He and Keiko came to Ireland partly because it is a place that neither of them knew - "It's sort of easier when you're in a third country, if things go wrong it's nobody's fault" - and partly because Japan had become too expensive. After graduating from the University of Kent, he sat on the waiting list for McDonald's for months, then just thought enough, and went to teach English in Tokyo. He moved to Japan in the early 1990s after failing to get a job in Britain. Last year, Mitchell moved from Japan to Ireland, and is currently renting a bungalow outside Cork with his Japanese wife, Keiko, and their nearly-two-year-old daughter, Hana. "There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why." When he started on Cloud Atlas three years ago, he originally planned to write nine separate narratives and a book of around 900 pages, but eventually saw the light and settled for six overlapping stories and a book of 500-ish pages. "You have to distinguish between workable innovation and unworkable innovation," he says. Mitchell is also aware that experiment for the sake of it leads you into all kinds of cul-de-sacs. His new book has a brilliant comic creation in the character of Timothy Cavendish, a louche publisher who had a walk-on part in Ghostwritten, and a lot of good jokes - my favourite being a tantric sexual position called the Plumber (you stay in for ages and nobody comes). He will spend ages writing biographies for all his narrators, working out the speech patterns and the childhood traumas, before he even starts on the ghost of a story. But what saves his books from being just brilliant formal experiments is the heart with which he writes, the humour, and the absolute conviction with which he draws his characters. His books are dense, noisy with life - a string of multi-layered narratives.Īll of which makes Mitchell sound an annoyingly tricksy writer, and it's true that his critics have him down as a bit of a clever clogs, too ambitious for his own good. So instead of ruminations on a childhood in rural Worcestershire, we have had, to date, the inner lives of: a Japanese terrorist, a nuclear physicist, an art thief (his debut, Ghostwritten) Tokyo gangsters and submarine pilots (Number 9 Dream) and now, in Mitchell's new novel, Cloud Atlas, a 19th-century lawyer, an investigative journalist and a doomed clone from the future. By the time he started writing seriously, he says, he wanted "to write the world, underlined three times, three exclamation marks".
This, of course, has never been his point, and until recently he had almost no interest in delving into his own life story. I t's a rule of thumb that precocious young novelists start off with something loosely autobiographical - drug-taking in Leith or high jinks in Camden, say - but three books into his career, David Mitchell has revealed very little of himself.
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