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In David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, as in his first novel Ghostwritten, there is a change in narrator and protagonist with each new chapter, and Mitchell deploys pastiches of familiar literary styles to individualize the voices of those narrator/ protagonists. For instance, one chapter employs an orthography signifying a folk dialect somewhere between that of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and that of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (and the events represented in the chapter are reminiscent of those depicted in Riddley Walker and also Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz). Another chapter, in addition to employing the technical jargons of Orwellian and Huxleyan dystopian fiction, deploys the narrative technique James Joyce used in the “Ithaca� chapter of Ulysses; moreover, some of the sentences in the chapter, such as “Hae-Joo led me to a stylish café platform where he bought a styro of starbuck for himself and an aqua for me� remind me of the hyper-consumerist future imagined in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. A third chapter is an impressive pastiche of my favorite expatriate Russian writer (the chapter is also the funniest—it’s been a while since a book has made me laugh out loud in the way that this one has).

Mitchell experiments with the juxtaposition of different narrative genres in the book, employing the epistolary mode, the detective fiction, the confession, question and answer, and oral story telling. Moreover, he experiments with story by plotting his novel as a series of embedded narratives: while the plot is an innovative employment of Gustav Freytag’s triangle, the story itself may possibly describe a circle (in which case the innermost narrative frames the narratives by which it is framed—think of Escher’s paintings, perhaps, or the topologic notion of the torus [the doughnut-shaped universe], or that other “impossible� figure, the circle squared).

One of Mitchell’s themes is the place of the Other, and in his novel he explores relations between colonizer and colonized, senior citizen and youth-obsessed society, dissenter and dominant order, and worker and owner. He is interested in character and in historical detail, and takes his time constructing his realistic representations of the heroes and heroines in his novel; you’ll want to take your time reading him.

Acquired May 30, 2009
Gift from Jenn