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David Mitchell’s magnificent first novel, Ghostwritten, took the form of 10 apparently unconnected monologues, each set in a different country, whose characters turned out to be linked by fine filaments of cause — a shared sexual partner, a journey on the same train, a meeting on the street. The ways we behave, Mitchell showed us, are often driven by happenstance and unconscious effect, as much as by intent and design. In Cloud Atlas, he has romanced this conceit into a theory of history. History, the novel proposes, exists as an impossibly ductile cable of influence, which human beings experience only as “elastic moments, whose ends disappear into the past and the future”.

The opening section of the book purports to be the Pacific Journal of a traveller named Adam Ewing, and is a brilliant pastiche of an aristocratic early-Victorian epistolary voice — dense with ampersands, capital letters and gentrified indignation. A textual wormhole whooshes us from here to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a caddishly opportunistic young musician, has blagged the job of amanuensis to Vyvyan Ayrs, the self-exiled grandee of English composers. Two other monologues, set in 1975 and the present day, and each subtly connected to their preceding stories, see us through to an unspecified time in the future, where we overhear an eerie cyber-gothic catechism between an archivist from the Ministry of Testaments and a “psycho-genomically altered” fast-food server named Somni-451. Then, after an interlude set even further ahead, the novel retreats in reverse order through its voices, concluding in 1850 with the final half of Ewing’s journal.

The echoic patterning is clearly involved with Mitchell’s sense of history’s intricate repetitiveness and the feedback structures which exist within it. His plot works to the logic of Lorenz’s Law (that butterfly, that storm), whereby an insignificant occurrence in one place or time can assume catastrophic proportions elsewhere. In Mitchell’s hands, this is also how fictional language works: a metaphor in one section acts as a stem-cell out of which a whole story is grown in another, and motifs recur — concentration camps, slave-masters, mutilation — which link up, like diodes flashing their alarm.

Cloud Atlas is a novel that is unafraid to provide its own mottoes. It is about “the history of the struggle against corpocracy”, and how “the will to power . . . sparks war”, and the moral warning it delivers is that “a purely predatory world shall itself”. In its cryptic ways, this is a strongly political book. Mitchell grimly registers the human will to power that, he suggests, can only ever be at best mitigated, and never eliminated, by a cautious liberalism.

The way Mitchell inhabits the different voices of the novel is close to miraculous. Each character is given a language at once quirky and consistent. Frobisher, for instance, is all young-man impetuosity and archness, with an ear always open for the applause of his reader (“Ostend is tapioca greys and stained browns. The locomotive strained like a gouty proctor on the pot before heaving itself into motion”). “Ventriloquism” is the term usually employed to praise such stylistic versatility, but “speaking in tongues” catches more fully at Mitchell’s radical gift — at his astonishing capacity not to be himself. No other British novelist, to my mind, combines such a darkly futuristic intelligence with such polyphonic ease.

The flipside to this extreme imaginative fluency, of course, is not knowing when to stop. And Cloud Atlas is, simply, too long. Or, rather, too big. Like some vast cumulonimbus, it explodes out of itself into innumerable bosses and minarets. It is (to borrow one of Robert Frobisher’s words) too heavily “storiated”. The danger with novels that have so many tales to tell, of course, is that they end up telling no one tale well enough; at times, Cloud Atlas becomes so concerned with its boisterous local effect that it forgets its larger movements. Mitchell’s answer to this criticism might be that he is writing a new type of novel, one that doesn’t work to the same laws of momentum as the old forms. Such is his imaginative talent, and so fascinating are the connections revealed in his Cloud Atlas, that one is almost prepared to accept this explanation.

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