Strange tales of hegemony

More than once, it seems like David Mitchell's Booker-shortlisted Cloud Atlas wants to defeat a reader's attempts to crack it. Opening the novel, you find yourself reading the diaries of Adam Ewing, an American notary in the Chatham Islands circa 1850.

The writing is in the turgid style characteristic of the period and difficult to wade through, especially if you're unprepared for it.

But gradually you overcome that and start to get involved with the story, which concerns the subjugation of one island tribe by another and Ewing's growing friendship with a doctor who may have sinister motives.

Then, 40 pages on, the story is abruptly cut off""midsentence, no less""and the novel moves to a second, unrelated chapter, an epistolary narrative concerning a louche young composer's exploits in a chateau near Bruges, Belgium, in the 1930s.

Another 40 pages on, to a pulp-style thriller set in 1975, and so on, until what you have is six separate stories""the final two science-fiction, the last set in an unspecified post-apocalyptic future""that follow a mirror-image pattern; after the last story ends, somewhere around the book's middle, we get the missing second halves of the other narratives in backward chronology, so that Adam Ewing is Mitchell's first man and his last.

This description should be enough to scare off anyone who's looking for a casual read and yes, Cloud Atlas is very convoluted in parts. But it is also""if you have the time, patience and energy for it""a daringly ambitious work that is fascinating both for its construction and its narrative versatility.

("The devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost," says a character, referring ostensibly to a megalomaniacal world consuming itself, but equally to the structure of the book.)

The stories are all concerned, in different ways, with hegemony: with the circumstances that enable one set of people (race isn't the only issue here) to exert dominance over another, and the resulting perpetuation of an unstoppable cycle of power and greed.

Mitchell's meticulous construction gives us pre-echoes, striking visual motifs (a rebel clone's last testimony, with an image of her head preserved on an egg-shaped recording device before her execution, recalls the impaled organs of persecuted tribal folk in another of the stories) and repetitions in sentences and words.

If you're sufficiently involved with one of the narratives, this can be unnerving; you might occasionally stumble upon a phrase or an idea that reminds you of something similar you've read somewhere else, only to realise that it was from another section of the same book. Even when connections aren't spelt out, there is a definite sense of these disparate stories calling out to each other across the centuries.

Though Mitchell is sometimes playful to the point of self-indulgence, he usually holds back enough to allow the reader to make inferences about the commonalities in the stories.

And he's clever enough to make his most explicit message-oriented statements in those parts of the book that are most difficult to read""so that the language prevents it all from seeming too simplistic (example from the chapter "Sloosha's crossing": "List'n, savages an' Civilizeds ain't divvied by tribes or b'liefs or mountain ranges nay, ev'ry human is both, yay. Old'uns'd got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall").

Some bits don't work. There are long, plodding passages and the stories don't always tie into each other in the most convincing ways (what's with that comet-shaped birthmark?). Reduced to its ideas, this book isn't all that remarkable.

What's much more interesting than Mitchell's linking of his narratives so that they become part of an overriding theme is the way he switches between voices. At least two of the stories"""Letters from Zedelghem" and "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish"""are perfectly realised comic novellas in their own right and "The Orison of Sonmi" is absorbing, challenging science-fiction.

There is a seriously versatile writer at work here, and the fact that he knows it (the book is very show-offish in places) takes nothing away from his achievement.

This is the sort of novel that lends itself to inverse snobbery; it's easy to make fun of it, to read bloated passages out to friends, to hold it up as an example of everything that's wrong with Booker Prize contenders.

But Cloud Atlas is something else too""it's an enormously ambitious work that isn't afraid to risk overreaching itself; it often stumbles, recovers, falls again, picks itself up, brushes itself off and starts all over again; and in the midst of all this occasionally achieves things that would have been impossible if it hadn't aimed so high.

Which, naturally, means this isn't an unqualified endorsement. You need, first, to have a lot of time for intense, dedicated reading. And you'll have to, at least temporarily, put aside any reservations you might have about "pretentious" writing (yes, that's subjective, but whatever your definition of the word it'll apply to this book).

You have to be willing to plough through bombast to get to the really good stuff. And even then, you might conclude that you admired it a lot more than you actually enjoyed reading it. Speaking for myself, having dealt with the whole behemoth, I'm going back to some of the individual stories. Reading them at one go might be more fun.

David Mitchell
Sceptre
Price: Rs 250,
Pages: 529

Cloud Atlas