As Mitchell has Robert Frobisher, 1930s itinerant opportunist and composer, write (of the 'Cloud Atlas Sextet' that he is composing):
Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet' for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and colour. In the 1st set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the 2nd, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late, but it's the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep, even if J. is in my bed. She should understand, the artist lives in two worlds.
Each of the six narratives making up the Russian doll structure of Cloud Atlas is convincing and extremely readable - they're stories in their own right, not simply exercises in style or concept - which is no mean feat given the diversity of voices, genres and settings they collectively embody. The plots move along at a cracking pace, all equally interestingly. And the whole is knit together by its depiction with the effects of the Nietzschean will to power as particularly manifested through colonialism, market capitalism and industrialisation/technological development, the imagining taking place both retrospectively (via 'historical' settings) and prospectively (in the sci-fi chapters), as well as by lots of subtle details connecting the various threads. And there's an unobtrusive concern with art and language, too - just as with the placing of the pivotal Crommelynck chapter at the dead centre of Black Swan Green.
