Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1173 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-21
• Original language: English
• 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'

Review
'A remarkable book ... there won't be a bigger, bolder novel this year.' (Guardian )

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

'His wildest ride yet ... a singular achievement, from an author of extraordinary ambition and skill' (Matt Thorne, Independent on Sunday )

'David Mitchell entices his readers onto a rollercoaster, and at first they wonder if they want to get off. Then - at least in my case - they can't bear the journey to end.' (AS Byatt, Guardian )

'Mitchell's storytelling in CLOUD ATLAS is of the best. I was, appropriately, captivated.' (Lawrence Norfolk, Independent )

'The best novel of the year so far ... a thrilling ride of a story' (Philip Hensher, Summer Reading, Observer )

'Impeccably structured novel of ideas in many voices by a talent to watch.' (Literary Editor's Best Books, Observer )

Customer Reviews

Interesting but not as good as people say
This book came recommended by a friend who thinks it's the best book ever written and who made her family and friends read it. Well, I cannot deny it was an interesting read. Mostly an exercise of style (reviewers who say that it is more a writer's book than a reader's book are right). However, I expected some sort of big reveal as I went along or even towards the end and it just did not happen. The stories are all related one way or the other but only superficially. The middle story (post apocalyptic world) was far too long and tedious to read. I started the book full of anticipation but ended up disappointed. A bit of an anti-climax.

Smoke and Mirrors
Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed Cloud Altas. I'm recommending it to you. I even recommended it to my mother. It's just that when I sat down to write this review, I found myself conflicted over exactly how I felt about it.

It's an enjoyable read, there's no doubt about that. David Mitchell has pinpoint control of his writing to the extent that he can evoke the six different scenarios that form the book flawlessly. It's innovative, energetic, clever. But...

Let's backtrack. Cloud Atlas is written in the form of six separate stories, all in the first person, spanning history from the diaries of an American lawyer making a business trip to Australia via the South Sea Islands on a ship straight out of Moby Dick, to the account of the last days of the human race, as we battle each other, disease and the environmental consequences of our past mistakes. The book is constructed so that each narrative ends on a cliffhanger, to be taken over by the next and then repeated in reverse order, so that we can finally discover what happens next to each of the protagonists. There is, of course, a linking theme, helpfully pointed out in the blurb: these are the worlds that result from the expression of what Nietzche called "the will to power". Dominance of one group by another, the desire to amass resources no matter what the cost to others, the destruction of the self by allowing our desires free rein are the ideas that Mitchell explores in his six scenarios. To knit the whole together, each story references the one before, to give the sense that the characters are connected, despite their distance from each other in time and circumstances.

So why my reservations? The word "clever" is the key. It's good to read a novel which has a point, especially one as serious as this and it is refreshing to come across an author who isn't frightened to take a hard look into the dark heart of human nature. However, to lighten the intellectual load, Mitchell has used a structure for his storytelling which is intriguing, but ultimately dilutes the central message. Switching from one narrative to the next makes it hard to make much emotional investment in each character, the crucial prerequisite to then feeling repulsion at the consequences for these individuals of unfettered greed. Ironically, the result is exactly the kind of emotional distancing that allows atrocities like the ones he describes to occur.

It's not the first time that cleverness has got in the way of telling the story: Gunther Grass and Thomas Mann should both have been awarded prizes for that. This is an error of trying to be too entertaining, not over earnest, but I am still left with a sense of disappointment that a novelist of such obvious gifts feels the need to resort to elaborate tricks to sugar coat an important message. Perhaps the next time, he'll tell it straight.

Oh and one more thing. Calling a character Luisa Rey and having her fall off a bridge? Enough with the literary in-jokes already.

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'