While the novel has traditionally been seen as tracking the development of the nation state, the author of this book queries whether globalisation might currently be prompting the emergence of a new sub-genre of the novel that is adept at imagining global community. Consequently, Cloud Atlas creates a constantly shifting world where the only fixed entity is the subject and its comet-shaped birthmark. The novel’s structure goes into thematic depths and creates a bridge, a constant interplay between form and content, captured in the metaphor of the concertina. It is exactly the work’s heterogeneity, its jumps through time and space, its interrupted chapter structure that lend it a special unity and coherence that erases both geographical and temporal borders. Seemingly in a paradoxical way, the multiple liminal states identifiable in the novel convey the ultimate sense of borderlessness. The novel operates a constant state of liminality, a state that will be embodied by the subject. Numerous versions of past, present, and future run in parallel, the actual and the virtual coexist, and the text folds upon itself. In this fictional world, the subject will serve as an entity that brings together disparate spatialities and temporalities through an intricate symbolic web that connects the subject’s body to the world it inhabits. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) presents its readers with a “borderless world.” This borderlessness concerns space and time, with complex and interweaving spatiotemporal planes.
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