zedelghem.”  It was uncanny but my brain adapted to this story more quickly and I found myself reading, sounding in my head like I were writing the letters as a spoiled, manipulative British cad.  What is interesting, now that I take the time to think about it, is that reading about Luisa Rey didn’t affect me at all.  Probably because it was written in a contemporary format of the language I understand and that my brain readily assimilates to.  It was like reading just ceased to be challenging and the words just flowed in like a typical story I’d read for entertainment.  It was something my brain could easily recognize so my thought processes relaxed. 

Then, just when I thought I was making progress, Mitchell switched gears and took me to London and dropped me into the mind of an elderly British man.  Not too difficult because the language here was also contemporary but after hearing Luisa in my head, it made my brain feel a little tired, just as though I was Timothy Cavendish taking a wearisome journey.  However, this was just a setup because Mitchell was really just warming up my inner voice up for Sonmi-451.  Reading as though I was a futuristic Korean clone was a place my brain really fought to go…at first.  Then, just like those brain teasers that spell words without vowels in order to show how the brain adapts, my brain adapted to Sonmi-451.  Then finally, Zachary arrived and it was like the stretching exercises before the actual workout worked.  For the first few pages I struggled with Zachary’s voice in my head and then he was just there as if he’d been there all along. 

The long drawn out point of all this is that I liked allowing all those characters with their different words and narratives into my brain.  I liked flexing my brain muscles to allow the characters to take root in my head and lead me down the path of their various stories.  I appreciated how Mitchell made me work for it a little, getting to know the characters via their dialect.  However, it was a clever way to get me to relate to the characters by having them all tell their stories in the first person.  I think it was this literary scheme that made the story and the characters within in it compelling.