Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

My first reaction to the work of David Mitchell was to hurl it across the room. In the winter of 1998, Tibor Fischer and I were separately sifting through the vast, open submission that would later become an anthology called New Writing 8. Sometimes our respective manuscript piles shrank to ankle height. More usually they hovered about knee-level. Most of the submissions ranged from competent but dull, to those of interest only to clinical psychiatrists. And then, rarely, there were the surprises. Towards the end of the selection process, with the anthology already bulging at the seams, the arrival of what seemed to be several very long short stories was, at best, unwelcome. Even more so when others of these "short" stories arrived from the same source: a young Englishman living in Hiroshima. Eventually, a 700-page manuscript piled up. It seemed the only way to check its growth was to read it.

The 10 interlinked sections of Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten, coalesced into a novel. Perhaps "world-spanning narrative of mind-bending invention" would be a better description. Organised about the wanderings of a transmigrating soul, its disparate narratives intersect, or chime off each other, or strike the sparks that keep the big plot-motor turning through even the wildest digressions. "The dog needs to be fed!" hisses a stranded terrorist down a phone line to, he hopes, the cell member who will understand the code for "Rescue me". Some dozens of pages later, in a completely different story, the phone rings in a Tokyo jazz record shop: "The dog needs to be fed!" The shop assistant says nothing: "It's best not to encourage these crank callers."

"Repetition?" scrawled a print-fatigued anthologist in the margin of the manuscript. The marginalia would multiply (and get less dimwitted) as I read on, slowly piecing together the intricacies of Mitchell's architecture. Tibor and I came independently to the same conclusion: our anthology would have to be 80 pages longer.

Ghostwritten was published in 1999 to rave reviews. More importantly, its ambitious blend of remote locales and eccentric narrators organised under the aegis of Mitchell's storytelling genius netted the book a considerable readership. number9dream, its successor, appeared two years later - its mise-en-scène a son in search of his father. From that wormhole opening, a whole universe expands, one even more intricate and florid than that of Ghostwritten. A "Far Eastern, multi-textual, urban-pastoral, road-movie- of-the-mind," begins a jacket-blurb too dizzying to quote in full, to which I would add only that one small part of the novel appears to be narrated by a member of an extinct branch of Homo sapiens trapped within a computer and thus thwarted in his quest for a fountain pen which, being lost among a pile of screwdrivers, is not being used to write the tale of how this entity fails to find it, and that the whole of the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001.

Now comes Cloud Atlas, whose title signals from the outset a typically Mitchellian anxiety about how the world's flux might be pinned down in print. Typical, too, is the choice of opening - the 19th-century journal of a credulous American probate lawyer, Adam Ewing, marooned on the remote Pacific speck of Chatham Island, its indigenous culture, the Moriori, driven almost to extinction by their enslaving Maori conquerors, and the supplanting white colonists barely subsisting on what little comfort the island yields. A more tenuous narrative toehold could hardly be imagined. Thirty-seven pages later, it appears that Mitchell has fallen off the cliff face altogether for, without warning or conclusion, the journal simply stops in mid-sentence. Narrative breakdown? A catastrophic printing error?

Neither. Hanging, not falling off, is what Mitchell does with cliffs. Cloud Atlas consists of six narratives nestled inside each other, all but the central one breaking off at a crucial juncture to be resumed and concluded later. The reader's task is to scramble up the steps of this six-storied ziggurat and bound down the other side.

Ewing's journal is succeeded by "Letters from Zedelghem", sent to one Rufus Sixsmith from Robert Frobisher, a penniless, bisexual buccaneer and composer who insinuates himself into the Belgian household of a more celebrated elderly rival in 1931. The rupture in Ewing's preceding narrative is partially explained, before the correspondence suffers its own truncation and we find ourselves in the first half of "Half-lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery", a plot-driven car-chase of a story in which an investigative reporter uncovers a corporate conspiracy in the US atomic energy business in 1975 with the help of a now-aged Rufus Sixsmith. That story appears as a pulp fiction paperback in "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish", where a feckless publisher (first encountered in Ghostwritten) is incarcerated in a sinister nursing home, his ordeal transferred to celluloid in the next section, "An Orison of Sonmi", the record of an interrogation of a dissident "fabricant", one of an underclass of slaves cloned in a dystopian future. The book's centre is reached in "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After", set in a post-apocalyptic world where Sonmi is celebrated as a cult figure, her memory as fragmented as the warring tribes that slaughter one another.

Cloud Atlas does not want for ambition, and Mitchell proves - six different ways - that he has the imagination and technique to deliver a fully figured world with its own language, landscape and customs. An astonishing range of textures and voices are combined to make these worlds feel real. Mitchell seems able to write in any genre, to throw his voice into anyone or anything. An exorbitant artistic effort has yielded an overwhelming literary creation.

At the same time, Mitchell's very facility lays Cloud Atlas open to the charge of artificiality. Looking no further than the stylistic pyrotechnics, one might describe the book as a set of immaculate pastiches mechanically joined together by a cascade of ontological downgrades, each "real world" becoming an artefact in the next. Might the narrative stitching be, at times, just a little too neat?

Cloud Atlas is not a volume for the risk-averse, but being stitched up by its author is not among the risks. Mitchell knows the teller is part of the tale. The book reverberates with ideas and resounds with their impacts on the lives of the characters. Incarceration, compulsion and enslavements of various sorts form the pantheon of evil gods who preside over Cloud Atlas.

The paper trail of documents and artefacts is carefully laid, a glorious puzzle for the reader. But each story, however told, is a spyhole into a different cell, a different tyranny: colonial, sexual, corporate, institutional, genetic and, from the book's centre, the meta-tyranny of a "progress" that returns us to the cycle's beginning.

Beyond that, the very design of Cloud Atlas tells a further story, a quest conducted among genres, languages and witnesses for the means to represent worlds, familiar or remote, historical or imaginary. If a residual anxiety lurks among the profusion of styles and multiplicity of narrators, it bespeaks an unease with any fixed authorial position. Good storytelling is compulsive, coercive - a form of tyranny itself. Mitchell's storytelling in Cloud Atlas is of the best. I was, appropriately, captivated.

Lawrence Norfolk's novel 'In the Shape of a Boar' is published by Grove Press