Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
Sceptre
2004
Pages:
Price: Rs 250
ISBN:
Paperback
What can one say in relatively boring prose about a book that is a sheer physical phenomenon? The metaphors to describe David Mitchell’s third novel — a classical fugue, an organic entity, a trip-wired structure, trapeze art in words — can all be lined up back to back and still provide only a hint of what it is in store for the reader.
It was clear in his earlier two novels that Mitchell is a master-stylist, whose genre-crunching techniques supplement — rather than make up for — his energetic, speed-ball use of language. By the sound of it, is a very clever novel. Well, it is that. It’s forged out of intelligence, and demands the same from the reader.
But in a world where the word ‘clever’ has become a byword for artful foppery, Mitchell has plenty of surprises in store. Like the great ‘structuralists’ of fiction — Lawrence Sterne, Miguel de Cervantes, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick and Alan Moore — Mitchell shows that technique, at its molecular-level, associative best has an awe-inspiring depth of its own.
The book is composed of narratives that seem independent enough at the beginning. We enter the world of Adam Ewing and his ‘adventures’ with the Moriori tribe in 18th century Chatham Islands. Written in a journal form, Mitchell’s first protagonist captures the skirmishes, the nerve-wracking relation between the colonised and the colonisers (and among the colonisers themselves) — in the case of the Moriori, both the Maoris and the British have overrun them. This is Mitchell playing Daniel Defoe with poco-pomo (post-colonial-post-modern) arrows in his quiver.
{{/usCountry}}The book is composed of narratives that seem independent enough at the beginning. We enter the world of Adam Ewing and his ‘adventures’ with the Moriori tribe in 18th century Chatham Islands. Written in a journal form, Mitchell’s first protagonist captures the skirmishes, the nerve-wracking relation between the colonised and the colonisers (and among the colonisers themselves) — in the case of the Moriori, both the Maoris and the British have overrun them. This is Mitchell playing Daniel Defoe with poco-pomo (post-colonial-post-modern) arrows in his quiver.
{{/usCountry}}We move to another universe a chapter later inhabited by the magnetic-cum-obnoxious figure of Robert Forshiber, a gifted and utterly decadent wannabe composer writing letters from the house of a master composer in 1931 Holland. Here Mitchell makes his protagonist and ‘victims’ inhabit a pre-World War II version of the 18th century world of Dangerous Liaisons where deceit and sophistication bubble to a boil.