A six-stranded, psychedelic blend of genres, settings

Cloud Atlas
By David Mitchell
Random House, 509 pp., paperback, $14.95

David Mitchell spent the last eight years living in Japan. Although he has written of the shadow Italo Calvino cast on him as a young writer, judging by Mitchell's fiction, the Japanese art of origami might be an influence, too. His 1999 debut "Ghostwritten" consisted of nine characters, 10 chapters, and an interlocking story about the interconnectedness of us all. "Number9Dream," a finalist for the Booker Prize, began as the tale of a Japanese boy on a quest into Tokyo to find his father. It then splintered into several different yarns, one based on a video game, one based on fantasy, and yet another based on myth.

It goes without saying, then, that Mitchell is Britain's most sophisticated young novelist and his sprawling, psychedelic new novel, "Cloud Atlas," his most ambitious book yet. There are just six narratives in this story, but they collapse in on each other with dazzling elegance to form a powerful meditation on causality, humankind's ability to abuse itself, and the flightiness of civilization. We begin appropriately with a story about a man named Adam (Ewing), who journeys across the Pacific in the 19th century. On the way, he encounters Moriori people, missionaries, and a few sailors without any soft edges.

Then, mid-sentence, Mitchell plucks us from this yarn and drops us into the story of an amoral British composer in 1931 who tricks a dying man into hiring him as a scribe and proceeds to bed the man's daughter. The book's title comes from this narrator, Robert Frobisher, who composes "The Cloud Atlas Sextet," a score for six instruments. Frobisher's life comes to us in the form of letters sent to his lover Rufus Sixsmith, who pops up again later in the novel as a nuclear scientist in the 1970s.

Powered by swift, punchy sentences and a plucky journalist heroine named Luisa Rey, that part of the novel focuses on a corporate nuclear scandal in California. The fourth narrator is a British publisher trapped in an old-folks' home in England. The fifth narrative transcribes the dying words of a clone slave on the eve of his execution in some futuristic universe. Lastly, we hear from Zachry, a tribesman from the postapocalyptic future who lives in the part of the Pacific where the book first began.

This constant jumping from one narrative to the next should be jarring, but it isn't. A former book clerk at Waterstone's in England, Mitchell has a compulsive reader's finicky grasp of which literary antecedents he must mimic to make these worlds seem true. Ewing is quite clearly based on Melville, while Frobisher recalls the high hilarity of Christopher Isherwood or Evelyn Waugh. In many ways, "Cloud Atlas" feels like one long jazz solo, with a very busy Mitchell tipping his hat and nodding at his favorite writers. A quick glimpse at a passage from Rey's section recalls the urbane panache of a Raymond Chandler novel:

"Rufus Sixsmith leans over the balcony and estimates his body's velocity when it hits the sidewalk and lays his dilemmas to rest. A telephone rings in the unlit room. Sixsmith dares not answer. Disco music booms from the next apartment, where a party is in full swing, and Sixsmith feels older than his sixty-six years. Smog obscures the stars, but north and south along the coastal strip, Buenas Yerbas's billion lights simmer. West, the Pacific eternity. East, our denuded, heroic, pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, berserking American continent."

In this sense, one of the biggest joys of "Cloud Atlas" is watching Mitchell sashay from genre to genre without a hitch in his dance step. If you are a fantasy reader or a thriller reader, a fan of epistolary novels or even a reader of journals, "Cloud Atlas" maintains a thrilling level of authenticity throughout. It is not unlike a narrative buffet -- you want to try each, and then go back for seconds on the ones you enjoy. And Mitchell allows us to do just this. Once the book hits the future, it crabwalks backward to the 1850s and the story is resolved in reverse order. At the book's close we are back in the Pacific.

Of course, the second-biggest pleasure of "Cloud Atlas" is figuring out how and where the tales are going to intersect. There is a certain thematic significance to these run-ins -- for instance, Frobisher picking up a copy of Ewing's nautical journal. First-person voices aside, "Cloud Atlas" is a book about the way civilizations overlap. There is a Darwinian tug of war, one might say, between each subsequent story and the one before. The seafaring spirit of Ewing abuts the amoral decadence of Frobisher; the sudden destructive might of the United States, as seen through its nuclear power, comments on the false innocence of Ewing's exploratory journey.

In England, Mitchell is already being called his generation's Pynchon, and indeed the two writers display a similar penchant for pyrotechnics. Mitchell's work also shares Pynchon's often-overlooked moral core. Watching Mitchell's characters act, and then seeing their actions' effects, it's hard not to agree that causality may be one of the thorniest moral issues in existence. What we do today in our own private lives may have consequences for people in the next millennium. The problem is that while actions have a way of carrying forward into the present, knowledge does not. It's a heady idea, and with "Cloud Atlas," Mitchell delivers a story that will make readers sit up and pay attention to this truth.

John Freeman is a writer in New York. His reviews have appeared in The Independent, The Scotsman on Sunday, and The Wall Street Journal.