One of the clever aspects of "Cloud Atlas" is that its various parts are virtually unrelated by events but strongly tied by themes. Syntax and cultural context usually keep his meaning clear, however-"The sky curfewed" for sundown, for example-and one gets the sense he is mimicking, and perhaps gently mocking, the conventions of 19th Century travelogues, epistolary novels, sci-fi novels and whodunits, each in turn. Mitchell bends the English language differently in each case, in some instances using dialect of his own invention that requires a little extra attention from the reader. We visit a genetically engineered society in the distant future, a post-apocalyptic Hawaii that has been blasted back to the Bronze Age, and California during the Ford administration, where we find: We jump from a 19th Century schooner in the South Pacific to interwar Europe, in mid-sentence, no less. Actions echo other actions, but are unrelated in the traditional sense of plot. "This could be one of those movies that are better than the book," he decided after reading it.A young journalist reads letters posted from 1930s Belgium and finds "the dizzying vividness of the images of places and people" so powerful within her that "she can only call them memories." The author, decades dead and a suicide as well, hadn't written to her but to a scientist friend who laments that "we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters." Emerson is quoted by yet another character: "They know not well the subtle ways/I keep, and pass, and turn again." Are we ourselves, or something else? Welcome to a nebula of a novel, David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas."īritish writer Mitchell (a Booker Prize finalist in previous work) casts time and space, and language itself sometimes, in diffuse arrangements where the rules of narrative physics don't seem to apply. Mitchell told The New Yorker: "As I was writing Cloud Atlas, I thought, 'It's a shame this is unfilmable.'" It was the script which persuaded him otherwise. Look out for Mitchell in a cameo appearance – he's a tall, blond, English man, possibly with a slight stammer. It is directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer.
Mitchell's brilliant "Russian doll" structure of interlocking stories which cross generations has been adapted into a "mosaic structure", in which the actors – including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Hugh Grant plus Jim Broadbent and Susan Sarandon – play different roles.
Salon called it "an amazing, baffling, thrilling and (for many, it would appear) irritating experience, and for my money the most beautiful and distinctive big-screen vision of the year", but Rolling Stone thought that it was "an uphill battle". David Mitchell's "unfilmable" 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas, is finally to be released as a film this Friday, having already divided the critics in America.
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