Is the lunatic in the hall?

Is it an act of surrender or retreat (at best)
to put on The Dark Side Of The Moon,
to disappear into the comfort of Us and
Them and all the rest from decades ago?

It may be.
And even now it may be too late:
perhaps it always was
and the suggestion we might meet again
on the dark side of the moon was,
then and now,
just another adolescent fantasy;

an idea one could never escape,
not even in this dismal old age
when  the  answer is only too clear.

Cloud Atlas - disturbing the suspension of disbelief

So -I'm reading Cloud Atlas.  i watched the movie and was impressed by what I would call an honourable failure - commendable but it doesn't quite pull off the very substantial challenge at the heart of the tale.

I have been enjoying the novel hugely.  I read the first two stories - found fiction - the journal of Adam Ewing and the breathtakingly accomplished letters of Robert Frobisher (an almost perfectly realised character I think).  I was totally captured - disbelief entirely suspended.

Then comes the third section.  And here is my problem ... if Louisa Rey is a fictional character in a Louisa Rey detective novel then the Rufus Sixsmith she meets in the elevator must be fictional and the Roger Frobisher who wrote the letters to Rufus forty years previously must also be fictional and the half book recounting the Pacific Ocean adventures of Adam Ewing must - likewise - be a fiction inside the fictional world of Cloud Atlas.  And that conundrum hasn't - so far - been well enough realised to allow me to maintain the suspension of disbelief.

Maybe all will be brought back home later.  Keep reading Douglas.