David Mitchell succeeds, post-postmodernity
David Mitchell's latest.
1:20 pm Jun. 30, 2010
There are many different kinds of difficulty, but try telling that to David Mitchell. In his dazzling first two novels, the Irish novelist sometimes seemed to think that a book’s quality is measured largely by how many narrative voices you can cram between two covers.
Mitchell’s first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), was a careening, complex tale told by almost a dozen characters who hurled the reader from Tokyo to Mongolia to Ireland to New York City, with several pit stops in between. In 2004, he published Cloud Atlas, another dense, fiercely intelligent story, the goal of which was no less than the mapping of human civilization’s rise and fall. He used the qualified triumphs and moral failings of his characters to demonstrate, in good old Marxist fashion, how the seeds of civilization’s ruin are built into its structure.
The author’s large-scale ambitions paid off, and Cloud Atlas came exceedingly close to succeeding completely. One lesson to be learned from the book is that it’s a far better strategy to attempt something very difficult, and possibly fail, than to plainly succeed at something easy. But the formal games and virtuosic complexity were becoming slightly wearying.
Mitchell may well have agreed. After Cloud Atlas, he changed course and wrote a far more stylistically conventional book, Black Swan Green (2006), whose narrator was a stuttering boy growing up in a miserable suburb in Thatcher-era England. While it was engaging, the novel often succumbed to the clichés of the coming-of-age genre. It seemed like Mitchell’s confinement to a more straightforward style came at the cost of his imaginative fire.
Mitchell’s new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, puts these fears to rest. Set at the end of the seventeenth century at a Dutch trading port in Nagasaki, it still has the author’s trademark intelligence and scope, but Mitchell newly—finally!—demonstrates that simple storytelling, and limited geographic and chronological tricks, can enhance his ambitions, rather than constrain them.
The title character is a young clerk from Holland, appointed to safeguard the interests of the Dutch East India Company at their storehouses at Dejima. The most convincing element of this unusual setting is not the vocabulary or the cultural attitudes, though both are rendered with care. By far the most convincing element is the primitive way in which information is disseminated: Characters wait literally years for letters, and the plot regularly turns on whether a given piece of information has or hasn’t reached its intended recipient.
For readers born and raised in an age of free, instant information, this is the most jarring aspect of the novel. But what acts as a limitation on the characters is a liberation for the author, allowing Mitchell to engineer situations that would not be possible in our day and age. It is a novel in which power rests upon who knows what, and all information depends on a physical medium. If you compare scenes of violence and warfare in the book to scenes in which one character casually passes a note to another, it is always the latter that are more important to the plot, that feel the most dramatic, that have the most electricity and power.
