But Mitchell does such a great job of capturing the different worlds and the characters’ inner voices that I never wanted to stop reading. I was a bit worried when the setting switched from the South Pacific to something about a young musician in 1930s Belgium-the first part had been so compelling, I wanted to know what happened. You might be tempted to quit reading the book if a new story does not grab you right away. Eventually, they pick up in reverse order, so the last thing you read is the conclusion of the story you started on page 1. After a while, the second one switches unexpectedly to a third tale, and so on. You read part of the first story, and then at an important turning point, the book suddenly jumps mid-sentence to the next story. Most of the stories are split into two parts. I had never come across anything quite like it in a book before. Just to complicate things even more, the novel has a mind-bending nested structure. “The novel has a mind-bending nested structure.”
Although I think you could enjoy the novel without worrying too much about what this means, it’s fun to try to catch all the connections in the different stories. He reveals it through hints, including a recurring birthmark that shows up on different characters. Mitchell doesn’t come out and tell you that explicitly, though. In each story, at least one character is the reincarnation of someone from a previous story. (“Most yarnin’s got a bit o’ true, some yarnin’s got some true, an’ a few yarnin’s got a lot o’ true.”) Two are set in the future, one after an apocalypse has set civilization back to something like the Stone Age and people speak in a distinctive way. Another-a very funny story about an editor caught up with gangsters-is set in London in the 2000s. One involves a young American doctor on a sailing ship in the South Pacific in the mid-1800s. Written by the British author David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas is made up of six inter-related stories set in different times and places. Yet if you haven’t already read it (it came out in 2004) or seen the movie with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, I suspect that my summary of the plot will make it sound quite strange. It explores how self-centered and bad people can be, but also how supportive and good people can be. I can tell you that it is a touching and clever novel about moral choices.
Cloud Atlas is a wonderful book that is hard to describe.
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