Oh, how times have changed. At least, real estate developers are doing their damndest to see that they do. This fall, the $42 million penthouse of 18 Gramercy Park went into contract—a downtown record. And now, an ultra-luxe condo development at 21 East 26th Street is looking to draw the Louboutin-heeled to Gramercy’s northern neighbor.

The Whitman, as the handsome brick and limestone manse is to be known, will have three full-floor residences, priced at $10 million, $10.25 million and $10.5 million (the cost increases incrementally as the floors go up), and a 6,540-square-foot duplex penthouse. The penthouse comes with three terraces (totaling 3,000 square feet),  a $22.5 million price tag and the ultimate luxury—27,500-square-feet of air rights.  Enough to build another mansion on top, or to sell to Madison Square Park’s next luxury-minded condo developer.

“One of the things that attracted me to this building is that there are so few parks, especially South-facing buildings parks,” said developer David Mitchell of Mitchell Holdings LLC, whom The Observer met when we toured the still under-construction building on Friday morning (it is expected to be completed by early Spring).

Mitchell Holdings bought the 1924 building—a former showroom— from the plumber’s union for a mere $13 million in 2011. Mr. Mitchell gestured out the big windows to the park beyond, noting that the living room in which we stood might not look particularly large, but it was actually 1,500 square feet.

“You can literally watch your kids play in the playground. It’s right there,” said Melanie Lazenby, the Douglas Elliman broker who is brokering the project with colleague Dina Lewis.

Ms. Lazenby noted that the decision to go with floor-through residences of nearly 5,000 square feet was motivated by the demand for huge homes downtown, where families with children increasingly want to live, especially now that Avenues has opened.

At $2,129 to $3,440 a square foot, that space does not come cheap, although it will come a less dear than 18 Gramercy, where prices range from $3,494 to $6,636 per square foot. The architect, Jeffrey Cole, doesn’t have A.M. Stern clout, but he and the developers have paired palatial apartments with high-end finishes, a combination that reliably fetches princely sums: kitchens by Arclinea, wide plank rift oak floors (made with only the choicest cuts of wood to avoid unsightly knots) and a different variety of high-end stone in every bathroom.

The apartments are long and narrow, with all southern-facing living rooms looking out onto the park. The master bedrooms are at the opposite end, facing 27th Street; the other bedrooms arrayed along the Western wall of the building, looking out onto a dim, narrow courtyard between the Whitman and its next door neighbor, which houses Vera Wang’s studio. So while those bedrooms certainly won’t be sun-flooded, at least residents will be apprised of the latest bridal fashions. (And the latest high-end food fads: Daniel Humm's ever-evolving Eleven Madison Park is right down the street.)

Can Madison Square Park and buildings like the Whitman ever challenge the Park of all Parks and the elegant limestone behemoths that line it? In today's heady luxury market, the question seems besides the point. There are more than enough wealthy buyers to go around and they're willing to spend lavishly on apartments that abut parks and rivers, whether they're on Fifth Avenue or W. 26th Street, Sutton Place or Riverside Boulevard.

kvelsey@observer.com

Jim Broadbent and Hanks in Cloud Atlas. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Almost three hours long, a lugubrious sludge of mud soup called Cloud Atlas deserves a limp nod for pure guts, I suppose, but what I’d really like to do is burn it. Based on a genre-switching, era-hopping, style-abusing, tempo-thumping novel by David Mitchell that everyone has always labeled “unfilmable,” the labyrinthine, ridiculously bloated—$100-million, anybody?—head-scratcher of a movie is the mess that proves it.

Coming at us in sections like an exploding garbage truck, this adaptation is a single film that weaves an incomprehensible literary gumbo of unrelated stories in multiple time frames over a span of 500 years. Whew! In spite of the publicity poop about how six narratives are linked by the connective tissue of man’s relationship to man, nothing really intersects—except in preposterous threads only a nuclear physicist could formulate on both sides of an equation. All you can do while you puzzle over it like a board game is try to figure out which member of the hammy all-star ensemble, unrecognizable in lurid makeup, wigs, period costumes and rubber prostheses, is playing which man—or woman—while the viewer-unfriendly screenplay squirts and splatters all over the place. Characters fade into and out of past, present and future centuries with the grace of a battering ram. They include Tom Hanks, in his worst performance since Joe Versus the Volcano, as a crooked doctor who looks like Benjamin Franklin on the Pacific Ocean in 1849; a balding cockney skinhead who becomes a pop celebrity by throwing a critic off the roof of a literary party in 2012, and a dark-skinned one-eyed native goat-herder (you can’t make up this stuff) in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, in 2346, babbling away in a language that hasn’t been invented yet. Ben Whishaw is a gay composer in 1930s England who writes about his own murder in a diary; Halle Berry plays one of the last survivors of a lost civilization in 2346 as well as a crusading journalist in 1973 San Francisco, trapped in a stalled elevator in the middle of a power outage, whose life is endangered when she gets a scoop on a nuclear reactor meltdown, and then saved by the lover Whishaw wrote to in his lost journals back in 1936; and the marvelous Jim Sturgess is a robot warrior from a futuristic planet called New Seoul in 2144 who is persecuted for falling in love with a sexy, socially outlawed, genetically cloned slave. Susan Sarandon plays a medicine man. Faring best of all is Hugo Weaving, as a vicious Nurse Ratched wreaking havoc on a senile publisher in a nursing home, played by Jim Broadbent. Mr. Weaving has had plenty of experience. He was one of the drag queens in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. There’s more, but I hesitate to make you feel as tortured reading about it as I am telling you about it.

The book wove the various stories into each other like a lap dissolve, relating each sequence as it was being read by the person in the next chapter. In the movie, the jumble of aborted narratives crash and thrash like carnival bumper cars, fragmented and pointlessly failing to find a common theme. “Our lives are not our own—from womb to tomb, we are bound to others,” drones the narration, but as co-written and co-directed by Germany’s Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski, who created the abominable Matrix trilogy, the movie is a trash heap of rubber noses and implausible high school accents that give new meaning to the word “pretentious.” The actors are a game lot, but they should have stayed in bed. It’s ambitious and massive and fascinating to watch, like a public hanging. The sets, especially in the futuristic sci-fi thriller section, are inventive, and the real star is editor Alexander Berner (Resident Evil) for cobbling it all together. But the effect of so many characters and so many unsatisfactory plotlines is curiously bland and inconsequential. At the end of nearly three hours of metaphysical hocus pocus destined to attract the smallest number of paying filmgoers imaginable, you don’t know whether to laugh, boo or write career eulogies for all involved. I mean, Hugh Grant as a bloodthirsty cannibal? The prosecution rests.

rreed@observer.com

CLOUD ATLAS

Running Time 172 minutes

Written and Directed by Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski

Starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Hugh Grant

1/4

Peter Carey — one of the two people to have won the award twice — still has a chance to become the first to win a third Booker. 

The winner will be announced Oct. 7. Place your bets!

Here's the full shortlist:

Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue Room (Picador - Pan Macmillan)

Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books - Grove Atlantic)

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy The Long Song (Headline Review - Headline Publishing Group)

Tom McCarthy C (Jonathan Cape - Random House)

Mitchell announced news that he claimed he hadn't even yet shared with his publisher: that Jacob de Zoet will be followed by two more books dealing with the theme of immortality and delving further into the realm of speculative fiction.

Mitchell's publisher, Random House, seems less fond of speculation.

"We have no official comment about David's plans for his upcoming novels," a rep told Capital in an email. "He simply likes dropping hints at readings."

Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Random House
Page Count: 496
Pages Read: 81

Does It Work? Mitchell knows how well he writes, and he is good enough to hold himself back. He lets his dialogue carry the story, and restricts descriptions to a few lines here and there—the claustrophobic, artificial island where the Dutch live and work is made vivid by his sharp jabs. This is a lovely novel.

Best Moment So Far: Jacob meets his new flame when they both find themselves chasing an ape (really) that has stolen an amputated leg from an operating room. (Really.) The ape clambers to a high shelf, "places the leg at his side, grips his rhubarb-pink penis, and twangs it like a harpist in a madhouse, cackling through bared teeth." When Jacob reaches for it, he is greeted by "a warm and liquid whiplash, smelling of roast beef." Yuck!

Odds We'll Finish It: 3/1. Nothing stands in our way but the novel's length and the oppressive humidity of June in New York. But we shall likely press on, if only because we've been told the later chapters contain ninjas. 

Highly Niggling Complaint: In an otherwise amusing passage of 18th-century medical blather, a learned surgeon refers to Jacob's intestines as "caverns measureless to man." It is an almost-too-cute smartypants allusion to Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," which would work better if that poem hadn't been published 18 years after the novel takes place. Get with it, Mitchell!

I swallowed whole his earlier fictions (especially the magnificent Cloud Atlas), happily suspending disbelief even when Mr. Mitchell was inventing a primeval future in Hawaii; an American notary, circa 1849, traversing the South Pacific; or a scurrilous bisexual composer falling suicidally in love with a haughty teenage girl in Belgium in 1931. Why should I doubt Mr. Mitchell’s ability to make up a story just because that story could, for once, plausibly be his own? In short, having hoped that Mr. Mitchell would write less defiantly artificial fiction—that he would abandon the virtuoso exploration of exotica—I’m now going to hold him to the high standard of his earlier work and demand that his portrait of middle England be equally imaginative, equally convincing and equally thrilling.

It almost is.

Black Swan Green stands on three legs: a time, a place and a voice. The first two are rock solid; the third wobbles.

The voice belongs to Jason Taylor, who lives in Kingfisher Meadows, a new development tacked onto the Worcestershire village of Black Swan Green (“There aren’t even any white swans there …. It’s sort of a local joke”).

Jason gives us a guided tour of his fraught 13th year. He’s being bullied at school because he stammers; the girl he’s got a crush on is way beyond his reach; and his parents’ marriage is inching inexorably towards collapse. The portrait of the parents is clear-eyed perfection, as are the scenes of schoolyard brutality and the surges of unfocused adolescent yearning. All these narrative strands are dramatized in quick, compelling vignettes. (Mr. Mitchell is addicted to tidy episodic structures, in this case 13 monthly installments, each a self-contained chapter, beginning in January 1982 and ending in January 1983.)

Details that fix the year precisely (Connors vs. McEnroe at Wimbledon, Kramer vs. Kramer airing on television) are scattered liberally, often delightfully, but Mr. Mitchell is particularly nimble when it comes to weaving the relevant geopolitical facts of 1982—the Cold War, the Falklands War—into the fabric of young Jason’s life. “Mrs. Thatcher was on TV yesterday talking to a bunch of schoolkids about Cruise Missiles. ‘The only way to stop a playground bully,’ she said … ‘is to show the bully that if he thumps you, then you can jolly well thump him back a lot harder!’” Jason, who knows a thing or two about playground bullies, is unimpressed by the concept of deterrence.

In May, while his parents bicker, the Argentineans sink British warships in the cold South Atlantic. To block out the septic atmosphere of family dinners, Jason plays with his dessert, dreaming of a Falklands triumph: “I bravely led our lads yomping over custard snow to ultimate victory in Port Stanley.”

Like your average teenager, Jason eavesdrops, carelessly breaks his most valuable possessions, pulls pranks to impress his schoolmates, displays a healthy contempt for his older sister and—if he can get away with it—bends his parents’ petty rules. He’s not a goody-goody, but he’s too fundamentally virtuous, too honest with himself. How many 13-year-olds are this sensibly self-aware? “Picked-on kids act invisible to reduce the chances of being noticed and picked on. Stammerers act invisible to reduce the chances of being made to say something we can’t. Kids whose parents argue act invisible in case we trigger another skirmish. The Triple Invisible Boy, that’s Jason Taylor. Even I don’t see the real Jason Taylor much these days.” His heart-of-gold truthfulness allows a trickle of too-sweet sentimentality to seep in.

That’s not the only lapse. In July, Jason pays a visit to Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck (a character imported from Cloud Atlas), who has rented, improbably, the old vicarage at Black Swan Green. A Belgian aristocrat with a dizzying bohemian past—she’s rubbed elbows with Charlie Chaplin and perhaps other body parts with “that Andalusian goat, Picasso”—Madame Crommelynck gives Jason a lesson in aesthetics. She imposes her critique of the poems he’s published—as “Eliot Bolivar”—in the parish magazine: “Beauty is not excellence,” she thunders. “Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue.” But here comes the inevitable paradox: “If an art is true, if an art is free of falseness, it is, a priori, beautiful.” Too bad that this chapter is the only one in the novel that rings false.

And speaking of aesthetics—is it to avoid the distraction of merely cosmetic beauty that Mr. Mitchell has crowded Jason’s prose with thickets of apostrophes? Here’s a lyrical snippet worthy of Wallace Stevens that he scrunches up with a contraction:

“Woods in winter’re brittle places.

“Your mind flits from twig to twig.”

And here’s a casual poke at Keats and his famous “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”: “Autumn’s turning miserable, rotting and foggy.”

DAVID MITCHELL IS PROBABLY THE MOST exciting English novelist at work today, and most of Black Swan Green is a delight to read—deft, playful, perceptive. Which means that the heavy passages, the ones freighted with significance, sag more noticeably. Consider, for example, this leaden sic transit summation from our barely pubescent narrator:

“The world won’t leave things be. It’s always injecting endings into beginnings. Leaves tweezer themselves from these weeping willows. Leaves fall into the lake and dissolve into slime. Where’s the sense in that? … The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making.

“But who says the world has to make sense?”

What’s gone wrong here? I suspect that the daredevil David Mitchell, author of stratospherically brilliant and original novels, lost his nerve when it came to the humble task of recording an ordinary coming of age against the backdrop of a humdrum village in Maggie Thatcher’s England. So he pumped up the voice: Unwilling to trust that the story of 13-year-old Jason Taylor’s time and place could hold our attention, he allowed his hero to force the message, to push at us polished nuggets of wisdom. Ignore them and you’ll find plenty left over that’s blessedly free of falseness.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

If you have a mind to console yourself with fiction, next week you’ll be able to immerse yourself in The Rules of Perspective (Henry Holt), Adam Thorpe’s thoroughly engrossing novel about a provincial German art museum firebombed in April of 1945, just weeks before the Nazi surrender. (Mr. Thorpe’s first novel, published 14 years ago, was the remarkable Ulverton.) If you’re willing to wait, and don’t mind painfully sharp barbs, the witty, prodigiously observant George Saunders’ new collection of stories, In Persuasion Nation, is due out from Riverhead in mid-April. Also in April comes a new novel, Black Swan Green (Random House) by David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten, two of the best novels published in the last decade.

Messrs. Thorpe, Saunders and Mitchell are not yet household names. If you’re more comfortable with the tried and true, how about Gay Talese’s mammoth memoir, A Writer’s Life? Knopf will be publishing it on April 25. And just a week or so later, Harcourt will publish Let Me Finish, an elegant memoir by the venerable New Yorker editor and writer Roger Angell.

Less venerable, but also on the staff of The New Yorker, the habitually provocative Caitlin Flanagan is sure to stir up more controversy in mid-April with To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife (Little, Brown). Also tart, despite the otherwise apt title, is Rich Cohen’s Sweet and Low, the story of the Sweet’N Low company, which Mr. Cohen’s grandfather founded in Brooklyn 50 years ago.

Fifty years ago …. If Good Night, and Good Luck whetted your appetite for tales of the Red Scare, try Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy (Harcourt) by former New York Times reporter Tom Wicker. And that should put you in the mood for what may be the most important nonfiction book of the season, James Carroll’s House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, which Houghton Mifflin will publish in early May. A big book (700 pages), meticulously researched, on a topic Mr. Carroll knows well (his father worked in the Pentagon), it aims at the heart of an institution that is for most of us a frightening mystery.

At the other end of the spectrum, coming in mid-April, is Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid (Doubleday), another facile contribution by the formerly anonymous pundit so many people love to hate, Joe Klein.

To counteract our self-absorption (ever try to count the number of book titles that wave the word “America”?), please make room for two novels in translation: in April, Seeing (Harcourt), by the Nobel Prize winner José Saramago; and in May, The Possibility of an Island, by the incendiary Frenchman Michel Houellebecq (Knopf).

Some writers are always in season. Philip Roth has a short new novel coming out in early May, Everyman (Houghton Mifflin)—same old terrain, same ever-astonishing mastery. Also in early May: Anne Tyler’s Digging to America (Knopf). In early June, John Updike is back with his 22nd novel, Terrorist (Knopf)—yes, it’s topical: The protagonist’s name is Ahmad, he lives in New Jersey, and he has violence on his mind. And last but hardly least, also in June, the wise and wonderful Cynthia Ozick will publish her fifth collection of essays, The Din in the Head (Houghton Mifflin).

—Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

If you have a mind to console yourself with fiction, next week you’ll be able to immerse yourself in The Rules of Perspective (Henry Holt), Adam Thorpe’s thoroughly engrossing novel about a provincial German art museum firebombed in April of 1945, just weeks before the Nazi surrender. (Mr. Thorpe’s first novel, published 14 years ago, was the remarkable Ulverton.) If you’re willing to wait, and don’t mind painfully sharp barbs, the witty, prodigiously observant George Saunders’ new collection of stories, In Persuasion Nation, is due out from Riverhead in mid-April. Also in April comes a new novel, Black Swan Green (Random House) by David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten, two of the best novels published in the last decade.

Messrs. Thorpe, Saunders and Mitchell are not yet household names. If you’re more comfortable with the tried and true, how about Gay Talese’s mammoth memoir, A Writer’s Life? Knopf will be publishing it on April 25. And just a week or so later, Harcourt will publish Let Me Finish, an elegant memoir by the venerable New Yorker editor and writer Roger Angell.

Less venerable, but also on the staff of The New Yorker, the habitually provocative Caitlin Flanagan is sure to stir up more controversy in mid-April with To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife (Little, Brown). Also tart, despite the otherwise apt title, is Rich Cohen’s Sweet and Low, the story of the Sweet’N Low company, which Mr. Cohen’s grandfather founded in Brooklyn 50 years ago.

Fifty years ago …. If Good Night, and Good Luck whetted your appetite for tales of the Red Scare, try Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy (Harcourt) by former New York Times reporter Tom Wicker. And that should put you in the mood for what may be the most important nonfiction book of the season, James Carroll’s House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, which Houghton Mifflin will publish in early May. A big book (700 pages), meticulously researched, on a topic Mr. Carroll knows well (his father worked in the Pentagon), it aims at the heart of an institution that is for most of us a frightening mystery.

At the other end of the spectrum, coming in mid-April, is Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid (Doubleday), another facile contribution by the formerly anonymous pundit so many people love to hate, Joe Klein.

To counteract our self-absorption (ever try to count the number of book titles that wave the word “America”?), please make room for two novels in translation: in April, Seeing (Harcourt), by the Nobel Prize winner José Saramago; and in May, The Possibility of an Island, by the incendiary Frenchman Michel Houellebecq (Knopf).

Some writers are always in season. Philip Roth has a short new novel coming out in early May, Everyman (Houghton Mifflin)—same old terrain, same ever-astonishing mastery. Also in early May: Anne Tyler’s Digging to America (Knopf). In early June, John Updike is back with his 22nd novel, Terrorist (Knopf)—yes, it’s topical: The protagonist’s name is Ahmad, he lives in New Jersey, and he has violence on his mind. And last but hardly least, also in June, the wise and wonderful Cynthia Ozick will publish her fifth collection of essays, The Din in the Head (Houghton Mifflin).

—Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

Hugely entertaining and vastly ambitious, David Mitchell's third novel, Cloud Atlas , is tailor-made for a reader with eclectic tastes. "Tailor-made" is meant to evoke the image of a meticulous craftsman hand-fashioning something rare and beautiful out of boldly patterned material-imagine big shears cutting out curious shapes, patient adjustments to get the fit just right, eye-straining needle work. "Eclectic," in this case, isn't about subtle variations in style; not satisfied with one fabric, this tailor insists on motley, makes kaleidoscopic clothes, works with silk and sackcloth, Mylar and skins.

Mr. Mitchell tells six wildly different stories in 11 chapters. Each of the first five stories is interrupted in mid-flow-a series of abrupt, disorienting truncations. After the sixth story, which is left intact, the other five stories resume one by one, in reverse order, so that the last chapter picks up the story begun in the first chapter. The intricate symmetry of this narrative pattern is somewhat daunting; it's bound to put off many readers. One of Mr. Mitchell's narrators provides a template for swift dismissal: "As an experienced editor," he sniffs, "I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory."

I hope Cloud Atlas will be spared knee-jerk reaction against "tricksy devices," and not merely because Mr. Mitchell is a prodigiously talented writer. The book works : The elaborate structure enacts a theory of history that's part of the novel's core meaning; the stop-and-go narrative reveals itself as a continuous cycle; the separate stories achieve a weird unity; and what seemed at first mere cleverness begins to look like wisdom.

Mr. Mitchell is always weighing the progress and promise of civilization against its failures. He begins by plunging us into the mid-19th-century Pacific journal of Adam Ewing, an American notary from San Francisco who has traveled to New South Wales on business and who finds himself on the Chatham Islands waiting for the repair of the ship that's taking him, via Hawaii, back to his hometown-which the gold rush of 1849 is in the process of transforming. Adam is pious and earnest and naïve, full of Yankee hopefulness about the virtues of democracy and the inevitable triumph of Christian values. His adventures, told in antiquated prose modeled on Melville and Richard Henry Dana Jr., bring him into contact with two primitive tribes: the warlike Maori-who are cannibals-and the peaceful, doomed Moriori, who are enslaved by the Maori. We also encounter an English "gentleman," a surgeon whose motto, Adam learns too late, is "The weak are meat the strong do eat." Just as we're getting used to our narrator's somewhat doltish goodness, just as we're beginning to notice a spark of intelligence beneath the cloak of righteousness, the story breaks off in mid-sentence.

And suddenly we're reading the letters of Robert Frobisher, a fabulously cultivated young Englishman, the product of Eton and Cambridge, a composer who's brilliant, promiscuously bisexual, unstable and utterly unscrupulous. The year is 1931, and Robert-broke, disinherited by his father, pursued by creditors and temperamentally unsuited to any work except making music-gambles on a trip to Belgium. Not far from Bruges, in a turreted château that "stinks of mushroom and mold," he talks his way into a job as amanuensis to the celebrated Vyvyan Ayrs, a reclusive English composer suffering from tertiary syphilis. It's a marvelously rich atmosphere. Elgar, visiting Bruges, drops in for tea. Robert's older brother, who died in the trenches of World War I, is buried somewhere nearby, under a headstone marked "KNOWN UNTO GOD." Here's civilization at its best and worst: a cad creating symphonic works with a syphilitic, Nietzsche-spouting composer, living and breathing music in crumbling bourgeois splendor in a country recently devastated by one war and soon to be overrun by another. But again-no sooner have we grown comfortable with this delightfully decadent ambiance than we're yanked away ….

To Buenas Yerbas, Calif., summer of 1975: A young reporter is investigating a lethally corrupt power company that has built a radically unsafe nuclear reactor. Then on to present-day London, where a vanity-press publisher who likes to quote Gibbon scores an unlikely best-seller and soon thereafter finds himself literally imprisoned in a old-folks' home in the drear North.

And then boldly into the future, sometime after the "Saudi Arabian Revolution" and "the disastrous Pentecostalist Coup of North America" and "the Skirmishes." This, the last of the truncated stories, is set on the Korean peninsula in a rigidly hierarchical, ultra-capitalist state, a "corpocracy" managed for the benefit of "purebloods" and sustained by the labor of "fabricants"-genetically engineered or "genomed" slaves. (Echoes here of Philip K. Dick, and also of the 1973 sci-fi classic Soylent Green ).

For the fulcrum story, the pivot at the center of the novel, Mr. Mitchell invents a distant future that mirrors our distant past. Set long after "the Fall," in Hawaii, where only crumbling traces remain of the "Civ'lize Days" and the "Old Uns" who had the "Smart," this last story is packed with adventure, an old man's yarn about the destruction of a primitive but peaceful tribe: When he was still young, his people were slaughtered and enslaved by their warlike neighbors. It's the Maori and the Moriori all over again-the end of civilization brings us back to its beginnings.

There are many ingenious threads connecting the six stories and explaining the sudden truncations. For example, in an alcove of books in his room in the château in Belgium, Robert Frobisher finds a "dismembered volume"-one half of Adam Ewing's journal; much later, he discovers the other half wedged under the leg of his bed. And Robert's lush letters were sent to a character who turns up 44 years later in Buenas Yerbas, on the run from ruthless hired assassins. But the links, though many, are too serendipitous and too tenuous to bind the parts into a whole. Imagine yoking Melville, Evelyn Waugh and John D. MacDonald.

All six stories insist on their integrity. The two futuristic tales are even told in dialect (two different dialects, each one appropriate and convincing), a sci-fi tradition that stretches back to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange . The chapters set in California and England have a loose, contemporary feel: The former has pulp-fiction reverb ("The butt of the gun arrives in his palm. His finger enters a loop of steel, and a flare of clarity illuminates his purpose"); the latter reads like particularly relaxed Martin Amis satire.

Running through each of the chapters like an animating trickle of electricity is a thought best summed up from the post-apocalyptic perspective: "[H]uman hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it, too." Hunger appears in many guises, from cannibalism (a recurring motif) to a storyteller's barter: "so gimme some mutton an' I'll tell you 'bout our first meeting. A fat joocesome slice, nay, none o' your burnt wafery off'rin's." The fact that we're animals who must feed and digest disgusts a suicidal Robert Frobisher: "People are obscenities. Would rather be music than a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function."

But of course the urge to make music, to become music, is also a hunger. Robert eventually pours his life into the composition of his Cloud Atlas Sextet , which-you guessed it-sounds a lot like Mr. Mitchell's novel: Each solo has "its own language of key, scale, and color" and there's a schedule of strategic interruptions. "Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished," Robert writes, "but it's the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep." Despite his obsession, he scoffs at the idea of making art for the greater glory civilization: "How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner."

A surfeit of narrative ingenuity, and a message to boot! Is Cloud Atlas too cerebral? Is there room in it for the beating heart of every beloved novel: people we recognize? Yes, indeed. I'm amazed by the sheer energy Mr. Mitchell has invested in imagining the interior lives of his half-dozen principal characters. An ailing Adam Ewing on the cusp of disillusion looks out over the Pacific and declares, "The color of monotony is blue." Centuries later, Sonmi-451, a fabricant coming to grips with her special destiny and mesmerized by her first sight of the ocean, says, "All the woe of the words 'I am' seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully."

I'm sure it's hard to believe that a pleasing melody could emerge from this cacophony of voices, each in its own language of key, scale and color. But the same remarkable skill that makes the various stories so distinct and engrossing makes their uneasy juxtaposition seem, in the end, harmonious. The authority with which Mr. Mitchell imagines entire, self-sufficient worlds earns him the reader's trust-and the time to let his theme swell into a unifying idea.

Adam Begley is books editor of The Observer .

Rereading a novel that gets better the second time is a rare pleasure topped with the promise of more pleasure to come. With reprise reading, you're looking for confirmation, not discovery: the satisfaction of recognizing that intricate workmanship is actually functional–once again the key turns in the lock–and also a wash of happiness, relief, wonder, gratitude as you step over the threshold and admire a view that spreads wider every time you look.

Of course, it's easy to read David Mitchell's amazing first novel just once and come away zapped by the encounter. Ghostwritten is a book of fleeting encounters. In 10 chapters, each of which could almost stand alone as a short story, we get 10 first-person narratives; the various narrators cross paths, then disappear, or sometimes re-emerge in a new setting. Each connection seems casual, coincidental. Taken together, these chance meetings are the fragile building blocks of a daring architecture, or links in a fabulously ductile chain of human (and non-human) interaction, a chain that stretches from the Tokyo subway on the day of the sarin gas attack to the 28th floor of an East Village high rise on a night in the near future, less than two weeks before the likely extinction of mankind.

He begins with the voice of a mass murderer and an event plucked from the headlines: Quasar, a devoted follower of "His Serendipity," releases nerve gas in the Tokyo subway. Quasar's mind is poisoned with hate and the mumbo-jumbo of his cult's crazy doctrines, so it's a relief when we switch, in the second chapter, to the voice of Satoru, a teenage jazz fan, half-Japanese, half-Filipino, who falls in love with a girl so quickly it seems to come before the proverbial first sight: "The door opened, and I smelled air rainwashed clean."

Later on there's money laundering in Hong Kong, art theft in St. Petersburg, a ramble in London, a homecoming to a tiny island off the coast of Ireland and, at last, the New York City episode, which features the hip, despairing patter of "poet DJ" Bat Segundo on "Night Train FM, 97.8."

Mr. Mitchell circles the globe in 400 pages; he shows us where we are and where we're headed, all with a spy satellite's eerie precision and a moralist's earned authority. And it's a good thing, too–if his writing were less than completely convincing, his jet-lagged reader would rebel.

Perhaps the most daring chapter takes place in Mongolia. It's narrated by an entity without physical dimension–a kind of parasite ghost–who passes from one human to another, "transmigrating" from mind to mind at will, needing only the briefest bodily touch to make the switch between hosts. This being calls itself a " noncorpum "; it lurks in the mind, usually silent and passive, though sometimes exerting its will and even occasionally making its presence known: "[I]f I came across a mystic, lunatic, or writer I would sometimes talk with him." The noncorpum possesses only one memory distinct from its hosts' memories, an enigmatic Mongolian folk tale; it has traveled the world over looking for clues to its own origin and hunting, unsuccessfully, for signs of other noncorpa .

This may sound loopy in digest form, but Mr. Mitchell pulls it off brilliantly. The noncorpum burrows into the human mind in the same way a writer does, registering physical sensation ("He had dried tears in his eyes and his mouth tasted of watch straps") and charting the ebb and flow of thought and feeling. It may require a special talent to invent a credible noncorpum, but ordinary imagination is all you need to follow its adventures, believe in it and–yes–care for it.

There's another non-human entity in Ghostwritten , an artificial intelligence that calls itself "the zookeeper" and communicates with the world only by calling in, at yearly intervals, to Bat Segundo's New York radio show. Bat, who jokes that wacky callers will "turn Night Train FM into Radio Schizoid," can only conceive of the zookeeper as a tremendously resourceful hacker; in fact, "Zooey" is more like HAL in 2001 , an intelligence in charge of a machine–or, in this case, in charge of all machines. A digital God for our digital age, it must figure out on its own how to cope with man's inhumanity to man.

The zookeeper peers down on our planet from the vantage point of orbiting satellites and tells Bat Segundo what he sees. Some of these passages are hypnotically beautiful, others wizardly, like this bit, courtesy of a "decommissioned Israeli spy satellite … EyeSat 80B^K," which the zookeeper uses to scope out the Amazon basin: "This world of trees is still dark, to human eyes. Nocturnal eyes and EyeSats can see deeper down the spectrum. There are no names for the colors here. On the roof of the forest canopy, a spider monkey looks up for a moment. I can see the Milky Way and Andromeda in its retina. By image enhancement I can identify EyeSat 80B^K, lit by a morning that hasn't arrived yet. The monkey blinks, shrieks, and flings itself into the lower darkness."

The last chapter of Ghostwritten returns to the Tokyo subway and the real-life sci-fi nightmare of doomsday cults and sarin gas, a scenario that makes Mr. Mitchell's bold inventions seem mild by comparison. How do Quasar and the love-struck teenager and the noncorpum and the zookeeper fit together? Why are they in the same novel? Each of the novel's chapters prompts a meditation on the forces, many of them invisible, some of them crushingly obvious, that script our lives. A thematic unity is apparent–though just barely–on first reading. Ghostwritten is a marvelous puzzle. It takes time to fit together the disparate pieces, but patience in this case pays off handsomely. Once assembled, the story hums with significance.

Displaying his talent for "profundity on the hoof," a character in London trots out this easy aphorism: "The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting." Elsewhere, another character arrives at a more nuanced expression of the same idea: "Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present." (A neat post-Freudian credo, that.) Memory is only one of many kinds of ghostwriting in Mr. Mitchell's novel; chance and ignorance and blind desire and blind hatred do their bit, too.

David Mitchell is a 31-year-old Englishman who lives in Hiroshima. When Ghostwritten was published as a paperback original in Great Britain last year, it earned some excellent reviews, sold something like 13,000 copies, then sank out of sight. Maybe it will do better in America, where we revere literary daring (take a bow, Don DeLillo) and shower with money novelists who show serious scope (that's you, David Foster Wallace). Maybe a book that wants to be read twice needs to be published a second time before it sticks.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.