In Mitchell, the vast tracts of time and space separating the principal narratives mean that they don't intrude on each other in a direct sense the characters from one don't know the characters from another personally-they are not linked in a causal way, although there is sometimes a weak historical connection between them at play. Many writers produce linked sets of stories that play off each other to novelistic effect, generally because they share characters or settings. This is an unusual and creative novelistic approach. So, situations that are quite diverse in detail, time frame and narrative tone are uncannily similar in the concerns that undergird them.

The will to power and subjugation of the weak is a recurrent motif, for example, whether it's 'purebloods' exploiting 'fabricants' (artificial people, genetically manufactured) in one of the futuristic sections, tribal warriors of the Maori overrunning and butchering the peaceful Moriori in the Pacific islands in historical times, or simply the staff bullying the elderly in a long-term-care facility more or less present-day (the aged ' 'are the modern lepers,' ' we are told). One of the clever aspects of 'Cloud Atlas' is that its various parts are virtually unrelated by events but strongly tied by themes.

Syntax and cultural context usually keep his meaning clear, however-'The sky curfewed' for sundown, for example-and one gets the sense he is mimicking, and perhaps gently mocking, the conventions of 19th Century travelogues, epistolary novels, sci-fi novels and whodunits, each in turn. Mitchell bends the English language differently in each case, in some instances using dialect of his own invention that requires a little extra attention from the reader. We visit a genetically engineered society in the distant future, a post-apocalyptic Hawaii that has been blasted back to the Bronze Age, and California during the Ford administration, where we find: We jump from a 19th Century schooner in the South Pacific to interwar Europe, in mid-sentence, no less. Actions echo other actions, but are unrelated in the traditional sense of plot.

A young journalist reads letters posted from 1930s Belgium and finds 'the dizzying vividness of the images of places and people' so powerful within her that 'she can only call them memories.' The author, decades dead and a suicide as well, hadn't written to her but to a scientist friend who laments that 'we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.' Emerson is quoted by yet another character: 'They know not well the subtle ways/I keep, and pass, and turn again.' Are we ourselves, or something else? Welcome to a nebula of a novel, David Mitchell's 'Cloud Atlas.'īritish writer Mitchell (a Booker Prize finalist in previous work) casts time and space, and language itself sometimes, in diffuse arrangements where the rules of narrative physics don't seem to apply.

2004 novel by david mitchell