The wrong trowzers get lost in time

David Mitchell

Sceptre, 16.99

DAVID Mitchell was one of the less controversial inclusions in Granta’s ‘best young British novelists’ last year. Shortlisted for the Booker for his second novel number9dream, the 35-year-old is a rising star whose new novel, Cloud Atlas, comes laden with advance praise. "There won’t be a bigger, bolder novel this year," the jacket declares. At more than 500 pages its size is undeniable, and the book’s multi-layered structure is certainly bold. The question is whether its stylistic virtuosity is supported by any real substance, or else hides a lack of it.

The book begins on a far-away island, where the narrator sees "a white man, his trowzers & Pea-jacket rolled up, sporting a kempt beard & an outsized Beaver". We are somewhere in history - but where, exactly?

Historical pastiche is a hard act. Peter Carey has done it brilliantly in books such as Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang, and it is this sort of comparison that Mitchell immediately invites. He goes further, though. Cloud Atlas is built from six stories, each a pastiche of a different sort. From the island we go to a composer in 1930s Belgium; then to an American nuclear power station where an investigative journalist rumbles a hideous conspiracy. A farce about a present-day vanity publisher follows, taking us into two stories set in dystopian futures - one of them a hi-tech world of zombified clones, the other a post-apocalyptic stone age.

The first five stories each break off in mid flight, and in the second half of the book we get their conclusions, in reverse order, taking us backwards in time until we eventually wind up again with the narrator of the first.

Multiple pastiche is what James Joyce did in Ulysses, where each chapter is in a different style. More recently, Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller consisted of beginnings of assorted books. Mitchell’s work, however, has more in common with Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton or Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 Chapters. As with them, one strongly suspects that Cloud Atlas is really a bunch of unrelated short stories that have been spliced and lightly fiddled with in order to make them look like a novel. Scratch the surface and the virtuoso style peels away to reveal little underneath.

Perplexed by the olde-worlde-speak of the first chapter, I did a quick internet search for ‘trowzers’. I found it in no text later than the mid-18th century, confirming the overall impression that the speaker belongs, if anything, to the age of Boswell.

It therefore comes as a shock to find out, eventually, that we are in 1850. It seems that Melville is the source for Mitchell’s tale of South Sea islanders - we later get explicit mention of Typee and ‘Benito Cereno’ (not to mention a whale sighting). But as well as those anachronistic "trowzers", we also get the narrator speaking of "entropy" - a word coined in 1865.

Such nit-picking would be unnecessary if the story itself were good enough to focus the reader’s attention away from the language in which it is couched. Yet Mitchell’s pastiche - unlike, say, Carey’s - fails to achieve this.

The second story is the book’s strongest, and clearly owes much to the real-life composer Frederick Delius. We have a blind musician taking on a young sighted copyist who is himself an aspiring composer. Edward Elgar visits (just as he visited Delius), providing an amusing cameo. Again, though, the language does not always stand up to scrutiny. Would a musician really describe a group of children as "ill-tuned harpsichord allegretti"?

From historical pastiche we move to thriller writing. The power-plant story has the same vagueness of time as the island one; we guess 1970s, until a mention of the Betty Ford Clinic (founded 1982) places us a decade later. But no, it is another case of bad entropy - we really are supposedly in 1975, during husband Gerald’s term of office. Reporter Luisa Rey unearths dodgy doings at the new plant, whose top physicist has gone Awol and winds up dead. He, it transpires, was formerly the friend of the composer’s copyist, who in turn discovered the journal describing the South Sea islanders while working for the composer. Such tangled connections are how all this book’s stories mesh: as found texts, remembered movies and gnomic cross-references.

These links are pleasantly teasing when they first appear, but ultimately are unable to sustain the weight placed upon them. Instead of grand synthesis we get an increasingly frantic search for meaningful connection between stories that have no true common ground.

The fourth strand sees a publisher on the run from thugs, finding himself mistakenly incarcerated in an old people’s care home. It is a lightweight, jolly romp, reminiscent of Jonathan Coe, and like all the stories in Cloud Atlas it works well at the smallest scale, in its observation of detail, its sheer panache. At the larger scale, it fails like the others.

Good beginnings are far easier to write than good endings, and this book contains six good beginnings to stories that all end weakly and implausibly, when we eventually get round to their reprise.

Murders, suicides, sudden coincidences and escapes of the "one leap and she was free" variety are the norm. It is not clear in each case whether these forced climaxes are deliberately aping their chosen genre or merely surrendering to its inherent limitations.

The two science fiction stories at the book’s centre are easily the most soporific section, though paradoxically, the sense of narrative unity is strongest here, in that both stories are a working out of a simple goodies-versus-baddies scenario - the goodies being respectively colonial underdogs in a primitivised Hawaii, and oppressed slaves in a genetically modified Korea. Readers who enjoyed the more outlandish sections of number9dream will not be disappointed by these.

We then rewind through the previous stories, expecting everything to come together with a bang, but instead seeing each tale peter out in a whimper. The book’s big messages are equally disappointing. "Is it better to be savage ’n to be civ’lized?" one character asks, to which the pat answer is, "ev’ry human is both, yay". The episode in the old people’s home ends with the uplifting thought, "it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation" - a grand way of saying "you’re as old as you feel".

Mitchell shows himself in Cloud Atlas to be a highly gifted stylist and a writer of considerable intelligence and imagination. It is a pity that his baggy monster of a book is so much less than the sum of its parts, since many of those parts are truly excellent. If he can learn to write endings that live up to his beginnings, his promise might be fulfilled. Who knows, he might then graduate from being a ‘best young novelist’ to being quite simply one of the best.

• Andrew Crumey is Scotland on Sunday’s literary editor