Ian Hislop is a man of many talents. For 18 years he has edited the hugely popular Private Eye, a role that has made Ian one of the most sued men in British legal history. He is also a comedy scriptwriter who has written for Harry Enfield, Spitting Image and most recently the BBC sitcom My Dad’s The Prime Minister. His talents also bring him in front of the cameras, and he became a household name as the satirical team captain on the current affairs quiz, Have I Got News For You. He also writes for various newspapers, fronts a history programme on Radio 4 and in 2003 was named as one of the 50 funniest people in British comedy.

Abruptly, that narrative breaks off mid-sentence. There follow a series of letters written between the 1st and 2nd World Wars by a scoundrelly but ambitious young composer who talks his way into the household of a reclusive old maestro in Belgium for a sort of apprenticeship. We learn, in passing, that Ewing’s journal is one of the books he finds while rifling the library for volumes to sell from under his patron’s nose. His story, in turn, gives way to ‘A Luisa Rey Mystery’ – a pulp thriller about a girl reporter on the trail of corporate corruption in the 1970s. Sheaf’s of the letters that make up the previous section figure in the plot.

So it continues on to contemporary Britain with a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors and, eventually, into a nightmarish future with the grim story of an automaton in a fast-food restaurant. After a singular central section, written in the voice of a sort of post-apocalyptic Pacific Islander puzzling over the ruins of civilisation, the second halves of each of the preceding narratives layer back out.

In essence, it is six novels in one, with all except one of the tales being told in the first person. The stories are folded inside each other, much as if you actually opened six short paperback novels – around 75 pages each, say – at the halfway point, stacked them on top of each other; tried to close the whole bundle, and read from the outer book inwards. Soon, we see how all the stories fit together; and the over-arching theme of the novel comes through ominously – a sombre warning about the predatory hunger of humanity.

It might sound like an arduous, gloomy read, but isn’t. Proof of what an extraordinarily versatile and unpredictable writer David can be is that, despite the brooding on apocalypse, the tone that comes through most strongly is broadly comic.

David gained a degree in English and American Literature followed by an MA in Comparative Literature, at the University of Kent. Then, in his mid-twenties, having spent two frustrating years in London during John Major’s recession (‘I was turned down for a job in McDonald’s. That’s how bad it was’) David decided to move to Japan. The decision driven, finally, by a mixture of ‘wanderlust’ and the accident of a Japanese girlfriend whose visa expired, seems to have had a profound impact on his fiction. Once in Japan David lived for eight years in Hiroshima, teaching English and writing in his spare time.’

Cloud Atlas is his third novel and was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. His books are dense, noisy with life – a string of multi-layered narratives. All of which makes David sound an annoyingly tricksy writer, and it’s true that his critics have him down as a bit of a clever clogs, too ambitious for his own good. But what saves his books from being just brilliant formal experiments is the heart with which he writes, the humour, and the absolute conviction with which he draws his characters. He will spend ages writing biographies for all his narrators, working out the speech patterns and the childhood traumas, before he even starts on the ghost of a story.

David is also aware that experiment for the sake of it leads you into all kinds of cul-de-sacs. ‘You have to distinguish between workable innovation and unworkable innovation,’ he says. ‘There’s a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can – hubris, I suppose – without stopping to work out why.’ When he started writing Cloud Atlas he originally planned to write nine separate narratives and a book of around 900 pages, but then, as he puts it, ‘reality took over’.

David’s MA was on levels of reality in the postmodern novel – which he is slightly embarrassed about. ‘How pretentious is that?’ he asks. Nevertheless, its influence is clear. In particular his fascination with complex structure. ‘I like to work out some ground rules for novels,’ David says. ‘Sometimes before I start, and sometimes after I’ve started, I begin a rewrite with them. The ground rules are what give the novel originality and its distinctness. They are limiting, but it’s the limits that force you to be, hopefully, ingenious enough to get yourself out of the straitjacket you’ve put yourself in. It’s escapology, almost.’ David talks a lot about the commandments and restrictions he needs to work. The book he is writing now has 13 chapters, and the commandment is that each chapter must work as a stand-alone short story. In his teens, David read that Nabokov wrote all his novels on file cards and so for a time he did that, too. In his 30s, however, the rules have relaxed a little – he needs only his notebook, computer, a lot of green tea and his CDs – but the discipline is still there.

He delights in producing a sort of interconnectedness between his novels. Ghostwritten, for example, is arranged as a collection of interlocking short stories threaded together with recurring characters or phrases or images. And if you read his three novels you may notice that the Mongolian hitman who appears in Ghostwritten also shows up in number9dream; and that the hilariously camp hero of ‘The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish’, one of the stories in Cloud Atlas, is the brother of a character from Ghostwritten. ‘It’s great fun for me,’ he says, ‘and there’s a more writerly reason. The longer a character has been accreting in your head, I feel, the more real they are on the page, even if you don’t refer to their history.’

Eighteen months ago, David moved from Japan to Ireland, and is currently living just outside Cork with his Japanese wife, Keiko, and their three-year-old daughter, Hana. David met his wife in 1997, in the middle of the eight years he spent in Japan. The couple came to Ireland partly because it is a place that neither of them knew – ‘It’s sort of easier when you’re in a third country, if things go wrong it’s nobody’s fault’ – and partly because Japan had become too expensive. In Ireland he can write and be a hands-on-father. The move doesn’t seem to have disturbed his creative flow. He talks of having two or three novels ‘in a holding pattern’: the one after his autobiographical book is a historical novel set in a Dutch trading outpost in Japan circa 1800; then comes an ‘Atlantic fringe’ engagement with late medieval Icelandic myths.

David can’t imagine any other job other than writing. ‘I’m really interested in how will works, but I have no interest in asserting my own over other people in a David Brent kind of way. Ugh, all of that’s horrible. I can’t see myself surviving very well in an office environment.’ He sighs, ‘I haven’t got enough testosterone.’

INSPIRATION FOR CLOUD ATLAS

Due to its very nature, Cloud Atlas had multiple inspirations. One inspiration was Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, which has each of its ten chapters interrupted at the end, and an entirely new narrator changing tack in the following chapter. ‘It’s absolutely one of the DNA strands of my book’s ancestry, for sure,’ David says. ‘That book shows how you can use frustration in a benign way and make something positive out of it. It’s a sort of striptease. I read it at the right age, which was about 20. I hadn’t read anything like that and it just scalped me.’ Not content with echoing Calvino’s book, however, David decided to see if he could work his stories backwards too. ‘You get to the end of one book, but then put a mirror there so that you go backwards concentrically through the interrupted stories and pick each one up again,’ he explains. ‘I just wanted to see if it could be done and what it might look like if it could.’

Calvino’s influence is important tonally as well as structurally: ‘Unlike Borges and maybe Kundera and others of that commercially successful but still fairly experimental post-war European set, Calvino has also got a great sense of humour. And that’s a common element in all great writing, as opposed to really, really good writing. It’s one thing that I feel the lack of in Mishima, say – an author I also have a lot of time for, even now. He just never tells a joke.’

David is determined to have fun. ‘One of the questions I always try to keep in the front of my mind,’ he says, ‘is to ask why would anyone want to read this, and to try to find a positive answer for that. People’s time, if you bought it off them, is expensive. Someone’s going to give you eight or 10 hours of their life. I want to give them something back, and I want it to be an enjoyable experience. I never lose the feeling of being honoured when someone reads my book. Really. It’s always a significant transaction that someone does that.’

With Cloud Atlas, David says he wanted to write a book, ‘that was something of a meditation on predation, or predacity, the noun of predator. But also about power too, so necessarily that isn’t going to be a very nice book. It’s not necessarily what I believe, but it extrapolates the state of the world today, and what our species is doing now that it has the keys to the car. Just look at the few fledgling attempts to sort out global problems, like the Kyoto Protocol, and how these get trampled over by the rich and the powerful. Even though it is a bit negative, I don’t think it’s unrealistically negative either.’

‘Each chapter,’ says David, ‘is about a different form of predacity. People preying on each other, groups on the individual, and corporations on the state. The will of each character is being overridden in some way.’

Often, the predation he writes about in Cloud Atlas works on the level of race: the imperialists buying out the Plynesians, the Consumers controlling the Servers, the tribal warfare that follows the second Fall. ‘Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself,’ says David, ‘a way of subdividing into smaller groups. But I think banging on too much about race is something a white male hasn’t quite got the right to do, because lots of other non-white writers have done it so well. Any racism I experienced in Japan was of the mildest possible sort; it never really got above the level of condescension. But it’s undeniably a sub-theme – the 19th century made an ideology of racism. That is a part of my history, and we do have a responsibility to sort through our own country’s dirty laundry.’

His basic technique was developed during his first attempts at fiction. He acquired the discipline while teaching English in Japan. Sketching short stories set in noisy Far Eastern cities, he heard the same theme murmuring beneath different narratives. ‘They all seemed to be about causality,’ he says. ‘I was basically wondering about the different reasons things happen, whether because of love, or greed, or people abdicating their will to a higher authority. So instead of worrying about going over similar thematic turf, I thought why not use that, and write them more like a composer would write variations on a theme.’

The Luisa Rey mystery section of Cloud Atlas is unabashed pulp fiction – the hardest part to write, David says, as the genre almost demands unoriginality. Yet part of him is even now considering writing an airport thriller under the name of Lesley V Hush. ‘I’ve got this half-jocular impulse to publish another Luisa Rey mystery… I think it would be a wonderful joke to have an embossed gold-foil cover: A Luisa Rey Mystery. I’d love to do that. But it would have to look the part… it would be a three-for-two offer in Tesco.’

For the science fiction strand in Cloud Atlas, the roots go further back, but are still book-related. ‘The earliest books to make an impact on me are all part of that British end-of-the-world tradition in science fiction. JG Ballard, say, or John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids – that’s a fantastic piece of writing that would stand up even now and should be up there with Brave New World.’

‘It’s the challenges you set yourself, the difficulties, the frames, the straitjackets, that force writing to be ingenious. With historical fiction, that constraint is the language: you’ve got to get it absolutely right, and it can be incredibly time-consuming: the first 90 pages of the book, set in the 19th century, took me about a year and a half. But you’ve got to get the authenticity right to establish that magic, just the same way that I’ve got to make exactly the right noises if I can get Hana, who’s learning to speak, to bring something in from the next room.’

For 99.9 percent of Cloud Atlas’s writing life, the six narrators were kept at separate files. ‘I wrote them in the order that they appear on your way into the book,’ David explains, ‘from the past into the future. Bit I wrote them whole; so the whole of the Ewing part, for example. Then only at the very end – and it felt like quite a historic day actually – did I cut and paste them and do the incisions.’

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They are usually a group of about twelve members. Their ages range from 40 to 60 years old. The groups normally read a huge mixture of books, Janet Barton one of the members (who sadly couldn’t be there on day of filming) normally picks quite quirky books as she finds that the rest of the group pick more serious novels. They are very enthusiastic group who loved reviewing “Cloud Atlas.”

Here's what they thought...

“Cloud Atlas is a book of six different stories. I really enjoyed four of those yarns, they were super reading. I couldn’t cope personally with the science fiction ones and I don’t think I’ll be alone in that. Overall, yes I did enjoy it.”

“Reading this book has been a great delight to me. It’s one very good reason that I joined the book circle…good in parts, the parts I enjoyed, I really enjoyed.”

“I think that Cloud Atlas pulled in every kind of human experience. None of the characters were particularly loveable or even admirable but I think it was a most enthralling read and I enjoyed it very much indeed.”

“What I really enjoyed about Cloud Atlas was the feeling of place and time each of the six stories really made you feel you really lived in. It was quite difficult to leave them and to start another story and I don’t think the idea of the circular way they were written quite worked. It was a wonderful experience.”

“What I really admired in Cloud Atlas was the author’s masterly use of prose. The richness and vividness of his vocabulary and the way it was cadent and flowed. His language was beautiful.”

“I found it a very taxing read. I found it quite difficult to read. Very good, very stimulating but quite taxing.”

“Fascinating, interesting and sometimes boring. Overall a very good read.”

“Whilst acknowledging my limited intelligence. I did find Cloud Atlas very complicated. Accordingly my enjoyment was limited.”

“I’m not sure if I enjoyed Cloud Atlas or not. However, it intrigued me and I would recommend it to others, particularly those interested in science fiction and green issues. Each section was neither short story nor novel, for this reason it left me somewhat unsatisfied.”

“This is an absolute tour de force. It reminded me of climbing a mountain, difficult in parts, easy parts, amusing parts where you can relax, a very occluded summit and rollicking down the other side in a breathless heap, picking up all the loose ends. David Mitchell, where on earth does he go now?...all I’ve decided is when he decides I want to go with him.”

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