Cloud Atlas - a review.

‘Cloud Atlas’ jumps around in time and space, a sort of Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy for adults, loaded with endlessly recurring coincidences. It takes the form of a series of short stories, each different in tone and style that David Mitchell manages to link together to make a novel. It’s the detail that is so compelling...he recreates a whaler’s tavern on Chatham Island, an Amis-type literary bash in London, a nightmare journey through England on a privatized train all with amazing precision.

The stories are fascinating narratives in themselves. The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish for instance involves an unfulfilled vanity publisher on the run from gangsters who takes refuge in a horrendous old folks home a half-day hike from Hull. Very entertaining. It reminded me of Burgess at his best.

Broader themes include ecological disaster, hegemony, capitalism gone mad and massive political and corporate corruption. It’s an ambitious book. Myths abound. There are echoes of Melville and Nietzsche but it’s modern too, Huxley gets a nod, there's even a touch of Burroughs. One of the characters is a Chandleresque hack reporter investigating corruption at a nuclear power station in California. Her name is Luisa Rey, a clear reference to Wilder’s ‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey’. The examination of interrelated lives is clearly pivotal. The only part I found hard going was the sci-fi Korean dystopia, but that’s because Mitchell catches the fabricant thought patterns so well you almost have to be an android to read it. This is followed by a quantum leap into a vividly imagined post-Apocalyptic Hawaii.

'Cloud Atlas' does get a bit convoluted at times, but it’s playful. Just when you think, ah-hah, I’ve got it, he’s written a bunch of short stories and found a way to tie them all together, you start to realize it really is a novel about the connectedness of things, inside and outside the book. It all gets very cleverly tied up in the end. But in reverse. Which is probably just as well. Reading too many novels makes you go blind. Timothy Cavendish said that.

Mitchell’s strong suit is detail. His fictional characters become real through the use of language...they are living ghosts. Perhaps the connections do only exist in the author's mind but the writing is so good belief is easily suspended. Time may or may not be linear but the central question Mitchell raises is eternal. Either we live by accident or we live by a plan.