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David Mitchell’s Booker-shortlisted Cloud Atlas is a brilliant epic, full of elaborate metaphors and shifting voices. But this is no dry literary exercise: it’s even got a car chase, writes John Walsh.
Cloud Atlas
Which is why his third novel, Cloud Atlas, is the
star of this year’s Man Booker shortlist, the hottest favourite in
Booker history, and tipped by the entire world to win the `A3-50,000
prize on October 19.
Even if Cloud Atlas fails to win the Booker, it’ll
still be the most talked-about novel of the year. The Independent
called it "an overwhelming literary creation". In another
paper, AS Byatt said she couldn’t bear it to end. And in a third,
Robert McFarlane, one of this year’s Booker judges, praised Mitchell’s
"darkly futuristic intelligence". Not since Martin Amis became
de facto boss of a new generation of young writers in the 1980s has
there been such an awestruck buzz about an English novelist. Abruptly the story ends and we’re suddenly reading the Isherwood-like letters of a louche bisexual Cambridge music student called Robert who has gone to Belgium to worm his way into a job with a crochety British composer, to become his amanuensis and make love to his wife. Then we’re whisked off to mid-1970s California in a thriller about a girl reporter investigating a crooked energy company with the help of a man called Sixsmith — the chap to whom the Belgian letters were addressed in 1931. After a spell in the memoirs of a venal London vanity publisher in the 1990s, on the run from hoodlums and incarcerated it a twilight home, we find ourselves in Korea a century into the future. Here workers are cloned "fabricants", but one female, called Sonmi-451, acquires intelligence and vision and is condemned to death. Centuries later, she becomes a goddess in a time when the whole of global civilisation has come to an end, and we hear about the final days. At this point, the narrative swivels round, and all the stories are ended in turn, until we’re back in the 19th century, heading for the heart of the slave trade. It’s a head-spinning display of structural and linguistic virtuosity. What went through Mitchell’s mind when plotting the book? "I didn’t think about it at all," he says. "When I’m writing, I know what I want to have next — this scene, that snatch of dialogue, this passage. The theme of predation, the tendency of a society to eat itself, and the Russian-doll structure, evolved organically as I was writing. My books start with four or five stem cells — a mention of the Moriori tribe in Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, and the revelation that humanity can regress just as easily as it can go forward. And I’d been reading Eric Fenby’s autobiography, My Life With Delius, which was such an intriguing relationship. Another starting-point was Italo Calvino’s book, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, which is full of interrupted stories. I wondered how it would be if you went and actually finished off all those interrupted stories..." He has, typically, two new projects on the go. One is a collection of stories called Black Swan Green, set over 13 months (one per story) in a village in 1982 at the time of the Falklands war. The other is set on the man-made island of Dejima, a trading outpost in Japan in the early 19th century and what happens to 15 westerners living there, when the only non-Japanese people allowed on the island were "merchants, translators and prostitutes". Stand by for a dozen new additions to Mitchell’s menagerie of voices, a muttering crew of new recruits to the parliament in his head, a score of new instruments to the orchestra from which this prodigiously gifted conductor extracts polyphonic harmonies never heard before. — The Independent |
SINCE David Mitchell’s debut novel, Ghostwritten,
was published in 1999, readers have got used to his command of a score
of different literary registers and voices, his breezy ability to twist
several disparate story lines into a cat’s cradle of allusion and
thematic intertwining. He has pushed, to the furthest corner of the
envelope, the principles of post-modernism — its smorgasbord of
styles, its death-of-the-author anonymity — without, amazingly,
putting off readers.