A light is shining on author’s ‘Cloud’

Oddsmaker Ladbrokes has established David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” as even money to win this year’s Man Booker Prize, and when the 35-year-old author mentions what England’s most famous bookmaker thinks of his chances, it is with a mixture of pride and horror.

“I am pleased,” Mitchell says. “But it makes me feel a little worried. If I were one of the Booker judges, because of all this noise, I would be inclined to not go for the favorite, to prove my independence of mind.”

Still, if ever a novel seemed like a shoo-in for one of the literary world’s most prestigious awards -- given to a writer in the British Commonwealth or Ireland -- it’s Mitchell’s audacious and innovative work. Essentially a story about the decline of human civilization told through six interlocking tales that begin with an 1850 sea voyage and end in a post-industrial Hawaii of the far future, “Cloud Atlas” has earned raves from the British critics.

Much of the acclaim has zeroed in on the book’s inventive structure -- the tales fold into each other like a series of nesting dolls -- but also Mitchell’s uncanny ability to inhabit the voices of his characters. Five of the stories are told in the first person, including the diary of a 19th century American notary public, the confessions of a clone bred for servitude, and the words of an illiterate, futuristic teenager whose pidgin speech carries echoes of “A Clockwork Orange.”

In fact, says Mitchell, whose previous novel, “Number9 Dream,” was also a Booker finalist, the section in “Cloud Atlas” that was the toughest to write was the only one told in the third person: “The First Luis Rey Mystery,” a noir tale about corporate deceit set in present-day California.

Third person is hard for him, he says, because “you’re dealing with an invisible entity, the narrator. ‘Mrs. Dalloway bought the flowers.’ Who said that? Where did you come from? Who are you? I’m simply not practiced in that. My first two books are in the first person and I’m happiest in it.”

There’s also a very particular reason for Mitchell’s preference to speak through other characters’ voices. Growing up in Britain in the ‘80s, he was, he has said, a “very anxious” kid who read catastrophic science fiction, worried about nuclear war and was burdened with a severe stammer.

“As a kid in the rough-and-tumble world of boys, you keep your mouth shut if you have a stammer,” he says. “It’s dangerous to try to speak; it marks you out as different. I was quite an interior kid. So I tend to write interior characters.”

Mitchell also honed his literary ventriloquism act during the eight years he spent in Japan. After graduating from college in England with one of those degrees that sounds like someone’s idea of a bad academic joke -- his thesis was on “Levels of Reality in the Post-Modern Novel” -- Mitchell found he couldn’t get a job (he was rejected even by McDonald’s) and eventually decamped to Hiroshima with his Japanese girlfriend when her visa ran out. While earning his keep as an English teacher, Mitchell also began his writing career and learned more about what it means to be culturally alienated.

“For a long time I was unable to interact; I was linguistically infantilized,” he says. “I couldn’t read signs or do anything. And this made me understand how powerful and sacred language is and how much our perception of the world isn’t based on actually what’s there but on the language that is a conduit to the world.”

Mitchell’s first two novels, written during his years in Japan, earned him the immediate attention of the British cognoscenti -- A.S. Byatt is a particular fan -- and last year Granta named him one of Britain’s best young novelists. A sweet, low-key man with a ready smile, clean-cut good looks and a total lack of affectation, Mitchell, who now lives in Ireland with his wife and 2-year-old daughter, appreciates the praise but also feels that “it writes the word ‘target’ on my head. I feel gratefully ambivalent. I view writing as a long-term thing, and it’s important to me to allow myself to continue to learn. I want to retain humility in order to learn.”

“Humility, especially the intellectual kind, is one thing Mitchell seems to have been hard-wired with. He can talk in high-flown literary concepts like a self-absorbed PhD candidate, and with its occasionally dense prose and tricky structure, “Cloud Atlas” could have been a real slog. But Mitchell wants to be read by the widest audience possible, so his novel is gloriously can’t-put-it-down readable.

“I am giving up a source of jet propulsion, the force of chronology that takes a reader through a conventional novel,” he says. “So you have to find any techniques you can to keep the reader on board, and one of those is, just on a scene-by-scene level, tension. Many of the scenes are mini-adventures almost, and when one’s over, the next one has to begin.”

Still, “Cloud Atlas” is not exactly what you’d call a romp. Although one of the episodes is a hilarious Evelyn Waugh-like tale of a sexagenarian publisher who finds himself accidentally sent to a rest home run by the British version of Nurse Ratched, the rest of the novel takes on Big Issues: racism, colonialism, the horrors of consumerism and the negative ways in which rampant overproduction is changing the planet.

Mitchell has said the book is ultimately about “predation,” about how people and institutions prey on each other. But he also says he wrote “Cloud Atlas” because he wanted to comment on “the continued rise and long inevitable fall into entropy of civilization. Do you really believe human civilization is permanent? Everything ends. Entropy is built into existence.”

This is nothing new for Mitchell, who admits to an “apocalyptic streak” in his work. In his first novel, “Ghostwritten,” he has a comet crash into Earth, and in “Number9Dream” he flattens Tokyo with a biological plague. So it comes as a bit of a shock that Mitchell says he hopes readers get a sense of hope from “Cloud Atlas.” Hope?

“I believe the probable curve of humanity in the very long term is entropy,” he says cheerily. “But that’s not the inevitable curve of humanity. If people behave with kindness and integrity, then the world doesn’t have to be as bleak as it’s portrayed in my book.”

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