David Mitchell: new book 2014, The Bone Clocks

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks: CW think it's a scandal that the latest work from our favourite literary genius didn't make the Booker shortlist. Joe Lloyd offers a guide to 'the Mitchellverse' 

‘What can’t the novelist David Mitchell do?’ That was the subtitle of critic James Wood ’s hagiographic account of Mitchell's work for the New Yorker , and it’s a rather apt way to begin exploring his work. No novelist writing in English today has created such an incredible diversity of narratives, and more astoundingly still, he’s done it over a mere five novels, all published in just over a decade. With his new, Booker-longlisted opus The Bone Clocks released tomorrow on Tuesday 2nd September 2014, it’s the perfect time to enter his fantastical worlds.

Mitchell was born in Merseyside and raised in Worcestershire – rather a mundane beginning for a writer whose books span continents, centuries and parallel universes . For the first five years of his life, he was unable to speak; when his voice bloomed, he suffered from a stammer. His earliest influences were the fantasy authors Ursula Le Guin and Susan Cooper, and the science fiction pioneer Isaac Asimov . After studying literature at university, he spent a period teaching English in Sicily before moving to Japan for eight years.

Mitchell's Japan 

The country looms large in Mitchell’s imagination. His first novel, Ghostwritten (1999) riffs on the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack, before ranging westward around the world for a series of seemingly separate tales. The influence of Haruki Murakami – who, in 1997, wrote a book about the incident – is clear, but Mitchell also weaves in Chinese history, Mongolian myths, philandering rock stars and quantum cognition. Somehow, it holds together, buoyed by shared themes and each chapter’s focus on exploring the consciousness of a single narrator. It won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Commonwealth writers.

Number9dream (2001) followed, and ostensibly saw Mitchell narrow his focus: the entire book follows a 19-year old Japanese teenager as he seeks his missing father. This is no straight coming-of-age tale, though. Protagonist Eiji’s imagination is only bound by that of the author himself, and so the narrative spirals out into parallel worlds and texts-within-texts.  Number9dream was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, beginning an unprecedented streak of five consecutive nominations.

Cloud Atlas and worldwide acclaim

With Cloud Atlas (2004), Mitchell’s career began to assume the dimensions of his novels. Structured like a Russian doll, with six tiered stories that nestle within one another, it moves from mid-19th century pacific voyage to post-apocalyptic Hawaii, dappling in dystopian sci-fi, pulp detective novels and Kingsley Amis-style farce. It was an unprecedented success, released to both critical acclaim and public excitement. What other novel has managed to charm both the determinedly highbrow Booker Prize and the ‘beach read’-heavy Richard and Judy Book Club, whilst being shortlisted for two of the world’s premier sci-fi awards?  In 2012, it was adapted into a blockbuster film, which bolstered Mitchell’s fame outside the literary sphere.

Despite the widespread praise, however, some suggested that Cloud Atlas’ mélange of styles didn’t quite gel. In a gushingly positive review, Philip Hensher confessed that he 'couldn’t identity a page of prose as Mitchell’s'. What if Mitchell was merely a gifted pastiche artist? Black Swan Green (2006) laid such fears to rest. A bildungsroman drawing heavily on Mitchell’s teenage life, it meticulously recreates the early 80s. The novel investigates the effects of stammering, both on its narrator’s life and on his linguistic imagination. After its release, Time magazine declared Mitchell the sixteenth most influential person in the world, an unprecedented feat for a literary writer. 

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) took four years to research. Set in Dejima, a Dutch trading post in Nagasaki, it dances around historical events while spinning its own tales of friendship, cultural interchange, romance and the supernatural. The author’s command of language – always capable of striking phrases, but seldom consistently superlative – here reached a new high, with passages of lush, glittering description often redolent of Sterne and Melville.  

The Bone Clocks

The Bone Clocks looks to bring this stylistic vim to bear the genre-bending ambition of Cloud Atlas. It begins in 1984 with the teenage runaway Holly Sykes, whose occult abilities see her unknowingly caught up in an eternal conflict. Each volume then moves ahead a decade in her life until 2043, cycling through a diverse series of narrators. Mitchell’s novels have always reused characters – creating what fans have dubbed ‘the Mitchellverse’ – but The Bone Clocks goes even further, linking all his previous works together. It’s also a potent statement of environmentalism, taking our current consumption of resources to its apocalyptic end-point.

Mitchell has achieved the rare feat of crafting a huge world that is entirely his own, a fictional universe that – while drawing on dozens of literary predecessors – remains unique. His readers trust him to take them places that many authors would not dare attempt. He has no fear of unfashionable genres and mediums. Even his short story, ‘The Right Sort’, published entirely through Twitter, seems less a gimmick than a natural fit for its subject. Read Mitchell, and prepare to have your view of contemporary writing transformed utterly.

ENTER THE MITCHELLVERSE: FIVE CHARACTERS WHO LEAP FROM BOOK TO BOOK

Denholme Cavendish

Denholme Cavendish is a shady corporation chief in Ghostwritten , but in Cloud Atlas he drives novel’s most comic plotline by trapping his brother in a nursing home. 

Neal Brose

By Ghostwritten , set in late 90s, Neal Brose is a financial lawyer in Hong Kong, caught between criminal dealings and a failed relationship. Move back to the 1983 of Black Swan Green , however, and he’s the star student in protagonist Jason Taylor’s class. 

Dr. Marinus

An aesthetic doctor stationed in Dejima, Dr. Marinus becomes the main confidante of Jacob de Zoet in the titular novel. Fast forward two centuries, and his reincarnated self becomes one of the main narrators in The Bone Clocks. He’s also been busy off the page, as a central figure in Mitchell’s opera Sunken Garden .

Boerhave

At the end of The Thousand Autumns, we meet Boerhave, midshipman of the Profetes. By the time of Cloud Atlas’ first narrative, however, he’s become first mate. His vessel? The newly standardized Prophetess. 

Eva van Crommelynck

In Cloud Atlas, Eva is the suspicious daughter of an adulterous mother; in Black Swan Green, she critiques Jason’s poetry whilst playing music composed by her mother’s lover Frobisher.