But each story however told is a spyhole into a different cell

But each story, however told, is a spyhole into a different cell, a different tyranny: colonial, sexual, corporate, institutional, genetic and, from the book’s centre, the meta-tyranny of a “progress” that returns us to the cycle’s beginning.Beyond that, the very design of Cloud Atlas tells a further story, a quest conducted among genres, languages and witnesses for the means to represent worlds, familiar or remote, historical or imaginary. Incarceration, compulsion and enslavements of various sorts form the pantheon of evil gods who preside over Cloud Atlas.The paper trail of documents and artefacts is carefully laid, a glorious puzzle for the reader. An astonishing range of textures and voices are combined to make these worlds feel real. Mitchell seems able to write in any genre, to throw his voice into anyone or anything. An exorbitant artistic effort has yielded an overwhelming literary creation.At the same time, Mitchell’s very facility lays Cloud Atlas open to the charge of artificiality.

Looking no further than the stylistic pyrotechnics, one might describe the book as a set of immaculate pastiches mechanically joined together by a cascade of ontological downgrades, each “real world” becoming an artefact in the next. Might the narrative stitching be, at times, just a little too neat?Cloud Atlas is not a volume for the risk-averse, but being stitched up by its author is not among the risks Mitchell knows the teller is part of the tale. The book reverberates with ideas and resounds with their impacts on the lives of the characters. That story appears as a pulp fiction paperback in “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish”, where a feckless publisher (first encountered in Ghostwritten) is incarcerated in a sinister nursing home, his ordeal transferred to celluloid in the next section, “An Orison of Sonmi”, the record of an interrogation of a dissident “fabricant”, one of an underclass of slaves cloned in a dystopian future. The book’s centre is reached in “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After”, set in a post-apocalyptic world where Sonmi is celebrated as a cult figure, her memory as fragmented as the warring tribes that slaughter one another.Cloud Atlas does not want for ambition, and Mitchell proves – six different ways – that he has the imagination and technique to deliver a fully figured world with its own language, landscape and customs.

Typical, too, is the choice of opening – the 19th-century journal of a credulous American probate lawyer, Adam Ewing, marooned on the remote Pacific speck of Chatham Island, its indigenous culture, the Moriori, driven almost to extinction by their enslaving Maori conquerors, and the supplanting white colonists barely subsisting on what little comfort the island yields A more tenuous narrative toehold could hardly be imagined. The rupture in Ewing’s preceding narrative is partially explained, before the correspondence suffers its own truncation and we find ourselves in the first half of “Half-lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery”, a plot-driven car-chase of a story in which an investigative reporter uncovers a corporate conspiracy in the US atomic energy business in 1975 with the help of a now-aged Rufus Sixsmith. Cloud Atlas consists of six narratives nestled inside each other, all but the central one breaking off at a crucial juncture to be resumed and concluded later. The reader’s task is to scramble up the steps of this six-storied ziggurat and bound down the other side.Ewing’s journal is succeeded by “Letters from Zedelghem”, sent to one Rufus Sixsmith from Robert Frobisher, a penniless, bisexual buccaneer and composer who insinuates himself into the Belgian household of a more celebrated elderly rival in 1931. Thirty-seven pages later, it appears that Mitchell has fallen off the cliff face altogether for, without warning or conclusion, the journal simply stops in mid-sentence Narrative breakdown? A catastrophic printing error?Neither Hanging, not falling off, is what Mitchell does with cliffs.