David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas

Praise for Cloud Atlas

“[Mitchell’s] exuberant, Nabokovian delight in word play; his provocative grapplings with the great unknowables; and most of all his masterful storytelling: All coalesce to make Cloud Atlas an exciting, almost overwhelming masterpiece.”

— The Washington Times

“[Mitchell’s] language crackles with texture and bite.”

— Time

“Hugely entertaining … a surfeit of narrative ingenuity.”

— The New York Observer

“Mitchell’s talent for riotous incident and energetic prose keep the pages turning.”

— Entertainment Weekly

“[Mitchell’s] most audacious work … a wild, wonderful ride.”

— Newsweek

“[Cloud Atlas] glows with a fizzy, dizzy energy, pregnant with possibility and whispering in your ear: Listen closely to a story, any story, and you’ll hear another story inside it, eager to meet the world.”

— The Village Voice

“Exhilarating, elegant, and accomplished … Cloud Atlas is a narrative about the act of narration, the ability of storytelling to shape our sense of history, civilization, and selfhood.”

— Time Out New York

“Mitchell has a gift for creating fully realized worlds with a varied cast of characters.”

— Library Journal

“[Like] Haruki Murakami, Mitchell mixes highbrow concerns with pulp content for maximum reading pleasure.”

— Details

“Cloud Atlas is such an astounding feat that it’s tempting to think there must be several David Mitchells, each of whom wrote one part of this book.”

— BookPage

“Stunning … Mitchell has a gift with language. [His] exploration of power and greed is riveting.”

— Rocky Mountain News

“Audacious, sprawling, preposterously ambitious … Next time someone suggests that The Novel is endangered, hit him with this one. Hard.”

— The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Revolutionary … Cloud Atlas brilliantly puzzles out the way things might not have been.”

— Newsday

“Astonishing … The way Mitchell inhabits the different voices is close to miraculous.”

— The Sunday Times (London)

“A remarkable book … It knits together science fiction, political thriller and historical pastiche with musical virtuosity and linguistic exuberance.”

— Evening Standard (London)

“A cornucopia, an elegiac, radiant festival of prescience, meditation, and entertainment. Open up Mitchell’s head and a whole ecstatic symphony of inventiveness and ideas will fly out as if from a benign and felicitious Pandora’s box.”

— The Times (London)

ALSO BY DAVID MITCHELL

Ghostwritten

number9dream

Black Swan Green

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by David Mitchell

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline, London.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Mitchell, David

Cloud atlas : a novel / David Mitchell.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-48304-1

1. Fate and fatalism—Fiction. 2. Reincarnation—Fiction. 1. Title.

PR6063.I785C58 2004

823′.92—dc22 2003069314

Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

v3.1

FOR HANA AND HER GRANDPARENTS

contents

Cover

Other Books by this Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing

Letters from Zedelghem

Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish

An Orison of Sonmi~451

Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After

An Orison of Sonmi~451

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish

Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery

Letters from Zedelghem

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Manuel Berri, Susan M. S. Brown, Amber Burlinson, Angeles Marín Cabello, David Ebershoff, Late Junction, Rodney King, David Koerner, Sabine Lacaze, Jenny Mitchell, Jan Montefiore, Scott Moyers, David De Neef, John Pearce, Jonathan Pegg, Steve Powell, Mike Shaw, Douglas Stewart, Marnix Verplancke, Carole Welch.

The Ewing and Zachry chapters were researched with the aid of a travel scholarship from the Society of Authors. Michael King’s definitive work on the Moriori, A Land Apart , provides a factual account of Chatham Islands history. Certain scenes in Robert Frobisher’s letters owe debts of inspiration to Delius: As I Knew Him by Eric Fenby (Icon Books, 1966; originally G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1936). The character Vyvyan Ayrs quotes Nietzsche more freely than he admits, and the poem read by Hester Van Zandt to Margo Roker is Emerson’s “Brahma.”

Thursday, 7th November

—

Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints. Through rotting kelp, sea cocoa-nuts & bamboo, the tracks led me to their maker, a White man, his trowzers & Pea-jacket rolled up, sporting a kempt beard & an outsized Beaver, shoveling & sifting the cindery sand with a teaspoon so intently that he noticed me only after I had hailed him from ten yards away. Thus it was, I made the acquaintance of Dr. Henry Goose, surgeon to the London nobility. His nationality was no surprise. If there be any eyrie so desolate, or isle so remote, that one may there resort unchallenged by an Englishman, ’tis not down on any map I ever saw.

Had the doctor misplaced anything on that dismal shore? Could I render assistance? Dr. Goose shook his head, knotted loose his ‘kerchief & displayed its contents with clear pride. “Teeth, sir, are the enameled grails of the quest in hand. In days gone by this Arcadian strand was a cannibals’ banqueting hall, yes, where the strong engorged themselves on the weak. The teeth, they spat out, as you or I would expel cherry stones. But these base molars, sir, shall be transmuted to gold & how? An artisan of Piccadilly who fashions denture sets for the nobility pays handsomely for human gnashers. Do you know the price a quarter pound will earn, sir?”

I confessed I did not.

“Nor shall I enlighten you, sir, for ’tis a professional secret!” He tapped his nose. “Mr. Ewing, are you acquainted with Marchioness Grace of Mayfair? No? The better for you, for she is a corpse in petticoats. Five years have passed since this harridan besmirched my name, yes, with imputations that resulted in my being blackballed from Society.” Dr. Goose looked out to sea. “My peregrinations began in that dark hour.”

I expressed sympathy with the doctor’s plight.

“I thank you, sir, I thank you, but these ivories”—he shook his ‘kerchief—”are my angels of redemption. Permit me to elucidate. The Marchioness wears dental fixtures fashioned by the aforementioned doctor. Next yuletide, just as that scented She-Donkey is addressing her Ambassadors’ Ball, I, Henry Goose, yes, I shall arise & declare to one & all that our hostess masticates with cannibals’ gnashers! Sir Hubert will challenge me, predictably, ‘Furnish your evidence,’ that boor shall roar, ‘or grant me satisfaction!’ I shall declare, ‘Evidence, Sir Hubert? Why, I gathered your mother’s teeth myself fro m the spittoon of the South Pacific! Here, sir, here are some of their fellows!’ & fling these very teeth into her tortoiseshell soup tureen & that, sir, that will grant me my satisfaction! The twittering wits will scald the icy Marchioness in their news sheets & by next season she shall be fortunate to receive an invitation to a Poorhouse Ball!”