In praise of David Mitchell

One of my most proud recent achievements has been finishing David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. After 3 months of carrying it around with me with a vague hope of getting through a couple of pages on the bus, I discovered that it was actually rated in the top 10 most unfinished books, coming higher than Crime & Punishment and just below Ulysses. Not wanting to be defeated, this spurred me on a bit and, although it has taken a while, it turned out to be one of the most interesting and exciting books that I've read in a long time - am pretty convinced that David Mitchell is a genius. The beginning does put you off a bit - fact - and a sample sentence from the middle 'tale' that took approx a month to read, "You'll mem'ry I, Zachry, was curled in my hideynick in the Icon'ry, list'nin' to Naples tellin' that mildewy yarn to my unwelcome dwellin'-guest an' showin' Meronym his fam'ly icons o' dead lifes." So the language is difficult but one of the points of the book is that ideas transcends language and time. There are 6 stories, connected by a stark analysis of human greed, a clear warning for the future but with a clear offer of redemption - it is a useful critique of the idea that we have to plump for an idea of human beings as essentially evil or essentially good and in the same vein as a book like 1984, suggests that an overly controlled society will ultimately self-destruct. We are introduced to a whole array of characters and across all the stories is the idea of the 'small man' fighting against the system. This is most clearly played out in An Orison of Somni where we learn about a future but worryingly familiar world, governed by a ruthless corporation, reliant on human clones and where certain 'brands' have been incorporated into everyday parlance - However Sloosha's Crossin' does point towards renewal, towards another world, and if anyone thinks that David Mitchell is too pessimistic about humanity, they should focus on the book's last sentence, a word of advice from Adam Ewing's father-in-law, "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?", lifted straight from Mother Theresa. Very challenging but very satisfying :-)