Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2136 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-20
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

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

Evening Standard
'A masterful feast'

The Times
'An impeccable dance of genres ... an elegiac, radiant festival of prescience, meditation and entertainment.'

Customer Reviews

love it or hate it
I loved it. I can understand the critics but for me it was the best book I've read for a while.

a waste of tree pulp
Six ideas for stories slotted into each to try and fool you all into thinking "wonderfull" , "original" , "beautiful" and other such twaddle ! Has no one ever read "The Emporer's New Clothes"? Well this is it . You're all going on about how wonderful the book is cos you've all been told it was , when in fact all it is , is six ideas for six different stories that have at times a very tenuous connection . And as one reveiwer quite rightly pointed out , what is the point of the book , apart from suppling the author with our hard earned cash.

Post modern box of tricks
Any book that can both be recommended by Richard and Judy and short-listed for the Booker prize calls for some attention. The number of reviews is a testament to its popularity and the fact that it still intrigues me a year after reading it to its ability to fascinate.

It's an odd book, because it is a throughly post-modern work - a style that was in fashion in the eighties along with introspective pop and leg warmers. All the tricks are here - unreliable narrators, fractured narratives, self-referentiality, stories within stories, changes in style. And it's a virtuoso performance, consciously reproducing the structure of the most intellectual works of music in words.

It's maybe inevitable that some sections work better than others and it's informative to separate them and ask which work alone. For me, the Sonmi and Sloosha's Crossing segments both have integrity. They're both well-worn sci-fi themes - the hierarchical consumerist dystopia and the post-apocalypse world - but that's part of the point; all of the segments are reworkings of familiar genres. Many people seem to struggle with Sloosha's Crossing and it's hard work but rewarding. (The stylistic experiment isn't new; there's similar stuff from Iain Banks going back to The Bridge.)

But it's the Letters from Zedelghem that stand out. This is an astonishingly powerful and original voice with emotional twists that are as poignant as they are unexpected. I found it difficult to match the style with anything else, curiously. Is that the point? Is this the one that's somehow real?

There's no doubt that this is a masterpiece of writing skill. Indeed, it's a showcase piece. For me, though, it's key fault is not unevenness but coldness. Except maybe for the Zedelghem segment, which is heartbreaking, Cloud Atlas seems to me an intellectual exercise in formality. It's rejection of the objective author is so total, it's artifice so apparent that we are always conscious that we are reading fiction.

Cloud Atlas is a perfect post-modern work and suffers from post-modernism's inherent fault - it's not really about anything that matters. It's about writing. It's very, very clever and hugely enjoyable for that but as a whole it does not provide a coherent emotional experience.

(Is it possible to do both those things? It's very difficult but try The Quincunx, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle or Gravity's Rainbow.)