Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1202 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-21
• 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

Cloud Atlas
I'm 50 years old and have read a good deal of books in my time.
But this is the first book I've not finished. Got to page 344 out of 529 and gave up.
Not my 'cup-o-tea'

Fine literature at its best
Reading one story after the other in this delightful book, wondering what comes next and finally getting to the end and seeing the subtle link between them all was like eating your way through a 10 course dinner at a top restaurant, feeling full yet wanting more. The different style stands out from the crowd and the book stays in your memory long after you have finished it. Well done Mr Mitchel

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.