A literary fugue for six soloists

Cloud Atlas

A Novel

David Mitchell

Random House: 514 pp., $14.95 paper

*

In “Ghostwritten” and “Number9Dream,” author David Mitchell displayed a prodigious knack for bending style and form. Disparate elements, shifting points of view and time, and questions of identity blurred together to create energetic, intoxicating narratives.

“Cloud Atlas,” Mitchell’s third novel, is proof that his hyperactive imagination is as restless as ever. Yet this time he invests as much thought in developing characters as in stylistic virtuosity. Each is given a wildly different voice and intricate background, and each is compelling.

History and destiny lie at the core of “Cloud Atlas,” in which six dystopian narratives traverse time, place, even genre, and reference and echo one another in unexpected ways. The first begins in 1850 with the journals of Adam Ewing, an American notary crossing the South Pacific. Then comes Robert Frobisher, a bisexual British composer in 1930s Belgium who stumbles upon Ewing’s writings; investigative journalist Luisa Rey, living in 1970s California, who uncovers a dangerous conspiracy; Timothy Cavendish, a vanity publisher in 1980s England; a 22nd century post-apocalyptic testimonial delivered by Sonmi-451, a cloned slave on death row, and finally the musings of a pidgin English-speaking Pacific Islander named Zachry. All are on a quest of some kind, each facing alternately damning and hopeful consequences.

Mitchell seamlessly deploys various genres, including historical and epistolary fiction, murder-thriller, sci-fi and memoir. His quirky details and form surprise: Characters share the same comet-shaped birthmark; stories are interrupted and resumed. (Ewing’s Dec. 8 journal entry ends abruptly midsentence on Page 39, then continues more than 400 pages later.)

Though it is easy to find the influence of literary predecessors such as Italo Calvino and Vladimir Nabokov (and cinematic sensibilities reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino), Mitchell’s nimble voice distinctly reflects our fragmented, frantic cultural moment.

Mitchell links his narrative strands in an ambitious structure that is confusing at first but makes brilliant sense before long. With its overlapping tales, “Cloud Atlas” becomes a meditation on the notion that history repeats itself as well as a cautionary tale about humanity being perpetually on the brink of destruction.

“My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher,” Ewing muses in his journals. “Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy?” he asks. “Because of this ... one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself.... In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.”

In one passage, Frobisher, while working on a musical composition titled the “Cloud Atlas Sextet,” describes his dizzying ambition: “My head is a Roman candle of invention. Lifetime’s music, arriving all at once.” He simultaneously seems to describe Mitchell’s ambition as well: “One may transcend any convention, if only one can first conceive of doing so.”

Frobisher’s vision for his composition, which he calls a “sextet for overlapping soloists,” is like the novel itself: “[P]iano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interrupted tale is continued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished....”

Mitchell’s novel may be gimmicky, but it succeeds on its own terms. He creates a world and language at once foreign and strange, yet strikingly familiar and intimate. Grand and elaborate as it is, “Cloud Atlas” offers too many powerful insights to be dismissed as a mere exercise in style.