I’ve recently read David Mitchell’s third novel, Cloud Atlas, which like his previous number9dream was short listed for the Booker Prize. He seems to display enormous growth with each novel and has presented himself as a fox (as in Isaiah Berlin’s characterization of writers as being hedgehogs-knowing one big thing, or a foxes-knowing many little things). This novel reminds me of his first effort, Ghostwritten, in that it is a series of stories that are interconnected. However, the stories are divided in two except for the middle stories that act as a sort of boundary between the different sections. Again, Mitchell is doing some literary ventriloquism. But instead of aping Murakami and Hornby, this time around he is mimicking Melville and William Gibson among others. He also does a variety of methods of story telling; third person narrative, letter correspondence, an interview, a mystery novel, and a journal are some of the styles he employs. I particularly liked “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing”-which probably owes something to Melville, and “Letter From Zedelghem”-which reminded me of the Dangerous Liaisons although it took place much later in time. There were merits to the “The First Luis Rey Mystery” and “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” as well. But I was turned off by the lengthy foray into SF in the middle section, I slowed down considerably while reading “An Orison of Sonmi 451”and “Sloosha’s Corossin’ an’ Ev’thin’ After.” The former was a dystopian story of the near future, which has precedents with Huxley and Orwell. It’S been done, and it’s been done better. I see Mitchell trying to channel Gibson here, or at least I guess that’s his influence. I must give him credit for setting it in Korea instead of Japan, despite his having lived here for a long time-but that would have been too cliché. The later is a sort of post-apocalyptic survival farce. To be honest, my interest was really flagging here, which is too bad, because I really enjoyed the first two sections. I see that Mitchell has moved form Japan to Ireland. I’ll be curious to see what he writes next. I feel inexplicably bound to him, since a book review of Ghostwritten was my first paid journalistic piece-we’re the same age and he has three acclaimed novels-d’oh!
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