It’s a rule of thumb that precocious young novelists start off with something loosely autobiographical — drug-taking and high jinks, say — but three books into his career, David Mitchell has revealed very little of himself. This, of course, has never been his point, and until recently he had almost no interest in delving into his own life story.
By the time he started writing seriously, he says, he wanted ”to write the world, underlined three times, three exclamation marks”. So instead of ruminations on a childhood in rural Worcestershire, we have had, to date, the inner lives of: a Japanese terrorist, a nuclear physicist, an art thief (his debut, Ghostwritten); Tokyo gangsters and submarine pilots (Number 9 Dream); and now, in Mitchell’s new novel, Cloud Atlas (Sceptre), a 19th-century lawyer, an investigative journalist and a doomed clone from the future. His books are dense, noisy with life — a string of multi-layered narratives.
All of which makes Mitchell sound like an annoyingly tricksy writer, and it’s true that his critics have him down as a bit too clever, too ambitious for his own good. But what saves his books from being just brilliant, formal experiments is the heart with which he writes, the humour, and the absolute conviction with which he draws his characters.
He will spend ages writing biographies for all his narrators, working out the speech patterns and the childhood traumas, before he even starts on the ghost of a story. His new book has a brilliant comic creation in the character of Timothy Cavendish, a louche publisher who had a walk-on part in Ghostwritten, and a lot of good jokes — my favourite being a tantric sexual position called the Plumber (you stay in for ages and nobody comes).
Mitchell is also aware that experiment for the sake of it leads you into all kinds of dead ends. ”You have to distinguish between workable innovation and unworkable innovation,” he says. ”There’s a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can — hubris, I suppose — without stopping to work out why.”
When he started on Cloud Atlas three years ago, he originally planned to write nine separate narratives and a book of about 900 pages, but eventually saw the light and settled for six overlapping stories and a book of about 500 pages.
Last year Mitchell moved from Japan to Ireland and is currently renting a bungalow outside Cork with his Japanese wife, Keiko, and their nearly-two-year-old daughter, Hana. He moved to Japan in the early 1990s after failing to get a job in Britain.
Mitchell is 35 now and after the huge critical success of his first two novels (AS Byatt described Ghostwritten as ”the best first novel I have ever read”), you would expect that Mitchell could afford to rest on his laurels, but no: if he had stayed on in Japan, he would have had to continue teaching English and seen much less of his daughter. Here, he can write and be a hands-on father.
Mitchell is tall and pale, and there is something slightly old-fashioned about him. He is courteous and formal, serving tea and biscuits in the living room, and has an endearing habit of deconstructing his own sentences — ”Right, let me marshal my thoughts,” he will say, or, ”Can I quickly put this in brackets?” and, despairingly, ”This sentence is collapsing under its own weight!”
Cloud Atlas took longer to write than his other two books, mainly because he had to do a lot of research. For every 10 years back in time you go, he says, you can add two months to your working time. The book is structured like a Russian doll, six narratives nestled one inside the other, with a post-apocalyptic future at its centre.
In spite of its title, Cloud Atlas is Mitchell’s tightest, most focused book, as well as his funniest: the Russian-doll structure allows him to return to the same themes — which are, broadly speaking, the struggle between savagery and civilisation, between biology and ethics. ”It’s a book about predacity and predation,” he says, ”individuals preying on groups, groups preying on individuals.”
It is also strikingly political, much more so than anything else he has written. Mitchell’s vision of the future is like Naomi Klein’s No Logo taken to its ultimate conclusion: a consumer society in the process of consuming itself. The narrator of this section, Somni 451, is a clone genomed to smile and stand for 19 hours on end in an underground fast-food restaurant, genuflecting to the dollar, worshipping the company logo. Language itself is branded: instead of shoes, films, petrol, traffic jams, Somni 451 sees nikes, disneys, exxon and fordjams. For the pure-blood consumers who live overground, spending is compulsory — ”Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime.”
Perhaps the most terrifying thing is that Mitchell exaggerates the present only slightly. And yet he says he is not a particularly gloomy person. Sometimes he feels, in the words of a George Monbiot column he recently cut out and kept, that, ”given the choice between saving the world and a new dinner service, humanity would probably go for the dinner service”. Other times, he’s not sure what the doom-mongers are worrying about. ”What is that lovely Arthur Miller quote?” (He is very given to lovely quotes.) ”’How much of life is decided simply because it is five o’clock on a Friday?”’
As a child, he says, he was ”very anxious”. Growing up in Worcestershire, England, with his older brother and artist parents, he worried constantly about the threat of nuclear war. ”I was speaking to some Dutch friends about it recently, and they laughed and said, ‘Why would you believe that?’ It would make an interesting study — how much was nuclear war feared, really, in the early 1980s in different countries. And I wonder if there is a correlation between the size of a country’s defence budget and that fear.”
While he waited for the end of the world, Mitchell collected postcards and wrote poetry. He waited; still no World War III. He drew detailed Tolkienesque maps and devised elaborate battle plans.
More than anything else, though, it was Mitchell’s stammer that encouraged him to ”live inside myself”. Until he mentioned it, I wasn’t aware that he had a stammer, and though he says I’m kind to say so, it is virtually undetectable — an occasional pause or hesitation between words that I had taken for thinking time.
”Having a stammer is like being an alcoholic,” he says. ”You never actually lose it, you just come to a more practical accommodation with it — and my working accommodation as a child was just not to say very much.”
The protagonist of his fourth novel, which he is already three-quarters of the way through, has a stammer. This is what he describes as ”my straight story”, a novel about a shy 13-year-old boy who stammers and publishes poetry under a pseudonym.
Mitchell says it has been a tremendous relief to get it all down. ”There’s been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it’s this huge psychological barrier. Maybe this is a tasteless comparison if you’re gay, but for me writing about it has been like coming out.”
It is, he says, the opposite of everything he has done so far, much more subtle and muted. ”I want to make all the exclamation marks go away — I still want them to be there, but I don’t want any special effects.” — Â