‘Cloud Atlas’ by David Mitchell
As promised, here is the second instalment in my ‘I need to read the book before I see the newly released film’ series - though in this case I’m not sure that I even want to see the film adaptation - the very highly acclaimed Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. The David Mitchell in question is in fact a novelist and is not, as I had previously and rather erroneously believed, the David Mitchell of Mitchell and Webb and Peep Show fame. (Why I thought this I have no idea…as far as names go, David Mitchell is hardly up there with Dostoyevsky or Dita Von Teese, and where David Mitchell of Mitchell and Webb would have found the time to write a novel in between acting, getting married and appearing on myriad panel shows such as Mock the Week is anyone’s guess.) Anyway, David Mitchell the novelist hails from Southport, Merseyside and Cloud Atlas, his third novel, was published in 2004. The novel earned widespread acclaim and was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize, in addition to winning both the British Book Awards’ Literary Fiction Award and the Richard & Judy Book of the Year Award. Phew…
Cloud Atlas is made up of six separate stories, each one tenuously linked to the next, with us readers ending up exactly where we started after a journey of fairly epic proportions. In its five hundred and forty-four pages, Cloud Atlas takes us from the nineteenth century South Pacific to pre-Second World War Belgium to 1970s’ California to present day Britain to post-apocalyptic Korea to an even more post-apocalyptic Hawaii and right the way round again until we end up back in the Pacific Ocean. Again, phew… I would give you a summary of each story in Cloud Atlas but, as always, sneaky old Wikipedia has beaten me to it. What I will say is this: expect to be whisked from rural England to the dystopian state of Nea So Copros and back again via a fictional hybrid of L.A. and San Francisco named Buenas Yerbas (that’s Spanish for 'good herbs’) in a dizzyingly brisk manner befitting of H. G. Wells. Cloud Atlas really does run the gamut in terms of genre and style, that’s for sure.
Like another novel I read and reviewed recently, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Cloud Atlas is a work of near-musical virtuosity. And although it did not 'speak’ to me on any profound psychological insert-adjective-here level, I would have to be a complete ignoramus to deny its brilliance.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in March 2013.