David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: another of the books I’m reading so I can throw it away before I leave Germany. It was a gift from a friend and for a long time I thought, I will never read this undoubted shite, based mostly on the cover

I’ve had enough fokcen horrible experiences with “bestsellers” which turn out to be okay but forgettable (Netherland), supposedly hilarious but actually dull (Rancid Aluminium), tediously well-crafted & lifeless (The Little Friend), pretentious, unconvincing, and badly-researched (Tree of Smoke), “creative writing workshop exemplar” (Enduring Love), wearyingly insubstantial (Birdsong), quite fun but nothing more (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin), boring pastiche (The Unconsoled), depressingly pointless & joyless (2666), competent but somehow meagre (The Plot Against America), aggressively unpleasant (The Wasp Factory), disappointingly trivial (Possession).

So I was quite surprised by Cloud Atlas. It’s very good. Not sure I’d re-read it but then I mostly only re-read poetry, philosophy and beyond-very-good fiction. The structure is initially confusing: it begins with the journal of a lawyer at sea in the 1800s, cuts to the letters of a young musician in the 1920s, then a journalist in the 70s, an elderly publisher in the present, then some sci-fi future of Blade Runner-esque androids, then lastly a post-apocalyptic future of rape and cannibalism. There is a connection running throughout, so the musician finds the lawyer’s journals, the journalist meets the recipient of the musician’s letters, the publisher receives a novel by or based on the journalist’s tale, and so on. The connective ligaments are not so explicit as to render great satisfaction to the more obvious reader; indeed, I found myself wondering just what manner of underlying structure there was, beyond a birthmark common to each time-segment and the overlapping narrations, so something of each protagonist (journal, letters, novel, film, video) is encountered in the next sequence; but this is not, in itself, very satisfying.

I think that while the film trailer talks about love and redemption and what not, the real connective matter is connection itself – it’s not a story about love or heroism or anything of that sort; it says rather: “each life & time is connected to others, in some manner”.

Mitchell has a stammer and an autistic son, suggesting that connection, coherence, fluidity, does not come naturally in his world. Had he created a more coherent ligature, perhaps I would have thought it a great novel; as it is, it’s possible I would re-evaluate, were I to read it a second time, and I enjoyed the prose and situations so much I dare say I will read it again, in a few years. The ultimate test of a novel isn’t “does it have profound meaning” but rather “did you enjoy it”. Balls to profundity if it gives no pleasure.

My own sense of slight disappointment most likely comes from my own odd perspective; that is, I remember fragments of another (relatively recent) life and have been told of others. Mitchell seems to be hinting at reincarnation as the underlying structure; but I noted none of the similitudes & ironies of our many lives – the characters of Cloud Atlas seemed to bear no real kinship, beyond a certain outsider, often outcast role in society. The only novel I know which uses reincarnation as a plot device, and comes very close to the reality, is Katherine Kerr’s Deverry series, especially the first four books. But since Mitchell does no more than hint, I can hardly criticise him for something he probably didn’t intend.

And there is a passage – which I failed to mark – where one character says something like “I would like a map by which to guide myself here, a map of the ephemeral and vague, the constantly shifting forces of our destinies & purpose, an atlas of the clouds” (my wording, as I can’t find the original now). It’s very modern in the sense of pointlessness, of history as a mechanical process within which we are churned up & destroyed, from life to life. It is, in a sense, accurate: there seems (as far as I can judge) no linear progression to reincarnation, no divinely-ordained karma; but there is certainly more structure and purpose than one would think from this excellent and enjoyable novel.