David Mitchell

Ghostwritten — (1999) Publisher: David Mitchell's electrifying debut novel takes readers on a mesmerizing trek across a world of human experience through a series of ingeniously linked narratives. Oblivious to the bizarre ways in which their lives intersect, nine characters-a terrorist in Okinawa, a record-shop clerk in Tokyo, a money-laundering British financier in Hong Kong, an old woman running a tea shack in China, a transmigrating "noncorpum" entity seeking a human host in Mongolia, a gallery-attendant-cum-art-thief in Petersburg, a drummer in London, a female physicist in Ireland, and a radio deejay in New York-hurtle toward a shared destiny of astonishing impact. Like the book's one non-human narrator, Mitchell latches onto his host characters and invades their lives with parasitic precision, making Ghostwritten a sprawling and brilliant literary relief map of the modern world.

Number9dream — (2001) Publisher: Eiji Miyake arrives in a sprawling Japanese metropolis to track down the father he has never met. But the city is a mapless place if you are 18, broke, and the only person you can trust is John Lennon. His 8-week hunt plunges into the hinterland between the city and the mind, where a Polish art movie is no less real than the coffee in front of him and letters from an Imperial Army soldier are signposts to next week, and where he crosses paths with numerologists, staion masters, gateballers, hostesses, organ harvesters and insane chefs. Philosophical, colourful, sometimes violent, this is a dazzlingly inventive novel about image, control and memory.

Cloud Atlas — (2004) Publisher: From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists 2003” issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope. A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation — the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small. In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity’s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.

Cloud Atlas

For some people, awards are guides as to which books to read, but for others they can serve as a warning that the novels are "too literary," all art and artifice and no story. It's easy to see how some might think that of Cloud Atlas. Nominated for several awards, including the heavyweight Booker prize, written by an author — David Mitchell — known for his surreal "literariness," and constructed in a non-linear fashion, Cloud Atlas runs the risk of being ruled out at the outset by many. That would be too bad, however, for the book is utterly brilliant, one of my favorite reads of the past decade and a perfect example of how craft and storytelling are not mutually exclusive.

The structure, as mentioned, is unusual, taking the form of six stories linked mostly if not solely by theme and told in chronological order. That isn't all, however. Each story is abruptly interrupted by the one following, until one reaches the middle of the book and the sixth story, after which the stories are completed in reverse order. The form sounds much more gimmicky than it reads (and serves a purpose beyond the gimmicky) and is not at all difficult to follow. The structure is part of the book's pleasure, offering up the simple pleasures of varied story/style and cliffhanger endings, along with the more complex pleasure involved in tracing the connections wending between all the stories.

The stories span centuries, styles, and genres. They are told as diaries, as letters, as interrogation; they are set in the 19th, 20th, and 22nd centuries; they mimic the style of mystery, science-fiction/fantasy, travelogue. They all share strong characters, strong voices, a sense of humor and one of sorrow. They can be equally funny and poignant. As one might expect when there are six separate stories, some are perhaps stronger than others, but that is more testament to any single story's strength rather than indictment of any story's weakness. Even then, the differences between them are slight and it wouldn't surprise me if readers disagreed about which are the better ones. Each is in its own right a compelling, well-told story, though all are improved upon and deepened by the connections between them.         

If there is any slowing in the book, it probably will come for most in the futuristic story, which is told in a stylized slang that simply because of its unfamiliarity will cause more reading difficulty than the previous stories for those not familiar with such a style; regular sci-fi/fantasy genre readers will probably not have any problem at all. That said, it is not all that difficult to follow (there is, for instance, no need of a glossary as in Clockwork Orange), it gets easier as one reads it, and the story shares the same strengths of character and plot with the others, making the extra work (little as it is) well worth it.

Cloud Atlas is a thoroughly enjoyable read on many, many levels. People who pick it up for its pedigree of awards and past authorial history might be surprised by the genre aspect ("how did I end up reading speculative fiction?"). People who pick it up despite, rather than because of, its pedigree might be surprised by its accessibility, by the compelling nature of the various plots. In either case, it will be a more than pleasant surprise for both. Highly and strongly recommended. —Bill Capossere

Black Swan Green — (2006) Publisher: From highly acclaimed two-time Man Booker finalist David Mitchell comes a glorious, sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. In his previous novels, David Mitchell dazzled us with his narrative scope and his virtuosic command of multiple voices and stories. The New York Times Book Review said, "Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across [Cloud Atlas's] every page." Black Swan Green inverts the telescopic vision of Cloud Atlas to track a single year in what is, for 13-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the 13 chapters create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. Pointed, funny, profound, left field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell's subtlest yet most accessible achievement to date.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet — (2010) Publisher: The author of Cloud Atlas's most ambitious novel yet, for the readers of Ishiguro, Murakami, and, of course, David Mitchell. The year is 1799, the place Dejima, the "high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island" that is the Japanese Empire's single port and sole window to the world. It is also the farthest-flung outpost of the powerful Dutch East Indies Company. To this place of superstition and swamp fever, crocodiles and courtesans, earthquakes and typhoons, comes Jacob de Zoet. The young, devout and ambitious clerk must spend five years in the East to earn enough money to deserve the hand of his wealthy fiancée. But Jacob's intentions are shifted, his character shaken and his soul stirred when he meets Orito Aibagawa, the beautiful and scarred daughter of a Samurai, midwife to the island's powerful magistrate. In this world where East and West are linked by one bridge, Jacob sees the gaps shrink between pleasure and piety, propriety and profit. Magnificently written, a superb mix of historical research and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a big and unforgettable book that will be read for years to come.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Let’s just admit it at the outset. As someone who tries to write, I hate David Mitchell. Hate him with the white-hot intensity of a thousand blazing suns. It’d be bad enough if he were just a great, you know, writer. Plain old everyday writer of some kind of novel: literary fiction, sci-fi, adventure, pastiche, historical. But no. He can’t just pick one. He has to be brilliant at them all. In one novel, no less (Cloud Atlas, by the way, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should. Then fire off an angry letter to any award group that didn’t give him their top prize for it. Yeah — I’m talking to you Booker). Worse, Cloud Atlas wasn’t his first brilliant book. And then he followed it up with Black Swan Green. And now he’s back with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet.

Well, I say “hah!” to you Mr. David Mitchell. Hah! Cuz Autumns isn’t brilliant. It’s only kinda brilliant. So there. Double hah!

The title character is a young Dutchman who arrives on the tiny island of Dejima, sole gateway for the Dutch East India Company to 19th century Japan, a closed society. De Zoet is here to make his fortune as a clerk in order to return home and marry up to his intended, Anna. But things quickly go awry: the East India Company is having monetary problems, the Japanese are reluctant to give up more of their highly-desired copper; global politics (revolution, Napoleon, the increasing strength of the English, the new America, etc.) are threatening the Company’s monopoly in Japan as well as Japan’s desire to remain closed; De Zoet is tasked to root out corruption among his fellow workers, making him none too popular; and he manages to fall in love with a Japanese midwife — Orito.

The language is typical Mitchell. Whether it be simple descriptive phrases (a newborn described as a “boiled-pink despot” or daylight being “bruised” by an oncoming storm) or his usual preternatural ability to change voice as needed, shifting seamlessly among differing classes, cultures, nationalities, genders, ages, formal speech or dialect, even human or feline. Dutch or English, male or female, slave or noble, bureaucrat or samurai, prig or whoring drunk — it makes no difference, all are rendered naturally and individually.

The structure is less complex than we usually see from David Mitchell, the book much more linear than usual, though we do shift narrators among varying sections. More typical, Mitchell is working with several genres at once, or successively: romance, clash of cultures, international gamesmanship, adventure story (complete with masked samurai and a daring rescue attempt), and a few others. It makes for a heady mix of characters and plotting, and one of the best aspects of the novel is how it rarely goes where you expect it to, in terms of either plot or style (or even narrator).

Characterization is sharp and rich from the smallest character to the major ones. If De Zoet seems perhaps a bit distant to us, we feel nothing but compassion for Orito as well as the young Japanese translator who also loves her.

The turn of the century (18th to 19th) offers up rich potential for Mitchell to explore: clashes between cultures as the world begins to shrink, between tradition and progress, science and religion, religion and religion (Christianity is adamantly banned from Dejima), old and new economic and political systems, between old empires and rising empires.

David Mitchell also explores, subtly, various forms of enslavement: actual slavery (in one of the most moving narrative sections of the novel, a slave discusses his “mind-island” — the only place he is free as his mind is the only thing he truly owns), economic slavery, sexual slavery, subjugation of the weak by the powerful — either as nations or classes, the oppression of tradition, the imprisonment of birth.

And as one might expect with such a setting, communication and miscommunication is also a major theme throughout, as characters try to feel their way to mutual comprehensible expression, sometimes succeeding, often failing. There is a pattern running through the novel of conversations being broken up, dialogue lines interrupted throughout the conversation with descriptive lines: the play of cards, shots in a billiard game, a drummer’s beatings, as if Mitchell is highlighting the sheer difficulty of simple conversation even without all the cultural baggage.

By this point, you’re probably wondering why the book is only “kinda brilliant.” Well, pacing is sometimes an issue. The book starts off with a bang (actually a birth) that you won’t forget soon. The first section is a bit up and down as we’re thrown a large cast of characters relatively quickly. But after that first section, pace is never an issue: fast when it needs to be fast and slow when it needs to be slow.

All right, I admit, it’s a small complaint. One might even say petty. But I can honestly say that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is no Cloud Atlas. And yes, I know that since Cloud Atlas is on my list of top 10 books of the past 20 years, that isn’t so damning. Fine then. Curse you, David Mitchell. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet isn’t the best book of the past decade, but it’s damn good and yeah, might even be a bit brilliant. Read it. And if you’re a wannabe writer, the We Hate David Mitchell Club meets the first Monday of every month — see you there. —Bill Capossere