From The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Harry Potter and everything I’ve read in between (and I’ve read plenty in my time—I work at a bookstore), I had never decided on a favorite book as a matter of principle: it was like choosing between my children. Also, I was having trouble remembering them all. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell turned out to be the exception to my rule.
The novel is ambitious and fantastic simply in the way it’s planned: in a mirror format. Cloud Atlas features six interlocking short stories, with the first half of each laid out from past to future chronologically, with the sixth section whole in the center, and then in reverse order again until the book finishes with the second half of the first story. I know—I was confused too. Each story is revealed to be within the next story somehow—as a diary being read, a series of letters, a manuscript, a movie, an “orison” (futuristic recording device), and a campfire tale. To interweave the disparate stories further, it is continually implied that each main character is really the same soul born again across time, space, gender, and age lines. For example, a young, bisexual British composer named Robert Frobisher is sort of the same person as a female restaurant clone in futuristic, “corpocratic” Seoul named Sonmi-451.
Cloud Atlas is not an easy read, but I promise it’s worth the time. Mitchell has a talent for creating memorable, distinct voices for each of his characters while still showing the reader the links between them. Every time I read his novel again I find connections that I missed the last time around. Plus, it’s worth reading if you’re the kind of person who likes to read the book before seeing the movie. The “Cloud Atlas” movie stars Tom Hanks and Halle Berry and will be released on October 26.
