World Book Night: Cloud Atlas

By this point I figure that you're a reader. Sure there will probably be people you've hit the 'next blog' link and arrived here by chance, and there are doubtless some Facebook friends glancing at the first paragraph and stopping, but if you get much further you read books.
That means you probably know what World Book Night is, but for anyone who's missed it, it's a reading promotion based about the idea that 20,000 people will be giving books away to friends, family, perfect strangers.
Sounded cool. So I signed up for it. Then I realised that it was the same night as Chris and Sandra's delightful wedding. So I've basically fluffed the whole concept.
The idea was that everything would be happening on the same night. You'd have bashes in libraries, people holding parties at home to explain their love of a book, people wandeing round pubs pushing books at God knows who.
Except I am at a wedding party, watching couples dance, and fighting the urge to drink so much subsidised Landlord that I won't be able to drive home tomorrow. I have given a copy of the book to the groom, and may give some out at breakfast tomorrow, but as far as the book frenzy goes, I'm not getting it right.
The book I chose to give away was Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Not the one from Mitchell & Webb. And for what it's worth, if you're remotely interested in the book, you might want to stop reading real soon. It's one of those books where the structure is as important, perhaps more important, than the plot, and while there are reviewers clever enough to write about such works without blowing the big reveals, I have no such pretentions.
So where was I? Instead of holding on to all the books so that icoyld give them to people at a party where modern literary novels were the last thing on their mind, I've been naughtlily handing them out for several days now. I guess I have about 20 left as I write. So if you want one let me know. Except that I already advised you to stop reading.
Potential readers gone now? Or at least anyone still here fully aware of the likelihood of spoilers? OK.
Cloud Atlas is one of those strange books that isn't quite a novel. It's not a collection of short stories either, but something between the two, that I don't quite have the language to explain.
The conciet is that there are a series of separate narratives, in very different styles embedded one within the other. There's a story about an anguished American in the South Seas in the 1800s, only to have his story cut off in the middle of a sentence, to be replaced by the story of a dissolute composer in the 1920s, who at one point finds a particular story about the South Seas in a library, and is inspired to write the mcguffin of the LA detective story. Eventually the narratives reverse their flow and each unpacks into the next, before all six reach their own conclusions.
Normally I find books like this annoying. I like characters, plots, that kind of thing. When the structure becomes clever-clever it's often a sign that the writer is just showing off, and who wants that?
Cloud Atlas manages to overcome me. At least in part this is because the writing is so damn good. I would read almost any of the stories if they were blown up into novels in their own right. Well perhaps not the first, which suffered from a well written, but whiney, protagonist, but on the whole the stories would stand up perfectly well if they were presented as distinct novellas. But that would pretty much miss the whole point. The strength of Cloud Atlas is the way that each story sets up it's sucessor, and only really makes sense when completed in the light of the revelations of the sucessor become predecessor as the book unfolds.
It's a masterful work, nominated for the Booker, and, given that I have no memory of what won that year, one that I think should have scooped the prize.
I can't help but wonder if the science fiction elements in the middle stories deterred the judges. This may become a bit of a theme.