Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - an appreciation: six stories entwine in this addictive genre defying novel that mixes adventure stories, thrillers, science fiction and Westerns
Cloud Atlas weaves together six short stories and mixes literary genres in this challenging and addictive novel.
Each part is linked to the next in the form of found diaries, and the novel speaks of creation, regeneration and coincidence
by David Mitchell, published by Sceptre.
Cloud Atlas is that rare novel that balances seemingly incompatible opposites. The story is addictively readable - David Mitchell mixes adventure stories, thrillers, science fiction and the western - but also daringly challenging.
The six short stories are not only interlinked, but inventively spliced together and told in knowingly old-fashioned voices: Mitchell's narrators pastiche Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Daniel Defoe, Aldous Huxley, Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh, while the entire enterprise resounds to the Arabian Nights or Voltaire. Yet, Cloud Atlas feels unmistakably new, and the recurring motifs, characters and plotlines feel like chaos theory turned into devilish narrative fiction.
The title suggests a form of imaginative mapping: we navigate Cloud Atlas in linear forms that are also endlessly scrambled. The first story, told by young American adventurer Adam Ewing on a 19th-century Pacific Island, is found, ripped in half, by the narrator of the second story, a desperate musician called Robert Frobisher, whose diaries are found by Luisa Rey, the heroine of the third story. And so on.
Mitchell has described the form as like a Russian nesting doll, with echoes containing more echoes. One could argue he is presenting existence as ever-regenerating acts of creation and recreation. There is nothing new under the sun (as the countless repetitions and elegant coincidences propose), but that doesn't mean those things don't feel new the first time we experience them. These cycles illuminate the first word of the title.