ALEX MACPHERSON
Arts Writer

Notoriously Verbose: a weekly book review by the Sheaf’s long-time volunteer and friend Alex MacPherson.

Question: what theme links together the diaries of a magnanimous passenger on a Victorian sailing ship, the epistolary history of a Septuagenarian Belgian composer’s amanuensis, an investigation into murder and corruption at a California power plant, the tribulations of an alcoholic publisher as he flees the henchmen of a recidivist Mafioso client, the final statement of a genetically engineered fast-food employee and a tale of primitive mysticism and idolatry among the itinerant population of post-apocalyptic Hawaii?

  Answer: I have no idea.

  What I do know, however, is that Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell’s sprawling epic of unparalleled ambition and oneiric fantasy, fuses together this seemingly disparate agglomeration of narratives into a work of startling vigour and resonance. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. That it didn’t win is, retrospectively, a great indignity. Perhaps the best summation of Mitchell’s prodigious talent came from the New York Times Book Review, which claimed — accurately, I might add — “Mitchell is, clearly, a genius.”

  My first encounter with David Mitchell came rather late. I missed the vast quantities of publicity generated by his first two novels, Ghostwritten and number9dream: both were widely praised and the latter made the Booker Prize shortlist. Cloud Atlas, Mitchell’s third novel, sparked an even greater sensation, the immediacy and scope of which cemented his reputation as a novelist of formidable aptitude. The Washington Post opined that “Cloud Atlas ought to make [Mitchell] famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a writer whose fearlessness is matched by his talent.” This is exceptional praise from the American literary establishment, an isolationist edifice notorious for its niggardly praise of foreigners.

  Although I endeavour to remain well-informed of recent developments in literature, I missed Mitchell’s meteoric ascent to the summit of international fiction. In my defence, however, it should be noted that a brief flirtation with the writings of Winston Churchill had exploded into a serious relationship: I spent nearly a year devouring every word written by and about the great man I could unearth. It was not until Christmas 2006 that my attention was drawn to the marvels of Cloud Atlas. My introduction to Mitchell’s private universe — a surrealistic land of mystical connections and fluid narrative — came by way of a Christmas gift.

  My extended family inures itself against the many perils of festively-themed bankruptcy by means of a lottery. I have a throng of cousins and to buy gifts for all of them would quickly exhaust my meagre resources. Given that many of us are impecunious students, a more fiscally responsible Christmas had to be devised. Sometime in November, each cousin’s name is inscribed on a slip of paper and placed into a hat. The subsequent draw establishes a prospectus of gifting: each cousin is obliged to buy only one present. The 2006 lottery proved felicitous: my name was drawn by a particular cousin who, in addition to being a first rate Scrabble player and a champion of obscure and complex drinking games, has fine taste in literature. On Christmas morning, shortly after my second mimosa, I was duly presented with a fine edition of Cloud Atlas.

  Because my propensity for acquiring books outstrips — by a considerable margin, I might add — my ability to read them, I didn’t get around to Cloud Atlas for a year or so. When I pulled it from the shelf, I was immediately intrigued with its structure. Mitchell was not the first — and nor will he be the last — author to deploy several apparently unrelated narrative lines in a single novel. Italo Calvino legitimized the technique with his 1979 offering, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Indeed, Cloud Atlas was not Mitchell’s first foray into multiple plots; his first two novels used the technique to some degree.

  Cloud Atlas is unique, however, because it is constructed like a matryoshka doll. Calvino’s narratives are interrupted and those in Ghostwritten and number9dream are linear. Each section of Cloud Atlas is split in half; these are then nested within each other to form an interlocking series of climaxes and resolutions. By dividing the stories at the moment of peak tension, Mitchell linked a series of narratives together in a manner that implies a deeper and more profound connection than is evident.

  The puissance of Cloud Atlas, as it does in all the great novels, transcends the printed page. The words and the sentences are doorways to underlying treasure and buried secrets. Although each narrative is only vaguely incorporated into its successors — “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” is, for example, discovered and read by Robert Frobisher, who mentions it in correspondence with his friend and putative lover, Rufus Sixsmith, who is himself a character in “The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” and so on — they are linked by passion and by faith, by triumph and despair. Great novels are about the characters, and they are about us.

  In The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes describes the moment when Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard realized that neutrons could not ionize, and could therefore be propelled straight through the positively charged barrier protecting an atomic nucleus. This discovery set in motion a chain of events that would inexorably lead to Robert J. Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project, the construction of an atomic bomb. The principle on which Oppenheimer’s work hinged occurred to Szilard as he walked down London’s Southampton Row: “as he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into our world and all our woe, the shape of things to come.”

  No words better encapsulate the feelings I experienced upon finishing Cloud Atlas. The sweeping dynamism and echoing reverberations of Mitchell’s novel astounded me. Cloud Atlas is a novel of mercurial brilliance but its true strength lies in its normative underpinning. It is both descriptive and prescriptive, a benchmark and a map. It perches on the summit of contemporary letters while simultaneously pointing to a higher peak, wreathed in the mists of time. Cloud Atlas showed me what literature was and what it could be. It is a novel of unlimited possibility and it outlines the shape of things to come.