Cloud Atlas: A Novel | David Mitchell | Highly unique and worthwhile

Cloud Atlas: A Novel | David Mitchell | Reading Reincarnated

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Cloud Atlas: A Novel

	Cloud Atlas: A Novel David Mitchell Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 170 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta?s ?Best of Young British Novelists 2003? issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope.

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan?s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified ?dinery server? on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation -- the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other?s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.

In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity?s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.

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Highly unique and worthwhile

Cloud Atlas is composed of six stories intricately weaved together. Each story is told in a different style and time, and each is interrupted at a suspenseful moment and then concluded later in the book. This is a masterful execution of a unique device, coupled with vivid storytelling. Highly unique.

Reading Reincarnated

I finished this remarkable novel at the start of a long plane flight.

Then I turned from the last page of CLOUD ATLAS back to its first.

I don't usually re-read novels, but this book is that jaw-droppingly good. It certainly qualifies as the best book I've read since Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. As this Amazon page contains analysis and plot synopsis aplenty on it, I'll simply add that this is the rare novel that should have won both literature's Man Booker prize and science fiction's Hugo award.

Wowsers.

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Rare Masterpiece

It's rare these days to come across an new, original masterpiece. It's a tough book to write a review of because there are so many incredible surprises and I don't want to create any spoilers - but the writing, the brilliance is so extraordinary - my advice is just read the book before reading this review further, but if you feel you need to know more, here you go:

This book is about "its structure", which consists of 6 stories, 5 of which are divided in half and placed around the 6th. The book is mostly about power, slavery, hatred and violence, and yet is full of humor and truly enjoyable to read. Each of the 6 stories is written in a different style - one is a diary, another is a series of letters, another is a pulp fiction novel, one is an autobiography (of which a character in a later story views the movie version of), one is an interview, one is an "oral history". Each of the stories is also a document featured in a later stories - for example, in the second story, the first story is discovered in the library. Also, the stories are critiqued in each other - in the second story, the problems and inconsistencies of the first story are pointed out. There are other themes and links, from birthmarks to names to ships. It never seems artificial or contrived however. The stories span centuries and cultures, although many of them center on or relate to the Big Island in Hawaii.

Some of the reading is difficult - the middle story is written in the author's own created futuristic dialect (shoes are called "nikes" for instance), which sometimes takes a while. The initial story is difficult to follow at times, and the book requires a fair amount of concentration. Much of the book is surprisingly exciting and interesting. I've never read anything quite like it.

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A Daring and Beautiful Novel

I read "Cloud Atlas" before I read "Ghostwritten" and "Number9Dream," and although I hold "Ghostwritten" to be one of the best pieces of contemporary fiction I have ever had the pleasure to read, "Cloud Atlas" does not rank too much below it. The structure, although jarring at first, almost immediately became part of the overall appeal and I found myself trusting Mitchell to bring about a stunning conclusion. Mitchell's prose, in my opinion, is much like Don DeLillo's in that it is beautiful in its simplicity and crafted without being overtly so. With "Cloud Atlas" much like "Ghostwritten," Mitchell has breathed more life into the world of fiction. It is a book to be read if you are a reader in search of artful characters, a magnificent plot, a daring structure, or any combination of the above.

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Interruptions and emancipations

David Mitchell's _Cloud Atlas_ is a sprawling work, with six separate narratives, five of which are interrupted only to appear in their successors. That is, the first half of the first story becomes a part of the first half of the second story, and so on, till they revolve around the sixth story before we hear the second halves of each of the stories in turn. The effect of this was that the second half of my read felt like it kept ending and each set of characters got wrapped up, one set at a time. For all the aspiration and pretension of this central structural device, its parts generally come across as very accessible. Some will appeal more than others (I grew tired of the post-apocolyptic pidgin dialect of the sixth story pretty quickly), but which ones strike the deepest chords will vary from reader to reader. If there is a larger theme, I would say it is each character's awakening to the casualness with which humans enslave one another (literally and figuratively) and the forms that their struggles to overcome this take.

One thing I would say about the shifting styles and the grand structure at its heart is that for all that craft and design, the whole ends up feeling like a grabbag. I don't mean to suggest that's a bad thing. When you read some things, from detective novels to Dante's Inferno, you're left with a sense that every event, even every word is there for some express structural purpose and that none of this will make sense without the greater whole. Cloud Atlas doesn't quite feel that way. These characters and their various narratives are bumping into each other in the grand scheme of things, rather than embodying some greater logic. To its credit, each of these stories gets a character of its own and each one's relation to the others is a particular, distinct thing. It reminded me of the feeling I get traveling, a bit out of place and wandering into other people's lives as I overhear their stories, recognize a little something and float on to the next.

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