David Mitchell's third novel is so tricked out, in fact, that advance proofs came with a disclaimer from the publishing director of Random House, who confesses that he thought pages had gone missing from his manuscript when it vaulted mid-sentence—mid-word, actually—from the South Seas diary of a 19th-century notary to the epistolary plaints of a penniless composer in 1931 Belgium. The epic unfurls as no less than a journal within a series of letters within a mystery novel within a movie (or, perhaps, a lovingly detailed description of said movie) within a convict's last interview within an old man's reminiscence. Each new narrative irruption opens a fissure in the preceding groundwork (usually leaving behind a cliff with a protagonist dangling off it) until Mitchell hits his novel's deep-earth kernel—a futurist folktale of sorts, spun 'round the campfire in a Twainian vernacular—and then tunnels back out again.
As did the pan-global daisy chain of Mitchell's 1999 debut, Ghostwritten, the new book barrels along on the author's virtuoso powers of ventriloquism. Cloud Atlas is a polyphonic spree whose voices (echoing forebears as diverse as Sterne, Typee-era Melville, Huxley, Waugh, Bradbury, and Amis fils) bounce off the sloping walls of the novel's Chinese-box architecture (evoking at turns Italo Calvino, Flann O'Brien, and Jonathan Safran Foer). The big theme is Only Connect, but Mitchell also lingers time and again on repressive imbalances of power: Victorian-era colonizers exploit and exterminate natives of South Pacific islands; a young tabloid reporter named Luisa Rey (her name nodding to a multi-strand ancestor of Cloud Atlas, Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey) gets in the crosshairs of a rapacious nuclear energy company in 1970s California; a genetically engineered serf in a future "corpocracy" slowly gains awareness of her sorry, shocking plight.
The latter's long night's journey into day affords Mitchell the opportunity to riff on a Brave New World updated for globalization and its discontents
