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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
For some writers, the end of a chapter is little more than a pause for breath. For the audacious British novelist David Mitchell, the chapter is the organizing principle of his imagination. His first three works--"Ghostwritten" (1999), "Number9Dream" (2001), and "Cloud Atlas" (2004)--are divided, with almost fetishistic care, into sections that resemble the movements of a musical composition. The sections are presented as independent narratives, divergent in theme and tone, which are carefully tethered to a larger design.
The Mitchell method reached a height of virtuosity in the entertainingly kinetic "Cloud Atlas," in which six archly distinct narratives--each set in its own place and era, and each mimicking a different genre, from the nautical adventure to the conspiracy thriller--are spliced together, as if by a twitchy film editor. Five of the stories cut off, at a moment of high drama, like an old projector snapping the celluloid right in the middle of the big shoot-out; they resume, with equal abruptness, in the book's second half. As the novel progresses, strange connections emerge: the text of the first chapter is discovered on a bookshelf in the second; the hero of the third section hears a bewitching recording of chamber music, the "Cloud Atlas Sextet," which was composed by the protagonist of the second. Mitchell's early books are elaborate games--Calvino-style curios, swollen to five hundred pages--and they are written in playful pastiche, with...
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