A Narrative Symphony

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a masterfully interwoven novel that tells in many voices, six to be exact. Through a Russian doll construction, readers are exposed to six different narratives ranging across centuries from the travel diary of an American lawyer’s crossing of the Pacific Ocean in 1850 to a distant post-apocalyptic world where man’s greed has destroyed most of civilization and the remaining humans have returned to a primitive tribal system. In between, the reader encounters an epistolary account of a young composer’s tenure as assistant to an older, more established composer, a pulp-fiction drama set in the 1970’s where the savvy reporter, Luisa Rey, takes on corporate in the form of Seaboard Power, Inc., the witty memoir of Timothy Cavendish, a book editor who is held in a nursing home against his will, and a science fiction-style interview with Sonmi-451, a genetically-engineered human clone who has ascended from the role of illiterate slave to assert her own humanity. Continue reading →