If the Booker prize was awarded for sheer effort and ambition, then David Mitchell should win hands down. In over 550 pages, Mitchell jumps across centuries from character to character, intertwining their fates and linking their lives in real, or (postmodern) symbolic ways. An American seaman with a brain parasite writing a journal whilst crossing the pacific; a young apprentice to an elderly composer writing letters to a university student who becomes a nuclear scientist and is written about himself in later life; an eager reporter chasing a scoop after the death of her reporter father; a slave rebellion in a post-holocaust world.

Mitchell has decided to paint this novel on a huge canvas using as many paints, as many brushes and as many techniques as he possibly can. Cloud Atlas is like a literary patchwork made of almost random bits of paintings from the Tate Modern. He writes in journal format, letter format, first person, interview format and third person in the style of a cheap thriller. Each character speaks in a language that is carefully researched or created to ensure it appears of its time. The novel is split into two halves; the first half moving forward in time, leaving each story half told; the second story moving backwards, gradually completing each of them.

But let’s not map out the plot and try to reveal Mitchell’s ambitious architecture. That’s the fun part of the game of reading Cloud Atlas. It may surprise some to hear that Mitchell even had to curb his huge ambition: he’d originally planned three more characters who doubtless would have shared those curious comet-shaped moles. Doubtless Mitchell’s Moleskine notebooks at his home in Clonakilty have these other three characters mapped out, intricately worked into, what he calls the novel’s ‘secret architecture’.

In Mitchell we see something quite unique: the postgraduate author of a dissertation entitled ‘Levels of Reality in the Postmodern Novel’, who has been driven to do something other than cynically gaze into the void of relativism. One cannot doubt Mitchell’s ambitious desire to create something. However much he attempts to escape and historicise postmodernism, though, he simply can’t resist the odd postmodern nudge and wink: ‘As an experienced editor I disapprove of backflashes, foreshadowings and tricksy devices, they belong in the 1980s with MAs in Postmodernism and Chaos theory,’ and the young composer’s reflection upon the seaman’s journal ’[there is] something shifty about the journal’s authenticity - seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t quite ring true, but who would bother forging such a journal and why?’

Delicious irony. As Andrew Crumey points out in Scotland on Sunday, Mitchell’s attempts to master the language of all of his historical characters is bold, but even the briefest etymological detective work on Google exposes his mistakes and an over-reliance on Melville. If James Wood had a fit over Zadie Smith making one of her characters use the word ‘beat’, then his fit would likely become an eternally recurring spasm here. So, yes, the language rings to an off-note and there something not so much shifty but stiff in the structure. The ‘secret architecture’ is hardly secret. Indeed, the various ruptures in the flow of the book reveal the jagged architecture for all to see. And the red threads glow in the dark just in case you almost miss anything.

‘But who would bother forging a journal and why?’ These are good questions Mitchell effectively confronts himself with, knowing he doesn’t have the answers and thus resorting to grinning at the unbearable lightness of it all. Instead we get the science fiction ‘post-civilised’ world where scientific knowledge has regressed and only stories live on. It becomes apparent that Mitchell is taking the Nausea route, in which the very process of writing itself is supposed to fill the void, the lack of a why. The very process of storytelling becomes salvation in itself.

Thus Mitchell, as the storyteller behind the storytellers, becomes the saviour. But Mitchell is aiming higher than that. The language, the structure, the multitude of styles, the broad sweep through historical to future minds… Mitchell has a totalising bent, absorbing influences and carefully mapping out his novels before spewing them into a ragged existence.

Who would bother forging a journal? Someone who aims to be the master-storyteller. Someone who can create characters in any genre as convincing as anything written at the moment, and move them about like puppets in his heavily structured world. Mitchell the Master-Storyteller. The literary Hegel; not only bringing down the curtain on history but peeking behind it to reveal the goat-herders inhabiting the aftermath.

But, to paraphrase Sartre, even if God did exist, he could not know what we are thinking. This is Mitchell’s tragedy. His totalising bent may structure the world. It may give characters the same birthmark. It may put words into the characters’ mouths, but it can’t put beetles in their boxes. Give any of them ten minutes under the Turing test and they’ll fade away into the half-life.

To quote Mitchell’s character Luisa Rey, interviewing Hitchcock, ‘the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like a scorpion enclosure’. Here’s the rub. Mitchell can’t shake off the residual autism so prevalent in generation Xers and this both fascinates and terrifies him. He looks at other people, he can mimic their voices, he can echo their ideas louder than they utter them, he can spin webs with their words, but he can never project inside. Thus he chooses the second option, to continue Rey’s quote, ‘a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel… the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression’.

And this is what Mitchell does, throwing the reader skidding across his increasingly dystopian universe, whipping up a tightly controlled whirlwind of words, ideas, narratives, hoping that readers will get caught up in the great illusion: the illusion that projecting wildly outwards is a possible escape from his inability to look in. The illusion that because he finds a Houellebecqian absence behind the eyes, this somehow implies anything more universal than this; a very personal limitation.

Let’s not worry too much about the film/book distinction. Mitchell, as is common in all writers under 35, has quite obviously seen far more movies than he’s read books. He owes more to Tarantino than Tolstoy. He could readily do with actors to pump life into the hollow men he creates. Mitchell isn’t a good enough literary author or storyteller to warrant such an epic as this and he tries endlessly to fill the ever-groaning cracks between the deficiencies of each with so much hack journalism that the pages will leave the texture of putty on your fingertips as you turn them.

But the thing is, Mitchell is obviously a really nice guy. You want to give him a silver star for effort and write: ‘Intriguing, but too ambitious. Try reading a short story by Hemingway or the early Tolstoy and think really hard about how and why they can capture more about the human condition in a paragraph than you do in a 500 page novel. Then, in a thousand words or less, try writing a scene where Rey meets Sixsmith and, following Hemingway, try to say something in each sentence that is true. Five point deduction for every self-reference.’

But, if the bookies are right, Mitchell’s going to win the Booker Prize and the critics will hail his breadth and imagination and ambition and his next novel will be ’Cloud Atlas on cocaine’. But Stephen King has already written that with his ‘Dark Tower’ series. And, despite his flaws, he’s actually a far better storyteller than Mitchell will ever be.