“This book is a great performance by a very talented writer. It consists of six nested stories presented in the form abcdefedcba. The structure is reminiscent of inversion in music, and indeed story b is about a composer who writes a piece for six instruments called Cloud Atlas Sextet. Story a is a seafaring yarn told in 19th-century English; story b is in epistolary form (mid 20th century); story c is a thriller (in 1970s US English); story d is in the style of contemporary British novelists; story e (set in a Blade Runner style 22nd century) is in futuristic English; and story f is written in an imagined post-apocalyptic Hawaiian English. The plots of the six stories are interwoven in various ways, some very clever, others rather silly (all the protagonists have the same birthmark). It's basically a set of virtuosic pastiches. The hard work expected of the reader, especially in stories e and f, is not really rewarded.”
Lachlan wrote this review Saturday, January 26, 2013.
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