Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)

David Mitchell is one of those rare writers who can conjure enormously complex postmodern narratives which, when read, actually come across as brilliantly simple and organic storytelling. It's not, of course: I can't even conceive of how much research, travel, plotting and planning went into this book. It's an absolute literary behemoth, the type of book that leaves you walking away shaking your head at the sheer audacity of it. I suppose that Mitchell shares this quality with his nearest analogue, the great Salman Rushdie, but then, Rushdie was always a little too wrapped up in his own brilliance, whereas Mitchell seems admirably modest and unassuming. It somehow makes his books even more likeable.

I start this review with that preamble because I'm not even sure of how to start summarising this book for you. It has so many layers that I could still be writing about 'Cloud Atlas' tomorrow and not be close to finishing. So I guess I'll try and give you the short version. As with Mitchell's debut novel 'Ghostwritten', 'Cloud Atlas' consists of a series of interconnecting stories that are thematically and textually linked. The conceit of the novel's structure is that each character reads or watches the narrative of the previous character, but each narrative is interrupted halfway through. As the sixth arc closes in the middle of the book, the story arcs are closed in reverse order until the reader ends with the story that began the book. We thus move both forwards and backwards in time, towards the ultimate philosophical revelation that everything changes but humanity's essential selfishness does not. Furthermore, each of the protagonists in the book possess a comet shaped birthmark, indicating that they are one soul being reborn into different physical vessels. It is truly a wonderful experience to join the dots of Mitchell's narrative framework and yet also get caught up in each individual story.

The stories span such a range of historical periods and regions that it's impossible not to be impressed, especially as Mitchell manages to make each of them seem entirely authentic. He also experiments with a multitude of genres: a journal, a series of letters, a crime thriller, a burlesque, an interview and an oral memoir. His characters are equally diverse, as are his locations. We start with Adam Ewing, an American notary on a voyage across the Pacific from Australia to San Francisco who is, unbeknowst to him, being preyed upon by a charlatan doctor. This section is probably the most humdrum but it introduces one of the novel's defining philosophical conceits: that man inherently preys upon those weaker than himself. This is seen in the way Ewing witnesses the colonial rapacity of the English and the Dutch, as well as the recounted story of the island people the Moriori, who were themselves colonised by the Maori, who proved themselves "apt pupils" in the dark art of colonialism. It is also evident in the way Ewing himself is taken advantage of by the man he thinks is a doctor and his friend. Ewing's journal is read by the would-be composer Robert Frobisher in the early 1930s while he is staying at the Belgian chateau of the syphlitic composer Vyvan Ayres and working as his amanuensis. Frobisher writes to his friend and lover Rufus Sixsmith of the way in which he has inveigled his way into the graces of Ayrs' wife as well as how he is funding himself through finding rare books and selling them to a broker on Greek Street. The novel's title is taken from this section, as Frobisher is writing a musical work of his own, 'Cloud Atlas Sestet', six interconnecting movements which endlessly descend and ascend, much like the characters in the novel do. Frobisher's letters to Sixsmith are read by the protagonist of the next section, Luisa Rey, an investigative journalist embroiled in the attempts of an all powerful nuclear energy company to cover up the fact that their new reactor could be unsafe and cause a disaster. The strongarm tactics of the energy company throw light into the darker side of capitalism. The Luisa Rey mystery is read in the early 2000s by Timothy Cavendish, a hapless vanity publisher who happened on a huge hit after his gangster client killed a smug book reviewer. Cavendish escapes the attentions of his client's brothers only to wind up in a dictatorial nursing home, having been tricked into thinking it was a hotel by his brother. Cavendish's struggles are seen  by Sonmi-451 as a film after she escapes her life as an indentured fabricant worker at Papa Song's (a thinly veiled analogue for McDonald's). This section comes across as an even darker version of Huxley's 'Brave New World', as all work in Nea So Copros (Korea) is undertaken by fabricants who are brutally executed after 12 years of service. This dystopic world is brilliantly rendered through Sonmi's recollections of her life as a server and a her later life as a revolutionary. Mitchell cleverly uses brand names already in existence as eponyms: so personal televisions are "Sonys" and coffee is "Starbucks". The rapacity of capitalism in this section is portrayed as all consuming, leading inevitably to the end of humanity as we know it. I have always been a huge fan of dystopian fiction, so this section had me on the edge of my proverbial seat. The recording of Sonmi is watched by the next viewpoint character, Zachry, a tribesman on Hawaii whose tribe is threatened by the even more primitive, but very warlike Kona. Zachry is visited by Meronym, a member of the last known advanced society. Zachry's people worship Sonmi as a deity, without knowing anything about her history. This section is written in a form of broken English argot, which like any such effort (Orwell and Newspeak, Burgess and Nadsat) absolutely takes you in once you get past the initial page or so.

The finale takes the entire second half of the novel and is by turns dazzling, elegiac, haunting and triumphant. Having to wait for the conclusion of each narrative makes you want to turn each page that bit quicker. It's a book to obsess over, a book to devour and yet a book to savour too. I've noticed that there has been something of a backlash against this book in recent years, almost as if the universal acclaim it won when it came out is now seen as somehow indecorous. I cannot for the life of me imagine why anybody would not see this novel for what it is: a dazzling postmodern gem and a book which will be regarded as the undisputed classic of the 2000s. This is a book which will be studied and thought about for many years. I already want to re-read it.

A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)

I have had John Kennedy Toole's 'A Confederacy of Dunces' on my shelf for over a year; a good friend gave it to me for my thirtieth birthday, and she's a friend whose taste in literature I trust completely, but somehow I just hadn't got around to reading it. I knew, of course, the tragic story behind the novel: the author's suicide at the age of only thirty-two with his masterpiece unpublished, only for it to be published eleven years later due to the unstinting persistence of his mother Thelma. In a way, this maudlin detail sort of put me off, which is unusual, as I am quite often a sucker for this sort of thing. I suppose I impute my reticence here to the fact that I knew this to be a comic novel, and the juxtaposition of this fact with the author's untimely death rather un-nerved me. Finally, as I went back to work after the Easter break, I took 'A Confederacy of Dunces' off my shelf and popped it in my satchel. Even then, I had no time to read it that week, so I took it out of my bag on Thursday last and stuck it on my bedside table. My girlfriend was away for the weekend, so when I awoke around eight on the morning of the Royal Wedding, utterly disgusted by our nation's bizarre fascination with a balding blue blooded moron marrying an upper-middle class stick insect, I picked the novel off my bedside table and began reading. Soon after, I began laughing out loud. And I kept reading. This is the best comic novel I have ever read, although to call it that does it something of a disservice; it's a burlesque of the entire twentieth century experiment.

Set in New Orleans in the early 1960s, this novel is undoubtedly dominated by its protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly. He is obese, slothful, eccentric, fiercely intelligent and holds the rest of the world in chilly contempt. When we first meet him, he is waiting for his mother outside a department store wearing his customary costume: an enormous plaid shirt, tent-like tweed trousers and a green hunting cap with ear flaps perpetually down to "prevent head colds". He has bought some sheet music and a replacement lute string. His bizarre appearance prompts a hapless police officer to accost him, leading to a picaresque riot in the streets as Ignatius and his mother escape through the chaos to a seedy bar called the Night of Joy, where a few too many beers leads Ignatius' mother to crash her car into a building. The bill for the damage is astronomical, so Irene Reilly's solution is to send her son, who since college has done nothing except scribble invective onto endless pads of paper in his room, out to work. Ignatius, of course, is utterly unsuited to work, not only because of his slothful attittude to, well, everything, but because his ideals and beliefs are thoroughly medieval in character (he subscribes to late-Roman philosopher Boethius' concept of Fortuna, the blind goddess of Fate spinning a wheel to determine our successes and failures). The surreally absurdist turns that Ignatius' attempts at work cause are genuinely hilarious, and it is around these forays into the world of work and around the people involved in Ignatius' street disturbance at the novel's outset that Toole creates the plot.

The sheer scale of this burlesque of life in 1960s New Orleans is so grand that it is in fact a very difficult book to sum up in any kind of pithy fashion. We have the bumbling patrolman who, in arresting an elderly man who stood up for the escaping Ignatius, earns himself the punishment of dressing up in costumes to try and bring in "suspicious characters" from the French quarter. We have the old man, Claude, obsessed with "Communiss" who ends up courting Ignatius' mother, an illiterate drinker who has indulged her collegiate son to the extent that he takes nothing she says seriously. While in the cells, Claude meets Jones, a black vagrant brought in for stealing a packet of cashew nuts, who is then made to get a job at the Night of Joy, the very bar Ignatius and his mother had hidden in. Ignatius works first at Levy Pants, an outdated work clothing wholesalers, as a filing clerk and then as a hotdog vendor, and the people he meets in these work places are also stirred into the plot. Interestingly, a lot of the literature I read is not plot based at all, rather a stream of events and reflections that are not necessarily connected by anything other than the fact that they are the reflections of the same narrator. When I do read third person omniscient plot based novels, I am struck by just how many balls are being juggled, knowing myself as a writer of fiction how difficult this actually is. The way Toole brings the various comedic plot threads together at the end of the novel is wonderful and the ending is one of the most satisfying I have recently read.

New Orleans itself is vividly rendered as a city of vice, iniquity, diversity and absurdity, one of the most complete portraits of a place I have come across in literature. Nothing is safe from Toole's satirical eye: race relations, McCarthy-ism, college education, all get the treatment. I was particularly fond of Myrna Minkoff, a correspondent and college classman of Ignatius from New York, a devotee of Freud and a beatnik, who writes him letters declaring that his experiences are nothing but paranoid fantasies brought on by a lack of sexual intercourse. Though he responds to these letters with rage, their sparring shows that they have a deep mutual respect for each other. Myrna is very much a cartoon parody figure, but such an amusing one that it is hard to criticise Toole for this fact.

I loved this book from the first paragraph. It is a grand parade of ridiculous events caused by one of the most memorable comic protagonists since Falstaff. As Walker Percy notes in his foreword, "it is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing", for he surely would have produced a body of work well worth reading. Sadly, we have only this and 'Neon Bible', written when he was only sixteen. And yet, despite the tragedy of his suicide, the comic genius of this book will continue to be his deserved legacy. A must read.

Devils (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

In the seminal early 2000s comedy series 'Freaks and Geeks', young Sam Weir, set a homework assignment on Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment', remarks to his father that the novel is "really weird, and all the characters have really long names". Like all such gnomic simplifications, this description of Dostoevsky's work certainly contains a grain of truth, but once the Western reader gets over the patronymics, there's a great deal more to discover.

Despite my extremely thorough literary education, I had not actually heard of 'Devils' before. This book first gained my attention in the way so many others have, that is, by looking beautiful on the shelves of Waterstones. Accusations of shallowness be damned, there's nothing like a well designed cover to set the imagination of the reader racing. When I picked this tome up just after Christmas and read the blurb, I was instantly entranced. Revolutionaries running riot in a provincial Russian backwater? Sounded like my type of thing. Soon after, my girlfriend brought it home as a surprise gift. The past two months have been spent worshipping at its altar. This is a truly astonishing work of literature. 

The primary problem with any literature originally written in a foreign tongue is that a great deal is lost in translation. One particular issue with editions of Dostoevsky is that often, the biting social satire and absurdist comedy he is so adept at fall by the wayside. Michael Katz, of the University of Texas, is therefore to be congratulated for endeavouring to embue this new Oxford World's Classics edition with the wit Dostoevsky intended it to possess in the first place. The novel, assumed to be set in the 1860s, starts as a gentle satire of the Liberalism that swept through Russia in the 1840s, primarily through the narrator's observations of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhoevensky, a former Professor of History whose impolitic liberal views got him dismissed from his post twenty years before the beginning of the novel. Following this dismissal, he finds himself the tutor to the son of provincial landowner Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, an arrangement which has lead to Stepan Trofimovich becoming a kept wit on her estate, perfectly comfortable but a man of less consequence than he thinks, an absurdly vain little man living off past glories that were not actually particularly glorious. Stepan Trofimovich is a masterpiece of characterisation, with his self-conscious use of French phrases mixed into his Russian (for example "voyez vous" instead of "do you see") and his bilious attacks of nerves. Although he seems like a harmless innocent, almost a buffoon, it is, Dostoevsky shows us, his liberal ideals which lead inevitably to the warped radicalism of the younger generation. Specifically, it is the son of Stepan Trofimovich, Peter Stepanovich, who causes the chaos that subsequently consumes the town. Liberalism literally gives birth to Radicalism. Similarly, Varvara Petrovna's son Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin is shown to be an amoral black hole of charisma, completely out of touch with his fellow man, unable to take on the challenge of modernising relations between the aristocracy and everyday Russians but also unwilling to join the revolutionary movement as participant or figurehead; he is the ultimate nihilist. Only very slowly does Dostoevsky uncover the rot at the heart of this province, a group of revolutionaries put together and manipulated by Stepanovich. This occurs at a pace slow enough to be gripping but not slow enough to frustrate. Behind the comedy is tragedy, behind the farce is serious political comment.

Indeed, the 'Devils' of the title are the ideas that have torn Russia apart through the Nineteenth Century. Conservatism, Liberalism, Nihilism...all are at fault, as far as Dostoevsky is concerned. The metaphor is based on the scriptural story of the Gardarene Swine, into whom Christ cast the Devil after he had possessed a man. The swine ran into a deep lake and were drowned; the evil spirits destroyed themselves. Many critics have suggested that Dostoevsky intended to explicitly criticise Liberalism and Anarchism with this allusion, but in my view the establishment do not come off any better; the new governor of the province, Von Lembke, is a weak and marginalised figure expertly manipulated by Peter Stepanovich and ultimately humiliated and badly injured in front of the entire town. His wife is similarly disgraced when a literary fete she organises ends in uproar and controversy. Even the Russian Orthodox church is ridiculed, with icons routinely stolen and a hermit priest, Father Tikhon, the agency for a lengthy (but unacted on) confession by Stavrogin. The ultimate themes of the novel are chaos and confusion, in terms of action and in terms of ideas. No-one ever seems to know what they are doing, nor what their philosophy is. In this way, Dostoevsky accurately reflects real life, where idealists and dogmatic types alike constantly contradict themselves in debate.

This novel is a towering achievement. It is not only a fascinatingly complex tragedy of human frailty and vanity, it is also a burlesque of a dizzying array of political and philosophical ideas that is laugh out loud funny. The characters are compelling and moving, the final section a dazzling tour de force that ties up the loose ends that are strewn cavalier style throughout the first two sections. This is a book that everybody should read. A literary education is incomplete until you've read it.