Cloud Atlas: A Novel

British author David Mitchell is the secret weapon of his literary generation. He has been quietly crafting extraordinary novels while leading an inconspicuously normal existence as an English teacher in Japan (although he is now a full-time writer and has moved to Ireland). His first two novels (Ghostwritten and Number9Dream, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002) have been praised by critics, but American readers of serious fiction have been a little slow on the uptake, which is a pity. Mitchell's writing style falls somewhere on the Don DeLillo meets Haruki Murakami axis: a postmodern stylist whose characters are estranged from the world around them, but aren't unconnected to it; characters who can relate to each other in the lingua franca of culture, but are emotionally isolated. Too old to be a wunderkind and too young to be a senior man of letters, Mitchell has suffered from criminally underdeveloped popularity in the US.

All this stateside anonymity is set to evaporate with the publication of Mitchell's third novel, Cloud Atlas. The type of literary ambition and virtuosity in this book is usually the culmination of a lifetime of ideas and failed attempts, not that of a novelist who hasn't yet cracked the age of forty. In Cloud Atlas, six different narratives, set in the past, present and far-off future, are woven together with the expertise of a neurosurgeon. Each character, be it the 19th-century missionary, the 1970s muckraking reporter, or the synthetic slave of the future (to name only three) has a distinctive voice, yet they all resonate through the echo chamber of history that Mitchell imagines. All the literary ventriloquism that Mitchell employs would be useless if these characters weren't so well developed and nuanced. And just when you think you've heard the last of one character, their exploits are felt in another time, by another character: a literary Butterfly Effect that Mitchell utilizes to maximum benefit.

But there is more to Mitchell's narrative prowess than merely linking together characters through different narratives. In Cloud Atlas, Mitchell proves himself capable of writing a unified story through multiple genres. He is just as adept in writing historical and science fictions as he is writing literary fiction. One could imagine that if David Mitchell wanted to slack for a few years between literary projects, he could earn a very comfortable living cranking out genre novels. Taking his cues from the best of his genre precursors (Raymond Chandler and Neal Stephenson), Mitchell doesn't miss a stylistic beat.

Cloud Atlas will be well received by fans of his previous novels as well as new readers who enjoy serious fiction. While time will tell if this is the novel to break him out of the shadow of obscurity, for now we can lose ourselves in an expertly written book, with a vividly imagined past, present, and future, that is populated with wonderfully realized characters.

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