David Mitchell - "Cloud Atlas"

It's tough to begin a review of "Cloud Atlas" since it's only a novel in a technical sense.  Rather than having a single unified plot, it's written as a cycle of six novellas.  Each novella is interrupted in the middle, only to be resumed later: A, B, C, D, E, F, E, D, C, B, A.  Furthermore, each novella is written in a completely different genre from the others. 

This might sound obnoxious, pretentious, or gimmicky, and it would be in the hands of an author without David Mitchell's talent.  But Mitchell is almost infuriatingly gifted.  He manages to pull everything off.  The first part could be Melville.  The third is a straight-up pulp paperback page turner.  Part Five could have been written by Aldous Huxley, or perhaps Philip K. Dick.  At no point does it sound forced or contrived.  It never feels like he ran out of ideas, and is merely filling in the novel's predetermined structure.

"Cloud Atlas" is not a humble novel.  Mitchell shows off quite a bit.  Very few writers can pull off what he did, and he knows it.  The book is thrilling to read, since Mitchell's brilliance is apparent on every page.  Unfortunately, it sometimes feels like Mitchell wrote the book merely to demonstrate his skill.  There's little in the way of continuity between stories, and my attempts to discern a robust underlying theme were not too successful.

I'm willing to let Mitchell show off, though.  He's shown that he can write circles around most other authors -- now I'm curious to see what else he has done with his talent.  I'm looking forward to picking up his other work.