JONNY: How's it goin', Kevin? Welcome to the first (and possibly only?) installment of the Wavelength Book Club. How do you like your coffee again? Black as your soul, right? Kidding. Okay, so I gotta start by admitting to my rabid fandom. David Mitchell is probably my favourite living author, and there's an added thrill in his relative obscurity over here. I only found out about him because my British uncle sent me his first novel, Ghostwritten, for my birthday a few years back. That one blew my mind and broke my heart all at once. I remember finishing it on a plane and having to bury my face against the bulkhead to hide the tears. Maybe it was just turbulence... but I am pretty emo. So I was pretty shocked and delighted to see Mitchell on the cover of eye back in the fall, when he was in town to promote his new book. Cloud Atlas is his third novel, and it is more similar to the epic-in-scope Ghostwritten than its more straight-up successor, number9dream. Ghostwritten consisted of 11 interconnected short stories set in different locales, all in the present day (or very near future), whereas Cloud Atlas has this novel as nested Russian doll" structure, which is pretty nifty. There's six stories in here, and each one starts in a completely different era and setting. And each is abruptly interrupted halfway through, as the book jumps forward in time to begin its next chapter, before reaching the end of time as we know it and going backwards to wrap up the loose threads. I'd just like to say that structurally alone, this book is an amazing achievement. But more than that, it's just a fucking intense read. What do you think, Kevin?

KEVIN: Hey Jonny, so it's 1am Xmas-Eve-Eve and I'm topping off some Black Russian with Bailey's on the rocks in Oshawa. I was in Chapters earlier today and came across a shelf-end display of Cloud Atlas and I rabidly described it to my friend. About 10 minutes later, a lady came up to me with a copy of Cloud Atlas and thanked me as she was looking for something for her husband and overheard my rant about it. I wonder if Chapters pays commision? So to begin, yes, Cloud Atlas was one of the best books I have ever read. Mitchell deftly masters the different genres/styles he uses and smoothly brings the reader into each new world, even when he leaves you in climax. Yes, the stories are all connected, but Mitchell uniquely avoids the obvious way of doing it and has just subtle connections, more coincidences really. As much as my mind wanted the stories to be really connected, with all the characters somehow related, in the end I felt more satisfied that it didn't all get neatly wrapped up Ghostwritten at times fell into this trap. In Cloud Atlas, nothing seems forced at all by Mitchell; it flows naturally and smoothly, from the proper language of the past to the suspense-filled airport mystery novel, to the dystopian future. And it is tough at first to get into the language of the book's centrepiece, but after a few attempts, the post-apocalyptic prose flows just as well as the rest, and allows for Mitchell to avoid the perils of writing depressingly about depressing things. Cloud Atlas tends to take bleak outlooks but they are written with hopeful words. I think where Ghostwritten focused thematically on exploring human nature, Cloud Atlas focuses more on the human condition. What I mean is that the world and environments affect the characters and shape them more so than specific people do. There are social conditions which the characters must abide by or defy in order to survive. The book's front sleeve calls it a "puzzle book" and it is in that Mitchell is assembling a look at the human condition in different times/history, and real history itself really is just genres, which is why the stories flow so smoothly.

JONNY: I think I agree with pretty much everything you said, especially the combination of 'bleak outlook' and 'hopeful words'... I don't think I've ever loved a work of art this pessimistic so passionately, with the possible exception of Brazil or Nineteen Eighty-Four. The boot-stamping-on-a-human-face-for-ever message of the latter resounds here: that humans enslaving and exploiting one another is an inescapable, historical inevitability. But each of Mitchell's protagonists is trying to escape and fight for a better life, and the point I think he's trying to make is that that's the point... of life, I mean. I guess this is a truly existentialist novel Ñ it's about individuals fighting to make sense of, and bring compassion into, a larger, meaner world that they didn't create. Yet he ably transplants this spirit into modernity Ñ Mitchell's books distill the early 21st century zeitgeist better than anyone else, I think.

KEVIN: Yeah, it's hard not to love this book. For all its pessimism and/or existential leanings, Mitchell never gets didactic or pompous. There is a sincerity to all the stories. He lets his characters just tell their tales, and through them, we get comedy, romance, greed, puzzlement, fear, compassion, and everything else that makes up humanity, from history past to the 21st century. I think this book resounds so strongly with myself and everyone else I know who has read it, simply because of its sincerity. After being over-saturated with Ã’irony" for the last however many years and faced daily with the hyper-reality obsession of the media, a tiny bit of sincerity seems new and exciting and refreshing on the mind. That is why it resounds, because storytelling is a fast-dying art, and Mitchell is either the last great storyteller, or the heralder of a direly needed
renaissance.

Jonny Dovercourt + Kevin Shutterbug