David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

"Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same it's still a cloud an' so is a soul," muses young Zachry, the narrator of the central segment of this 11-part novel of interruption, backwards referencing and echoes.

Around 150 pages later, the Cambridge-expelled, disinherited Robert Frobisher, musical genius, cad and fictional author of the "Letters from Zedelghem" which make up the second and tenth segments, describes the composition that "holds his life": "a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and colour. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order ... "

This piece of music he calls Cloud Atlas Sextet and his description of it - especially coupled with the opening quote above - suffices almost perfectly as an explanation of this novel's structure. It, too, comprises six voices over six twists of the historical kaleidoscope (although, possibly, only one soul) who are each in their turn interrupted by the succeeding voice, yet, following the sixth and central episode, resume in reverse to conclude their story.

It's a massively ambitious undertaking that can only be read with awe - even more awe, if possible, than one may have felt for his previous novels, Ghostwritten and the Booker Prize-shortlisted number9dream.

As a writer, Mitchell really does have it all: a vocabulary that is like the Oxford English Dictionary but with wings; an imagination that takes cultural and historical reference points and weaves them into wild fantasies; and a facility with voice that enables him to create characters whose presence one can almost physically sense, no matter what genre he has them operating in - and even if, as with Sonmi, central character of the fifth and seventh segments, they are not fully human in the usual sense, but are the products of a Matrix-like genetic-political experiment.

Historically and stylistically diverse as these segments are, it's easy to trace Mitchell's overall design and thematic interests. Slavery, tyranny and control run as brutal threads through all the narratives, manifesting differently depending on the era, but always raising potent questions about human society and organisation, and individuals' power to change anything in their own lives, let alone the forces of history ("Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?" one character rhetorically concludes).

The novel opens, of all places, on the Chatham Islands in 1850, as the peaceable Moriori face slavery and extinction at the hands of the Maori. We observe 19th-century colonisation, both by Maori and the British, through the eyes of American notary Adam Ewing, who then leaves the Chathams aboard a schooner, the Prophetess, en route back to San Francisco. He leaves us mid-sentence, and the next place we find ourselves is 1931, with Robert Frobisher, in the world between wars that was Europe then.

Frobisher finds an old book, torn in half, titled The Pacific Diary of Adam Ewing. Frobisher's segment, in which the torment is of a more personal kind - desire itself - is told in the form of letters to his friend Rufus Sixsmith; then, in the third part, "Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery", we meet Sixsmith again, nearly half a century older and now a prominent scientist about to blow the whistle on an atomic energy plant.

Paced as racily and suspensefully as any political thriller, we see the advent of the terrifying corporate power that, by the fifth segment, has come to dominate every facet of life. By the sixth section, "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After", human development - progress - has come full circle in just a few centuries: again, tribes slaughter and enslave each other; historical knowledge exists as myth and religious belief. The evil, fearsome spirit is Old Georgie (Bush?); Sonmi is worshipped as a goddess.

Some of the plots are familiar, although the reading is unfailingly fresh and original nonetheless. Mitchell is almost too clever - he has an answer for everything. As the narrator of segments four and eight, a London publisher institutionalised against his will in a tyrannical rest-home, says (as he edits a manuscript for a "young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption-thriller" called Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery): "as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!"

I don't expect to read anything as all-round brilliant as Cloud Atlas for quite some time. One is driven to read it, yet bereft and procrastinating as one nears the end. I hope it wins lots of important prizes in the coming year.

* Sceptre, $34.99