We leave him mid sentence, shortly after having helped one of the last remaining Moriori tribesmen to avoid being thrown into the Pacific. Ewing has some appropriately racist views on the various native populations, but he’s a kinder man than those around him. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (Part 1) is in diary form, detailing Ewing’s travels and travails through the Chatham Islands near New Zealand and onto a ship destined for Ewing’s native U S of A. This is surprisingly well done, much in the manner of Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Therefore, the young musician Robert Frobisher reads Adam Ewing, Rufus Sixsmith reads Robert Frobisher, and etc. The way that the apparently unrelated narratives fit together is in the nature of one of those Russian Matyroshka dolls: each narrative encompasses the previous one, in the sense that someone discovers or is in possession of the manuscript of the previous section. This is not to say that I enjoyed all the narratives equally, however. This is fairly daring, as readers tend to love continuity, but it isn’t long before you’ve stopped pining for part two of a particular narrative and become engrossed in the next one. In the first half of the book, the narratives tend to end at particularly interesting cliffhangers, or even in one case in the middle of a sentence.

If that seems confusing, don’t worry: Cloud Atlas is anything but. And then we get a second section of all but the Sloosha story, told in reverse order (i.e.

They are: The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing Letters from Zedelghem Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish An Orison of Sonmi-451 and Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After. The six narratives are told, initially, in chronological order. But I wouldn’t call this science fiction. Each of the six narratives are set in different times and places, spanning from the 19th century to the distant future. What we have here is a series of eleven novella length sections, covering six different narratives. The first interesting thing about Cloud Atlas is its structure.

To say I was impressed and enthralled by the first 200 pages of this book would be an understatement. After reading Mitchell’s more recent Black Swan Green, I was eager to seek out his earlier books, and Cloud Atlas didn’t disappoint. I could scarcely have been more enthusiastic about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas upon picking it up, nor can I remember being so enthusiastic about a newly discovered author.

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