Strange transactions: utopia, transmigration and time in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas

<p>This chapter explores the way in which British novelist David Mitchell contributes towards a rethinking of utopia in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas: (1) firstly, through a critique of programmatic or blueprinted totalitarian models of utopian social engineering; (2) secondly, through the positing of utopian possibility at a minor, self- scale that self-referentially deconstructs the utopian narrative synthesis; and (3) thirdly, through what I call Mitchell’s networking of such scaled-down utopian “moments of possibility” through his transmigratory metamorphoses of narrative voice through different historical moments, and the ways in which coincidence connects seemingly disparate, geographically dispersed characters.</p>