David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas contains six nested stories that differ wildly in style and subject matter but are uniformly enthralling. The six stories have only the most glancing connections to each other. In the first story, a 19th-century sea tale told in diary form, a young, naive lawyer named Adam Ewing crosses the Pacific. Ewing's journal is read by the narrator of the second story, Robert Frobisher, who writes a series of letters to his lover about Frobisher's relationship with an eccentric, tyrannical composer in the early 1900s. (That relationship bears some resemblance to the one between Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft.) Frobisher's lover is a key character in the third story, a conventional thriller about a journalist named Luisa Rey who, in the late 1900s, stumbles upon a corruption scandal at a nuclear power plant. Rey's story, in the form of a novel manuscript, is sent to the narrator of the fourth story, Timothy Cavendish, whose attempts to dodge the mafia land him in a ghastly nursing home. Cavendish's ordeal in turn becomes a film seen by the narrator of the fifth story, Sonmi-451, who is a clone living in a dystopian North Korea after the rest of the world has been wiped out by some sort of nuclear disaster. And, finally, Sonmi-451 is a demigod to the narrator of the sixth and final story, Zach'ry, who lives in a far-future, post-apocalyptic Earth in which humanity has been bombed back to the Stone Age.

Unusually, Mitchell does not present these six stories sequentially. Cloud Atlas begins by giving us the first half of the first five stories, with each half-told tale ending in a genuinely tense cliffhanger. Zach'ry's story then gets told in full. In the last third of the novel, the second halves of the first five stories appear in reverse order, so that Cloud Atlas both begins and ends with Adam Ewing's journal.

Can you tell that Mitchell is showing off? He deserves to. Each of the six stories is a beautifully constructed piece of genre fiction that completes a satisfying and vastly entertaining narrative arc. What is so impressive is that Mitchell never repeats himself and that he is just as good with each of Cloud Atlas's diverse literary forms (Victorian morality tale, epistolary novel, broken English a la Riddley Walker, etc.). The overall structure of the book, with its cascading setups and conclusions, also works to perfection. Despite my interest in the previous stories and my frustration with each cliffhanger, I never felt distracted from the story at hand, and the cumulative weight of all six stories climaxing one after another created a rush that no one of the stories could have accomplished by itself.

It's easy to explain why each story in Cloud Atlas is so gripping. It's harder to see what Cloud Atlas the novel means. Maybe the conglomeration of these tales has no larger significance: there is certainly no shame in writing a collection of individually well-crafted narratives. But the incidental connections between Cloud Atlas's components, not to mention the book's unusual nested structure, suggest that Mitchell intended something more general in juxtaposing these stories.

James thinks that Cloud Atlas is about forms of oppression -- personal, corporate, totalitarian, physical -- and the stories do seem to present a taxonomy of how people can exert their will on others. Given the vast amount of time covered by the book, however, I was also struck by how Cloud Atlas portrayed single individuals affecting history downstream. Each life, though so significant to the individual, becomes an afterthought only a short time later to the next narrator. Even Sonmi-451, who after all is a god in Zach'ry's time, has very little of her actual message preserved. But perhaps James's reading and mine are really the same. In each story, the narrator triumphs (in some fashion, at least) over oppression and cruelty. But the world still ends up as the barren wasteland in which Zach'ry struggles to survive. Such is the sum total of our personal victories.

Copyright © 2006 Steven Wu