David Mitchell is one of those authors who seems to divide people. Here's a comment from a member of The Guardian's online book club, which recently put the best-selling, twice-Booker-nominated writer's third novel, Cloud Atlas, under its literary microscope: "David Mitchell is a genius at making middlebrow readers feel that they're experiencing the avant-garde."
According to this reader, the work (six interlocked novellas, each completely different from its neighbour) is a flashy-but-empty display of literary pastiche that shrieks "significant", "clever" and "complicated" - and is designed to make readers think that they are clever too, simply for reading it at all.
Of course, the same thing could also be said in admiration of the novel. "[Cloud Atlas's six novellas] are a bit like the best-ever volume of the Reader's Digest Compacted Library - and I don't mean that in a bad way," was another, more typical response from the same website.
Mitchell recently spoke at the UK's Hay Festival of his impatience with the kinds of "meta-fiction" that keep reminding the reader that he or she is reading fiction. So he must be glad to know that so many of his fans think of him as, in the words of yet another book club reader, "a real storyteller in a literary world which abandoned storytelling some time ago".
So - is it Mitchell and his fans on the side of "story" against the horrid Po-Mo literary spoilsports, then? There's no denying that his fictions sings with a compelling vitality, not least because of its multitude of tones and styles - reviewers often mention his "ventriloquism". In his new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Sceptre) he harnesses his marvellous talents to a more conventional form - that of the historical novel.
The story's set in Japan at the turn of the 19th century, when the country was almost entirely cut off from the West, except for a tiny, quarantined Dutch outpost. Young, naive Jacob de Zoet arrives on the man-made island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbour as part of a contingent of Dutch East Indies officials charged with cleaning up the trading station's entrenched culture of corruption.
Though engaged to be married back home in Holland, he falls madly in love with Orito Aibagawa, an unusual Japanese woman studying as a midwife with Marinus, the station's resident physician. Their courtship is strained, since foreigners are prohibited from setting foot on the Japanese mainland, and the only relationship permitted between Japanese women and foreign men on Dejima are of the paid variety. Jacob has larger trouble, though; when he refuses to sign off on a bogus shipping manifest, his stint on Dejima is extended and he's demoted, stuck in the service of a vengeful fellow clerk.
Meanwhile, Orito's father dies deeply in debt, and her stepmother sells her into service at a mountain-top shrine where her skills in midwifery are in high demand, she soon learns, because of the deeply sinister rituals going on in the secretive shrine. This is where the slow-to start plot finally lifts off, as Mitchell turns up the heat with a rescue attempt by Orito's first love, Uzaemon, Jacob's translator and confidant.
Throughout, Mitchell's ventriloquism is as sharp as ever; he conjures men of Eastern and Western erudition as convincingly as he does Dutch sailors belowdecks. There are some quite riveting set-pieces (any would-be readers who happen to be pregnant with their first child might wish to avoid the gruesome opening chapter until well after the birth).
Yet ultimately there is something contrived about this novel's brilliant depiction of a faraway world. At the end of this clever and ambitious book I was none the wiser as to why Mitchell had felt so compelled to examine and dramatise in such detail the complications of politics and trade in the Far East at the turn of the 19th century.
Perhaps it's because his abundant abilities are above all mimetic. His authorial presence lacks a moral point of view - some input or pressure from him that is uniquely Mitchellian, in the sense of being fiercely held. In the end, this book has only its own stylistic panache on which to fall back.
Melissa de Villiers
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