Cloud Atlas (Paperback)

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Amazon.co.uk Review
It's hard not to become ensnared by words beginning with the letter B, when attempting to describe Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's third novel. It's a big book, for start, bold in scope and execution--a bravura literary performance, possibly. (Let's steer clear of breathtaking for now.) Then, of course, Mitchell was among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and his second novel number9dreamwas shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Characters with birthmarks in the shape of comets are a motif; as are boats. Oh and one of the six narratives strands of the book--where coincidentally Robert Frobisher, a young composer, dreams up "a sextet for overlapping soloists" entitled Cloud Atlas--is set in Belgium, not far from Bruges. (See what I mean?)

Structured rather akin to a Chinese puzzle or a set of Matrioshka dolls, there are dazzling shifts in genre and voice and the stories leak into each other with incidents and people being passed on like batons in a relay race. The 19th-century journals of an American notary in the Pacific that open the novel are subsequently unearthed 80 years later on by Frobisher in the library of the ageing, syphilitic maestro he's trying to fleece. Frobisher's waspish letters to his old Cambridge crony, Rufus Sexsmith, in turn surface when Rufus, (by the 1970s a leading nuclear scientist) is murdered. A novelistic account of the journalist Luisa Rey's investigation into Rufus' death finds its way to Timothy Cavendish, a London vanity publisher with an author who has an ingenious method of silencing a snide reviewer. And in a near-dystopian Blade Runner-esque future, a genetically engineered fast food waitress sees a movie based on Cavendish's unfortunate internment in a Hull retirement home. (Cavendish himself wonders how a director called Lars might wish to tackle his plight). All this is less tricky than it sounds, only the lone "Zachary" chapter, told in Pacific Islander dialect (all "dingos'n'ravens", "brekker" and "f'llowin'"s) is an exercise in style too far. Not all the threads quite connect but nonetheless Mitchell binds them into a quite spellbinding rumination on human nature, power, oppression, race, colonialism and consumerism. --Travis Elborough --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
'Remarkable and enjoyable book' -- Lytham St Annes Express 20050331 '(contains) extreme imaginative fluency' -- The Sunday Times 'David Mitchell has fast established himself as a novelist of considerable authority and power ... Anyone who read his remarkable debut, or its successor, NUMBER9DREAM, will instantly recognise the characteristic moves and bold gestures of this amazing extravaganza. His novels have a gleefully kelptomaniac air, moving from the most tawdry thrills to thunderous, visionary spectacle; they are unlike anything else, and you emerge from them dazed, amazed, unsure of the exact nature of the overwhelming experience ... a tremendous novel ... CLOUD ATLAS is one of the most shamelessly exciting books imaginable ... Mitchell is a novelist who knows exactly what he is doing, and one who is always one or two steps ahead of the reader; and at the end it seems to evaporate like the best dream you ever had.' -- Philip Hensher, Spectator 'His most accomplished achievement to date...a novel in the biggest, most exhilarating sense.' -- The Observer 'A complete narrative pleasure' -- The Guardian '(A) virtuoso performance...deeply impressive' -- The Daily Telegraph 'An intense, arcing colossus of a book whose narrative links, supplied by the voices of six main characters, are spun out