Books by author: David Mitchell

Thank you, David Mitchell, for restoring my faith in literary fiction. After a terrible experience with Nicholson Baker's House of Holes and a middling reaction to Richard Powers' Generosity, I was a bit afraid that my tastes had shifted away from beautiful prose and toward plot-driven speculative fiction. Though I do greatly enjoy the latter, thankfully I now know that I still have a taste for the former.

Black Swan Green is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel set in England in the early 80s. The narrator, Jason Taylor, is the same age as Mitchell, and about two years older than me, and although I grew up in New England rather than the U.K., I recognized enough of Mitchell's music and pop culture references to see and value how real and appropriate they are. I identified strongly with Jason, especially with the distortions the adolescent mind places on the significance of life's minor but formative events.

Mitchell is a versatile writer. You'd have a hard time finding three books in three different genres as uniformly excellent as Mitchell's Black Swan Green (bildungsroman), Cloud Atlas (literary speculative fiction), and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (historical fiction). In all cases, the writing craft is meticulous, but in the case of Black Swan Green there are sentences in each chapter that I wish I had conceived and written, metaphors that jump of the page — to the point of being aphorisms.

I'm eager to read Mitchell's earlier novels, though I am tempted to hold off a bit and save them for just the right time and place.

Cloud Atlas is an ambitious novel structured like a set of nested Russian dolls. There are six interrelated narrative threads. Each of the first five is interrupted half-way through to begin the next, and then they are finished in the reverse order. The stories range over time from a businessman in 1850 to a goatherd in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, and each has connections to the next. Each is told in an entirely different narrative voice from the others, and Mitchell does an admirable job of writing them all credibly.

I enjoyed some of the threads more than others, but the effect of the whole was quite good. I was very happy that there wasn't any kind of goofy sci-fi connection between the characters, because that would have ruined what turns out to be a really interesting meditation on time, the written word, and to a lesser extent race.

I quite enjoyed Cloud Atlas when I read it a few years ago, and I had been meaning to check out another of David Mitchell's novels. I'm glad that I've finally done so, and I'll certainly be going back for more.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is almost a straight historical novel. The action occurs in Dejima — a tiny port near Nagasaki, Japan — starting in 1799. It is a star-crossed love story, centered on the titular de Zoet (a Dutch clerk trying to make his fortune in trade with the Japanese) and Miss Aibagawa (the unmarried midwife he falls in love with). The viewpoint shifts from chapter to chapter, and the first clue to the viewpoint is the style of the date in the chapter heading (this took me a long time to figure out).

On a microscopic level, Mitchell succeeds at creating a "historical" dialogue style that feels old but isn't hard to read, with separate styles for Japanese speaking Dutch and vice versa, as well as Dutch speaking English and vice versa. On a more macro scale, the novel dips slightly into speculative fiction territory with some action revolving around an abbot who may be six hundred years old, but the setting and the primary characters are the focus, so it can easily be read as straight historical fiction. The main story arc is satisfying, though many questions remain about the abbot. I have heard that Mitchell may be planning to expand this novel into a trilogy, which would be welcomed.