by Tange

Created on: April 14, 2008

I am always pleased when a book is recommended to me by a friend. Often people think that, because I work in a library, I have mysteriously read every book in the world. Therefore, they expect me to tell them about titles and which authors to read. This time I am happy to indirectly claim all the praise and pass on Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, to you.

THE PLOT.

This is actually quite difficult to summarize, because Cloud Atlas is a series of six stories. These stories are separate but also linked ~ sounds weird, but it works because the individual tales overlap and interlink. The narrative takes us through the ages and around the world, spanning both the past and the distant future.

Through the years we see a lawyer crossing the Pacific Ocean in 1850, a young British composer in the 1930s who writes the Cloud Atlas sextet (for six overlapping voices) and a Californian journalist, in the 1970s at the time of Ronald Reagan's tenure. We then move on to a publisher in the London of the 1980s, a genetically modified clone on death row "somewhere" in the future and a young man on a Pacific Island witnessing the end of civilization.

We end in the location we began in, thus ending the story and completing the link between the separate elements. I have probably explained this all very clumsily, but you really need to read it to get the full picture ~ and I don't want to give too much away. Essentially the book deals with the evil and good that exists in everyone.

WHAT I THOUGHT.

We are led through these separate lives and narratives and witness the ups and downs of their lives through the eyes of each character. The book isn't constrained by time as we know it ~ they span the centuries and send us spinning from the past to the future. David Mitchell manages to be convincing whatever the gender, occupation or time his character is from.

He spans history and adeptly links the essentially different characters together, establishing common ground between them and showing how their lives are interlinked. There are also ripples in the fabric of time that carry us on ~ the story you are presently reading abruptly ends and we are thrown onto the next.

I started the book thinking that I wasn't going to "get" it! Not being a fan of short stories I couldn't see how the whole thing was going to pull together and entice me in. I was put off by what I was expecting the book to be like and was considering NOT reading it. I am so glad that I didn't let my preconceptions keep me away from

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