In his latest work, Mitchell conjures up a Dutchman in Shogunate-era Japan. Illustration by AndrÉ Carrilho

When people talk about “natural storytellers,” they are probably paying an unintended compliment to the unnatural. They mean that such writers are unnaturally gifted in artifice; that, better than the rest of us, they can draw us in, sound a voice, shape a plot, siphon the fizz of suspense. Yet the compliment is not merely inverted, since even freakish mastery of such tricks does not account for those impalpable gifts—the tremor of presence on the page, the overflow of vitality—which rival the abundance, even gratuitousness, of nature itself.

The English writer David Mitchell belongs to this returning army of nature. Lavishly talented as both a storyteller and a prose stylist, he is notable for his skill and his fertility. Without annoying zaniness or exaggeration, he is nevertheless an artist of surplus: he seems to have more stories than he quite knows what to do with, and he ranges across a remarkable variety of genres—conventional historical fiction, dystopian sci-fi, literary farce. “Cloud Atlas” (2004), his best-known novel, features six interlocked and rotating novellas, each completely different from its neighbor: the journal of an American notary, travelling by boat from Australia to America in the eighteen-fifties; the letters of a young bisexual English composer, sent in the nineteen-thirties to a college friend; a slice of nineteen-seventies paranoid political thriller, in which a young California journalist takes on a sinister energy corporation.

There are plenty of more or less postmodern novels in which multiple narrators jostle for attention; Mitchell’s first novel, “Ghostwritten” (1999), had nine of them—all stuffed into the very big gauntlet the serious young writer was throwing to the ground. One of those narrators, a London-based drummer, plays in a band called the Music of Chance (“I named it after a novel by that New York bloke”). Thus the first novelist clips bright coupons from his chosen traditions. A quieter self-consciousness was at work in “Cloud Atlas,” his third novel. Each of the six novellas in that book bleeds into its successor; each is obviously a text. So the bisexual English composer Robert Frobisher, who is working as secretary to a Delius-like composer, comes upon a journal in the old man’s Belgian château—“the edited journal of a voyage from Sydney to California by a notary of San Francisco named Adam Ewing.” He writes to his college friend Rufus Sixsmith, “Mention is made of the gold rush, so I suppose we are in 1849 to 1850. . . . Something shifty about the journal’s authenticity—seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t ring quite true.” Frobisher is referring to the novella that opens “Cloud Atlas,” entitled “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” and that we have just read. Likewise, Luisa Rey, the nineteen-seventies California journalist who takes on the evil energy corporation, in the book’s third novella, finds the letters that Robert Frobisher sent to Rufus Sixsmith back in 1931.

The eighteen-fifties hand off to the nineteen-thirties, which hand off to the nineteen-seventies. The fictional world is both very large and very small. Themes and repeated motifs connect the suite of stories: falling, drowning, poison, captivity, escape. The Delius-like composer is famous for two works of the nineteen-twenties, his “Matryoshka Doll Variations” and his “Untergehen Violinkonzert”; “Cloud Atlas” has been described as a “series of nested dolls,” and the German word Untergeher means one who is drowning or sinking. (It is also the title of a Thomas Bernhard novel about Glenn Gould and piano playing.) Robert Frobisher is working on a difficult piece of his own called—yes—“Cloud Atlas Sextet.” In the nineteen-seventies, Luisa Rey hears this piece in a record store, and finds the music “pristine, river-like, spectral, hypnotic . . . intimately familiar.”

The jacket copy of “Cloud Atlas” mentions Nabokov and Umberto Eco, and calls Mitchell a “postmodern visionary.” This is true enough, but one is struck by the gestural nature of Mitchell’s postmodernism. You could remove all the literary self-consciousness without smothering the novel’s ontology, or coarsening its intricacy. It is not exactly that Mitchell’s heart isn’t in his authorial games; to put it positively, the persuasive vitality of his stories is strong enough to frighten off their own alienation. The novellas have a life of their own, and will not be easily burgled—which is to say that they function like all successful fictions. The revelation that, say, Adam Ewing’s journal might have been fabricated by his son, or that Luisa Rey’s journalistic crusade in California might just be a thriller written by someone with the nom de plume of Hilary V. Hush, actually strengthens the autonomous reality of these fictions. This is the opposite of the weak postmodernism of a writer like Paul Auster, whose moments of metafictional self-consciousness—“Look, it’s all made up!”—are weightless, because the fictions themselves have failed to achieve substance: a diet going on a diet. In this respect, Mitchell is more like Nabokov (or José Saramago, or the Roth of “The Counterlife”) than like the feebler novelistic creator Umberto Eco. Of course, the paradox whereby the exposure of fiction’s fictionality only buttresses its reality is at least as old as the second part of “Don Quixote,” and reminds us of the ancestral postmodernism of the novel form.

Mitchell is ancestral in another respect, too. He may be self-conscious, but he is not knowing, in the familiar, fatal, contemporary way; his naturalness as a storyteller has to do not only with his vitality but also with a kind of warmth, a charming earnestness. This is why he can so speedily get a fiction up and running, involve the reader in an invented world. One would be hard pressed to separate the quality of his sentences from the quality of the human presence. Here are two examples of his novelistic vivacity, one from “Cloud Atlas” and one from his new novel, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (Random House; $26). In the first, Adam Ewing, the nineteenth-century voyager, is describing, in his journal, the antipodean heat on board the Prophetess: