David Mitchell has fast established himself as a novelist of considerable authority and power. His first novel, Ghostwritten, was published as recently as 1999, and Cloud Atlas is only his third. Anyone who read his remarkable debut, or its successor, number9dream, will instantly recognise the characteristic moves and bold gestures of this amazing extravaganza. His novels have a gleefully kleptomaniac air, moving from the most tawdry thrills to thunderous, visionary spectacle; they are unlike anything else, and you emerge from them dazed, amazed, unsure of the exact nature of the overwhelming experience. Cloud Atlas is a tremendous novel, but I’m not entirely sure why.
Ghostwritten had a very original structure, one evidently congenial to Mitchell. Each chapter was set in a different part of the world, and was connected to the others only tangentially; perhaps the hero of the previous story walked through a sentence in a subsequent episode. Slowly, these frail connections built up, until it started to seem as if one were witnessing the unfolding of a vast millenial conspiracy, and perhaps the end of the world. It was an extraordinarily impressive reading experience, but one put it down and it seemed to drift away like a marvellous, half-remembered dream.
That is not really denigration but simply a description of the strange atmosphere of Mitchell’s books. The reader’s feeling of ‘What the hell was all that about?’ on putting down number9dream is very much the same as his feeling on finishing one of Mitchell’s favourite (I guess) novelists, Haruki Murakami. The state of absolute dreaming conviction seems to exclude any kind of rational thought; more, the astonishing flood of narrative, sweeping away the reader in a torrent of frenzied events, traps the mind almost against its will.
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