Books of the Month

'Cloud Atlas' by David Mitchell

I know I recommend a lot of novels in these Book of the Month pieces, and that fiction isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But if you don’t finish this book agreeing that David Mitchell is a consummate, thoroughly engaging and genuinely innovative storyteller, then I’ll happily eat my hat. This is the best thing I’ve read in ages.

Ok, this is how Cloud Atlas works: there are six narratives, unfolding in mirror fashion (abcdefedcba, if you see what I mean), leading you from the nineteenth century through to a post-apocalyptic future, and back again, by degrees, to where you started. Each narrative connects with the others in overt and less overt ways – sometimes with characters who are mentioned in several places, sometimes more obliquely with recurring motifs like a distinctively-shaped birthmark or a piece of music. Each of these pieces – virtually novellas of their own – are opportunities for Mitchell to try his hand at different kinds of writing. So we have a historical travel journal, a collection of letters from the 1930s, a conspiracy thriller set in the 1970s, a roughly contemporary memoir, an archived interview set in the reasonably near future, and a kind of oral testimony from a much-altered earth yet to come. Oh, and each narrative is set in a different place too: the South Pacific, Belgium, the fictional US city of Buenas Yerbas, the UK, the country formerly known as South Korea, and – I think – a post-apocalyptic Hawaii.

So, pretty ambitious, right? Many writers might try something similar and end up at best with a pretentious load of over-written twaddle, and at worst, with something that doesn’t hang together and is just incomprehensible or implausible. But Mitchell, amazingly, pulls it off – not just bringing this vast and complex canvas into focus, but giving it meaning and subtlety. Each narrative is totally engaging and worth reading in its own right, but the fracturing of the stories, and the subtleties of the threads looping between them, make a whole which is definitely more than the sum of its parts. In the end, Cloud Atlas is a very humane book, and pulsing beneath its humour, horror and tension, is a quiet plea for us to slow down and think more carefully about how we choose to spend our lives, about how we treat the people and places around us, and about how our choices are inextricably linked to both the past and the future.

Susan Tranter

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