By Matthew Burchanoski
Immediately praised upon its release, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) stands as one of the most significant books of the 21st century. Though it has its skeptics, the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Nebula Award for Best Novel and won in Literary Fiction at the British Book Awards. The novel’s support across the communities of historical, speculative, and literary fictions is itself quite interesting but, suffice to say, the novel was well received and remains so in myriad lists of Best Books of the Century. One reason potentially behind its plaudits is how Cloud Atlas attempts to catalogue the challenges, tensions, and anxieties of its post-postmodern period. Many of the sociopolitical concerns shared by theorists regardless of their periodizing name of choice also drive Cloud Atlas’ structure and world. Less a realist representation of the contemporaneous moment than a warning about violent mistakes being repeated over and over, the novel assesses what entwines human’s past, present, and future morally as well as, in the broadest sense, politically. Put simply, Cloud Atlas is one of the most comprehensive attempts at understanding and representing the anxieties of the present moment. The impressive chronological and physical scope of Cloud Atlas is both obvious from its audacious structure and poured over in critical assessments. More than any other element, its expansive world motivates and helps organize analysis of the novel. Spanning roughly 1200 years with sections set on four different continents, Cloud Atlas presents a truly global vision of connectivity through time and space. The recurrence of objects, themes, and markers, as well as the reappearance of distinct, previous texts in newer sections, binds the eleven sections together as not simply diegetically related, but in many ways as repetitions of similar stories, phenomena, and souls.
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