“Loyalty looks simple,” Grote tells him, “but it ain’t.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (AUG 28, 2010)

This is quite simply the best historical novel I have read in years, Tolstoyan in its scope and moral perception, yet finely focused on a very particular place and time. The place: Dejima, a Dutch trading post on a man-made island in Nagasaki harbor that was for two centuries Japan’s only window on the outside world. The time: a single year, 1799-1800, although here Mitchell takes the liberties of a novelist, compressing the events of a decade, including the decline of the Dutch East India Company and Napoleon’s annexation of Holland, into a mere twelve months. He plays smaller tricks with time throughout the novel, actually, alternating between the Japanese calendar and the Gregorian one, then jumping forwards and backwards between chapters. The effect is to heighten the picture of two hermetic worlds removed from the normal course of history. One is Japan itself (the Thousand Autumns of the title), a strictly hierarchical feudal society, deliberately maintaining its isolation and culture. The other is the equally hierarchical society on Dejima itself, comprised of Dutch merchant officers, a polyglot collection of hands, and a few slaves, whose only contact with the outside world is the annual arrival of a ship from Java. To these, Mitchell adds two more hermetic worlds: an isolated mountain monastery in the second part of the book, and an English warship in the third. Without spoilers, I cannot reveal how these connect, but Mitchell’s writing will carry you eagerly from one event to the next.

The author has the rare ability to work on three narrative scales simultaneously: small, medium, and large. He immerses the reader in local details — particulars of language, culture, medical practice, philosophy and prejudice, commercial procedures, gambling, debauchery, and the capsule back-stories of the lesser characters. He will set up nail-biting situations that last a chapter or so, but introduce some twist that suddenly turns everything around at the end. And he arranges the book in three large parts, each of which ends with a transformative moral decision.

There is a large cast of of characters, whose plethora of exotic names can be confusing at first. But these crucial moments are associated with three or four who stand out for their human interest and moral dimension. Part I focuses on Jacob de Zoet (probably based on the real life Hendrik Doeff, who wrote a book about his experiences). He comes to Dejima as a lowly clerk, but he is smarter than the others, more genuinely interested in Japanese language and culture, and an incorruptible man in a nest of swindlers. Although by no means omnipresent, he serves as the commercial, political, and moral touchstone of the entire novel. Part II centers around two Japanese characters. One is the interpreter Ogawa Uzaemon, Jacob’s principal link to the Japanese world; his formal reticence conceals secrets of his own. The other is Orito Aibagawa, a young midwife who already knows more than most doctors. Despite a disfiguring burn on one cheek, she has a beauty that is hard to resist. But her importance to the book is less as a figure of romance than as the center of a moral challenge that tests her (and indirectly Ogawa) to the utmost. Part III introduces the fourth touchstone character, the British naval captain John Penhaligon, whose decisions will prove pivotal as the book approaches its climax.

Those who know David Mitchell from Cloud Atlas will be aware of his stylistic virtuosity and his fondness for channeling popular genres ranging from the nineteenth-century adventure story to dystopian futurism. There are traces of many different styles here also, but amazingly they all fit into his account of a single place and time. There are no postmodern tricks; this is Mitchell’s most straightforward novel to date. He does have a fondness for writing in short one-paragraph sentences of less than a line long, which makes some of the book look like blank verse, though it reads more like the rapid exchanges of a screenplay. Against this, he can produce set-pieces such as the opening of chapter 39, beginning thus: “Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas, and dung-ripe stables…” And going on for a page and a half to end “…a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observed the blurred reflection of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. ‘This world,’ he thinks, ‘contains one masterpiece, and that is itself’.” And David Mitchell, in HIS masterpiece, gives us an entire world.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 190 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (June 29, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Mitchell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Our review of Cloud Atlas Another MF review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

Bibliography:

• Ghostwritten (1999)
• number9dream (2001)
• Cloud Atlas (2004)
• Black Swan Green (2006)
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (June 2010) Commonwealth Prize

“The Ghost of Sir Felix whines, ‘But it’s been done a hundred times before!’ – as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What and not the How!”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd (JUL 19, 2010)

While David Mitchell is undoubtedly a talented writer, and ideas abound in the centuries-spanning, globe-trotting narratives that make up Cloud Atlas, I couldn’t help but feel slightly disappointed with this book. Of course, it’s entirely possible my disappointment was born from high expectations: Mitchell has been lauded as the best of a generation, and before the recent release of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Cloud Atlas was widely trumpeted as his best book. And while Cloud Atlas is a highly-entertaining smorgasbord of styles – a little something for everyone – it is also a post-modern comment on the ontological status of narrative that doesn’t fully come off.

The novel consists of six stories, each told in a different literary style: 19th century travelogue; high-style epistolary; paperback thriller; contemporary picaresque; a sci-fi dystopia; post-apocalyptic yarn.

Adam Ewing is an American solicitor sent to Australia to handle a client’s estate in the mid-19th century. The journal Ewing kept of his travels aboard the Prophetess, published post-humously by Ewing’s son, forms the 19th century travelogue. Robert Frobisher is a louche Englishman who has installed himself as an amanuensis for an elderly and infirm composer, Vyvyan Ayrs. While at Zedelghem, Ayrs’ estate in rural Belgium (circa 1931), Frobisher reads a copy of Ewing’s journal. He also writes a series of letters to his friend and former lover, Rufus Sixsmith, that form the epistolary part of the book. Sixsmith is a Nobel-prize winning physicist, who writes a damning safety report about a potentially lucrative nuclear reactor. The resultant conspiracy and cover-up is uncovered by tabloid journalist, Luisa Rey, who finds and reads Frobisher’s (now 40-year-old) letters after Sixsmith is murdered. This fast-paced thriller becomes the third section of the book.

Timothy Cavendish, a racist misogynist, is entering the twilight of his life. He is also a vanity publisher in contemporary London. After one of his authors kills a critic who wrote a scathing review of his memoir, Knuckle Sandwich, the author is jailed, and Knuckle Sandwich starts flying off the shelves. With the author in jail, the chronically insolvent Cavendish is only too happy to keep the money for himself. Problem is: the author has three violent brothers out to give Cavendish a knuckle sandwich of his own and claim their fraternal rights to the fortune. Too hot for Cavendish’s comfort, he flees London, but not before picking up an manuscript submission for the road: a thriller about an unsafe nuclear reactor and a journalist named Luisa Rey. Somehow Cavendish gets himself imprisoned in a nursing home. The fourth story, the story of Cavendish’s imprisonment and escape, is eventually made into a movie which is watched in the fifth story, set in future Korea.

In Korea, now called Neo So Corps, corporations rule. People are genetically engineered to perform menial jobs and pure-bred citizens have an enforceable civic duty to consume. Sonmi-451, a genetically-engineered worker, is awaiting execution. A state archivist has been sent to interview Sonmi about her life and crime. Sonmi’s last request is to finish watching an early 21st century film she’d started: The Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.

The sixth and final story is set in post-apocalyptic America. Civilization has been destroyed and human existence has devolved to the tribal. The island-dwelling Prescients are the most technologically advanced tribe. They are intent on making anthropological studies of the more primitive land-dwelling tribes. Meronym is sent to live with a valley-dwelling tribe to write an ethnology on their culture and customs. Zachry, the oldest male of her host family, tells the story of Meronym’s time with his people. Zachry finds the video archive of Sonmi’s interview when he goes through her possessions, intent on finding evidence that she’s a spy.

Mitchell nests these stories, one inside the other, like Russian dolls: upon reaching the mid-point of the first story, the second story starts, and so on. The sixth story, Zachry’s yarn, is the only one read uninterrupted, after which the second half of the fifth story – Sonmi’s interview – is picked up. In short, the structure is: 1, 2. 3, 4, 5, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Although, it sometimes feels like a gimmick to ratchet up suspense, the nested narratives are actually a structural metaphor for the cosmology Mitchell builds Cloud Atlas around.

The nature of the time has stumped philosophers for millennia. For the ancient Greeks and Hindus, time was circular, the universe destined to swing between cycles of creation and destruction. For the ancient Hebrews, time was linear. For Mitchell, at least in his Cloud Atlas world, time is a series of “presents” layered like onion skins or nested like Russian dolls. And in his nested-time world, the actual past (what really happened ) is eventually lost to the virtual past (our explanations/stories about what happened). Conversely, our virtual future (our hopes/expectations for the future) is lost to the actual future (what actually happens). The actual future becomes the actual past, which becomes an ever-evolving virtual past. In this way, narratives, like people, pass in and out of existence, from virtual to actual to virtual again. Mitchell sets out to explore the relationship between this coming and going, between the actual and the virtual, between unreal elements of human life – our myths, beliefs, stories – and the physical world.

If Mitchell is to be held to the laws of logic, then the first three main characters – Adam Ewing, Robert Frobisher and Luisa Rey – are fictional (within the fictional). If Luisa Rey and Rufus Sixsmith are just characters in a novel manuscript, then Robert Frobisher and Adam Ewing must be “fictional” as well. Mitchell doesn’t ground us in the actual until Cavendish reads the Luisa Rey manuscript, and by then we’re foaming at the mouth to see how it’ll all tease out.

The problem is: Mitchell pushes the consequences of his ontology too far, overburdening the already strained logic of his book. As fictional characters, Ewing, Frosbisher and Rey are part of the virtual past, ontologically on par with the actual future. That is, they’re just as real as Sonmi, Zachry and Meronym. This is a wonderfully interesting premise, and left like that –as a philosophical implication to ponder – it would have been enough. Instead, Mitchell forces his idea literal: not only are all these characters – the fictional and the actual – equally real, they all seem to be incarnations of the same soul.

Actually, it’s this pandering to the literal that is the fatal flaw of this book. All Mitchell’s grand ideas – his cosmology, his trite meditations on our will to power – are put in the mouths of his characters; spoke aloud the reader can’t help but catch them. This can get annoying if you’re like me, and prefer your themes to remain the unseen mechanism behind the story.

These problems notwithstanding, Mitchell is one hell of a writer, and this is one hell of an entertaining book. Mitchell moves between literary styles with astonishing ease, leaving this reader with little doubt that he is a shockingly talented writer.

Cloud Atlas is a book that will astonish and annoy you in turn, but for all its faults, it never fails to be entertaining. For that reason alone, Cloud Atlas is worth delving into.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 196 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks (August 17, 2004)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Mitchell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Bibliography:

• Ghostwritten (1999)
• number9dream (2001)
• Cloud Atlas (2004)
• Black Swan Green (2006)
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)

“Over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night’s rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (JUN 30, 2010)

This is a modern, woolly mastodon of a book, a book with tusks and chewing teeth, a throwback to the most towering storytelling in literary history. But it is also a Seraph, a three-paired-winged novel that is full of zeal and respect, humility and ethereal beauty, an airborne creature that gave me five days in heaven. And, it is a sea serpent, because it lifted itself up like a column and it grabbed and swallowed me. Whole.

Pardon me while I gush; I bow to the spirit and heartbeat of David Mitchell, a force of nature who wrote this unforgettable, epic tale of adventure and colossal love. It is really…all about life and love. At turns knotty, briny, ribald, sensuous, fearsome, biting, daring, cerebral, grandiose, infinitesimal, and what did I leave out? It’s panoptic, and exquisitely poetic. The first page-and-a-half of chapter XXXIX rivals Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. It will make you laugh, it will make you weep, it will make your soul utter its secrets.

The novel starts with a birth, ends with a death, like bookends to all it contains. It contains two calendars, the Gregorian and the lunar. Time is an expanding and contracting entity in this story. In the strictest and most Western sense, it is linear. But when you are addressing a more Eastern orientation, as well as gestation and birth, the lunar calendar is more fitting. Mitchell makes them work, hand in hand, in alternating chapters.

The eponymous Jacob de Zoet, the Dutch Zeelander and clerk, is the strong and very moral center of this novel. Copper-haired and green-eyed, robust but reserved, he is a devout, sensitive, patient, tolerant, artistic, and keenly intelligent young man. He is sometimes troubled, and often prescient. He is posted indefinitely on the fan-shaped, artificial island of Dejima in the bay of Nagasaki with the Dutch East India Company’s warehouses and stock and motley crew, and the year is 1799.

At first sight, Jacob falls in love with Orito Aiwabaga, midwife and student to the scholarly Dr. Marinus. A burn scar on the left side of her face is no impediment to her beauty in the eyes of Jacob; his principled nature is his obstruction. I inhabited his quiet torment and pleaded with the pages to bring them together. I fell a little in love with Jacob myself–he transcended the fictional; I felt his hands.

Drawing on historical facts but twisting it into a magnificent, almost mythical tale, Mitchell casts a spell with words and images. His juxtapositions are painterly; the narrative is colorful with stylistic and linguistic leaps that keep you on your toes. This is a demanding novel. Mitchell stays one step ahead of the reader (but not arrogantly so), and he does it with brio. It is as if he is aware of what he needs to do to take you to the fathomless waters of his prose. He starts off with these tongue-slicing, lip-curling crazy names that may frustrate you initially, but it makes you slow…down…and pay attention to the minute details as well as the grand canvas.

I have rarely read a book (in third person point of view) that makes me feel so intimate with the author’s artistic strokes. It was as if he made a contract to take our senses, gradually tune us to his rhythms, and descend further and deeper. With not one stitch of self-consciousness, he envelopes you. And there are lovely sketches in the book that add dimension to the narrative.(I wish I knew who the artist was–is it Mitchell? His wife?)

There are three major shifts in the book. The first part sets up the tension and gives you the flow and rhythm and landscape of the novel, and introduces the Dutch and Japanese equipoise of politics that teeter-totters in this faraway place. The hierarchy of administrators, leaders, shoguns, samurais, medical practitioners, merchants, interpreters, servants, and slaves encompasses the serious to the sensational, and is often comically ingenious. This is also where I was most a tenant of Jacob.

The middle section focuses more on Orito, and has a feminine spirit to it, as well as cautiously moving into a thriller mode. And just when you think you got ahead of the author, he wrests that predictability away and keeps his promise to elevate his purpose.

The third section is the most challenging to read. It begins baldly but ambiguously, with a nautical saltiness that throws you off, and a gouty Captain with a morality of uncertain definition. You know where you are, but not why you are there and how it relates to the story and themes. The language is frequently idiomatic and the circumstances initially unclear. But, Mitchell doesn’t let you down. Everything gradually connects without artificial means. And the Captain’s closing thoughts stole my breath away.

This is as close to perfect as a novel can be. (You know there will be a movie–it is beautifully cinematic without being conventional.) You will close the pages, exalted. Jacob de Zoet and Orito Aibagawa will be eternally seared in your consciousness, and this story forever in your heart. A++

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 190 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (June 29, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Mitchell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Cloud Atlas Another MF review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

Bibliography:

• Ghostwritten (1999)
• number9dream (2001)
• Cloud Atlas (2004)
• Black Swan Green (2006)
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (June 2010) Commonwealth Prize