David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is an epic and familiar tragedy. Just the technical aspects of Mitchell’s writing alone would warrant this novel a masterpiece. He shifts voice as though he were multiple authors and not one man writing from the point-of-view consciousness of several different characters in several different times. Despite the predictability of its plot, the book’s prose is so surprising that one forgets the more unoriginal concepts throughout.

****WARNING: SPOILER ALERT****

Mitchell takes the reader through six completely different time periods from gold rush San Francisco to apocalyptic future Hawaii. He uses one character to do it. Maybe character isn’t the right word. Perhaps soul is more accurate. This soul, identified by a strange comet-shaped birthmark, reincarnates itself into various forms and versions of humanity. This soul is faced with the evil of the world each time and it is up to the reader to decide if evil triumphed over good.

The insatiable hunger for more…more anything is the plank of Mitchell’s evil. His characters poison one another for treasure, steal intellectual property for glory and slaughter for pure survival. Whether this is a testament to the ills of consumerism or merely an exposure of the basest of human instinct is impossible to tell. Suffice it to say that humanity is its own worst enemy.

So, the cloud that is the soul must be guided by the atlas that is ineffable peace. And although that cloud will dissipate and wander off course it still must exist.

“‘& only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!’

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”