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After finally dusting off this book from my shelf, which sat for eight years untouched, I devoured it like an irresistible drug. The spirits of the literature gods, dead and alive, have convened with Mitchell, and Mitchell has embraced the half-seen and the unseen, the lives and half-lives, and the mystical, boundless forces that turn a book into a world, a narrative into a universe. There's as much meaning outside the pages, and between words and passages, as there is in the explicit text--a potent cosmos of orbiting ideas. Mitchell has punched a hole in the sky with this book.

That “everyone is connected� is not an original theme of literature. It has been done as prosaically as Coelho or as lofty as Nabokov. Mitchell’s book of six nested stories is a furious and radiant masterpiece of formal structure and polyphonic elasticity, with the universal theme of connection—between generations, geographies, and centuries; people of vastly different ethnicities, cultures, even fabricated clones!

From the South Seas of the mid-19th century to the post-apocalyptic future on Hawaii’s islands, Mitchell explores the link between people as much as a thousand years apart in time and an incalculable amount of distance. Our undertakings, our destructions, our sorrow, our humanity, and our imperfections reach across the millennia. What communicates our exertions is our recording of things said and done. “Sunt lacrimae rerum,� writes the protagonist of the second story. The world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.

The six novellas that comprise the novel are written in ascending and descending order. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. There are great tonal shifts between stories, yet the parts equal the whole. As the narrator of the second novella says about his composition, Cloud Atlas Sextet, for six overlapping soloists (piano, clarinet, cello, flute, violin, and cello), they are “each in its own language of key, scale, and color.� There is much to say about music and the structure of this novel.

And, in each story is a character with a comet-shaped birthmark, inferring incarnations of the same soul. The first five titles end in “Half-Lives� (which makes sense because they are only half a story) and the narratives end in a cliffhanger, usually an interrupted sentence or moment. The descending order (or latter half of each novella) pick up the Half Lives where they left off in the ascending stories.

Story #1 is written Melville style, about a notary, Adam Ewing, on a ship in the South Seas, who is facing an ugly truth about people and their predatory nature. In story #2, Belgium, 1931, a scheming, disinherited opportunist, Robert Frorbisher, procures a job as an amanuensis to an ailing, syphilitic composer. His narrative is told via letters to his lover, Rufus Sixsmith, Waugh-style. He finds the interrupted journals of Ewing at the composer's house. In the third tale, set in mid-70's California, Luisa Rey, a journalist investigating nefarious activity at a nuclear power plant, is after some sensitive information from physicist Rufus Sixsmith. Luisa also acquires some of the letters that Sixsmith received from Frobisher. Her story has a distinctly Grisham/Chandler style.

Story 4 is about a British publisher, Timothy Cavendish, who has a manuscript of the Luisa Rey story, but ends up imprisoned in a nursing home, trying to escape. Very Amis-y in narrative and characters. In the fifth story, Mievillie-ish, set into Korea’s future, the country is ruled by a totalitarian government, or “Corpocracy;� they clone “fabricants� who function without human sentience. When one fabricant, somni 451, develops human consciousness, her life becomes endangered. This is an era where words like starbucks and disney aren’t proper nouns anymore. Somni is charmed by an archived disney from the 21st century called The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.

The central story, #6, is whole, and the hardest to read (linguistically), where Somni is revered as a kind of enigmatic god-spirit. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world far, far into the future, where humans have reversed to a primitive or Iron Age state. The language is a sort of Twain-esque Pidgin. It takes a while for the dialect and colloquy to make sense, but the effort is worth the reward.

Six places, six times, six vocabularies--in one choate, mind-twisting tale. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma (as Churchill would say), and obscured by clouds (as Pink Floyd would sing). There's always treacherous forces coming to annihilate us, manmade and cowardly; there are also moral, stouthearted, everyday flawed heroes with fugitive wings and incorruptible souls. We endure, and we endure, and we endure. We touch one another. Occasionally, we punch a hole in the sky.