Cloud Atlas

I'm not a big fan of what I call "stunt writing" - the kind of writing that calls attention to the author's cleverness with minimal concern about the reader's pleasure or enlightenment.  (For that reason, I'm in the tiny minority who find Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections unreadable.)  But there is no greater joy than finding a writer who is a breathtaking stylist, who can do remarkable, unprecedented things with a sentence, and who can simultaneously move you deeply. 

David Mitchell began his career as an unrestrained stylist - his novel number9dream (note the lowercase title - always a bad sign) overflows with run-on sentences and ideas that drown any opportunity to uncover an actual novel.  But Cloud Atlas is a miracle of a novel - a stunt novel that qualifies as great literature on every level.

The stunt is unprecedented in my experience: The novel is actually six stories, arranged like a set of nesting dolls - the first half of the first story is followed by the first half of the second, then the first half of the third, fourth and fifth.  In the center is a complete story, followed by the second half of the fifth story, the second half of the fourth, then the third, the second, and finally, the completion of the first.  In addition, each story is told in a completely different style - the first, a 19th century journal of an ocean voyage, a la Conrad; the second, a romantic epistolary tale of doomed love in pre-WWII Bruges; next, a Grisham-style thriller with a perky heroine, secret documents and a cliffhanger; fourth, a farcical tale of a contemporary cad trapped in an old-folks home a la Kingsley Amis; and fifth, a horrifying, hard sci-fi tale about cyborgs in a corrupt, totalitarian, and decaying future.  The tale at the center is a stylistic tour-de-force - an adventure fantasy set in a world of savagery and mystery, featuring a shocking secret and told in an invented dialect Anthony Burgess would admire.

What makes Cloud Atlas a novel - a great novel - is that ultimately, every story connects with the whole in a real way; all are part of one ultimate tale.  The resonances are astonishing, and hit with surprising force because they are so unexpected.  Every story wrestles with an aspect of the question, "what does it mean to be human?" and Mitchell drives you to feel and think deeply about the implications of that question and its possible answers.  

This is not just an exercise in complexity and style; Mitchell's characters are not types, nor ideological constructs.  Their humanity is palpable.  (In fact, the most human of all is probably the least human - a cyborg of achingly real sweetness.)  Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable reading experience - entertaining, challenging, and filled with a passion not just for words, but for humanity, too.