Book Review: Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (2004)
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant…. I very much enjoyed reading Cloud Atlas , a book that takes you on a journey, not just across the globe, but also through time. In fact, when you arrive at the end you might feel somewhat jaded from the excursion. Beginning in the Chatham Islands in the South Pacific in the nineteenth century, the story stretches into the distant future, before recoiling to end up more or less where it started. Along the way it touches on 1930s Belgium, California in the 1970s, present-day Great Britain, futuristic Korea, and reaches a post-apocalyptic saga set in Hawaii. These represent individual stories, each told in two instalments, apart from the sixth story - that set furthest into the future - which forms the middle of the book and is told in a single sitting. Thus, each subsequent instalment steps forward in time, and then steps back again in reverse order, meaning the opening story is completed at the close of the novel. However, the book is more than a neatly...