It's not every day that an internationally bestselling novelist serenades you in song, but then David Mitchell [his Amazon.com page; his Amazon.co.uk page], author of Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is not every international bestselling novelist.
We have only just begun discussing his stupendous, challenging new novel The Bone Clocks, when he asks, a little mysteriously: "Have you noticed that all the great pieces of music have a navel? They have one little section or bridge or bit – I wouldn't use any more technical language than 'bit' – that's unexpected, but makes total sense afterwards. If it wasn't there it would still be a decent piece of work, but it just wouldn't have that thing that makes you want to live with it and keep listening to it as you age."
Mitchell gives examples of his manifesto for musical immortality. “A little, slow, soft undercutting in a piano piece by Shostakovich. Or it may be little more than a Tom Petty-type Uh-huh. No one else would have done it, but it just makes a song perfect.”
For Mitchell today, it is the chorus – "a place beyond language" – of Memories Can't Wait from Talking Heads' Fear of Music [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk]. Or: "Some mem-or-RIIIies can't WAII-aitttt" as Mitchell howls it. The rendition is charming and ever so slightly alarming. You suspect he would be a fun and enthusiastic addition to karaoke, but you are secretly glad he hasn't given up the day job.
Music clearly looms large over Mitchell's imagination. In a previous interview with me, he compared his magpie creativity – mixing and matching genres, tones and voices – to the eclectic BBC Radio 3 programme Late Junction, which plays Delta blues one moment, Pink Floyd the next and Messiaen for afters. More recently, his passion found expression in collaboration with Mitchell's childhood hero, Kate Bush: he co-wrote one dialogue and two monologues for her 22 sold-out nights at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. Bush, who was a fan of the author, contacted him after he wrote a newspaper article in praise of her work. "I was a very small cog in Kate's glorious machine," he has said. "I am a very lucky man. She is an artistic hero, as she is for very many right-minded people."
The reason for Mitchell's impromptu warble is the way Fear of Music resounds throughout The Bone Clocks. The album's themes – love, war, nature, memory and above all time – sing in harmony with Mitchell's novel, something his own mini-review catches. "It is one heck of an album. It sounds better now than it did then. It has this reverse-ageing production. It's a sort of immortal record. In a book full of pseudo-immortals that is no bad thing."
The album is present at the book’s opening in 1984. Our heroine, a teenager called Holly Sykes, runs away from home. This begins the “parabola of a life” that extends over six intricately interwoven novellas, 69 years and several countries, comprising all the grand narratives: loss, grief, conflict, marriage, children, art and the end of the world as we know it. Oh, and there is also a supernatural battle between two bands of semi-immortals fighting over time itself. “It is a big, hairy, bonkers, beast of a book,” Mitchell says. “My head is kind of spinning.”
Something similar happens to my head while talking to Mitchell himself. Open and friendly, he seems to regard an interview as an opportunity to whizz through ideas rather than as a process to be wary of. He is unfazed by personal questions, although he proves adept at deflecting them back towards his interrogator. When he learns I have a newborn daughter, he offers some paternal advice as the father of a daughter, age 12, and an 8-year-old son, whose autism Mitchell wrote movingly about in The Reason I Jump [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk], a book by 13-year-old Naoki Higashid that he translated with his wife Keiko.
“Enjoy ’em, relish ’em,” Mitchell tells me. “If you have the choice between working or playing on the trampoline, go out and play. You think you’ve made them – you haven’t. They are just on loan. They are with you for a short, middle section of your life. You think these yawning years of poo, nappies and sleeplessness will go on. Before you know it, they’re over. So, the trampoline, my friend, every time.”
What is striking about Mitchell’s conversation is how similar it is to the effervescent, free-range, culturally absorbent prose of his books. His eloquence, which is very occasionally impeded by traces of a childhood stammer, constantly runneth over. There are quotes, allusions, anecdotes and a belief that three words are not only better than one, they are necessary to say exactly what he wants.
“Being a writer is about amplifying or utilising or sprinkling phosphates or fertiliser over the imaginative processes that make worlds that aren’t and spending time with people who don’t actually exist. It is what writing is all about, especially if it is going to be any good.”
Both Mitchell and his fictions dash between high and low art without breaking stride. Early works like Ghostwritten and number9dream exhibit the influence of his eight years spent teaching English in Japan – their narratives are shaped by Haruki Murakami, but also anime and manga. His masterpiece, Cloud Atlas, glides from convincing 19th-century pastiche in the Pacific via American pulp thrillers to science fiction in Korea. In conversation today, Mitchell starts with Talking Heads, Shostakovich and Tom Petty, before name-checking Thomas Mann, Hari Kunzru, cheese-pop band Aqua, Game of Thrones and Star Trek's Jean-Luc Picard. He illustrates his belief that fiction is an "inexact" art form through a metaphor involving Pac-Man.
“I view the division between highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow as an artificial division imposed by snobbery and inverted snobbery. It doesn’t matter if it’s highbrow or lowbrow, high art or low art. What matters is whether it is any good or not.”
In The Bone Clocks, Mitchell pastiches contemporary giants like Martin Amis, quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley, but also employs narrative forms drawn from Dungeons & Dragons and fuses social realism with fantasy. Mitchell admits these hybrid concoctions can be strange and even unstable. "I balance them on a wing and a prayer. It is a hazardous thing to do. The risk is that if I have all this stuff that is not so – circles of semi-immortals fighting in this Chapel of the Dusk between life and death – then how can I ask people to take seriously what I want to say about the occupation of Iraq in the same book?"
Mitchell’s answer suggests ways that all art forms mix the mundane and the incredible, just as all lives combine the material with the fantastic. Underlying each extreme is Mitchell’s theory of time’s relativity. “The fantasy section is the distillation of the idea that time passes strangely depending on our experiences. The idea that time goes at different speeds all at once is already extraordinary.”
In its more recognisably realist mode, The Bone Clocks surveys the past 40 years of world history – from the monetarist, Thatcherite 1980s in Britain via the virtual reality aspirations of the 1990s to the economically doomed, war-torn present. "As well as a parabola of a life, I also wanted a snapshot of the world from a British perspective, albeit through different lenses in terms of gender and class."
One of the most striking novellas – “The Wedding Bash”, set in 2004 – is narrated by Holly’s husband Ed, a war correspondent in Baghdad who faces one of many stark choices that Mitchell throws at his characters’ feet. Asked by his wife to leave the dangers of Iraq, he must either lose the job that gives his life meaning or the family whose nerves have been shredded by worry.
For Mitchell, Britain’s involvement in Iraq will define an entire era. “In future history books, this period of British history will be the central event from which all the other things unravel. It was hubris to get involved. It was an ignorant move. It wrecked the reputation of a previously pretty popular prime minister. It was the rock against which Tony Blair’s New Labour foundered. The reputational damage to the government was insurmountable as was the damage to Britain in the world.”
Mitchell cites Britain’s tattered reputation as the defender of political fair play. “That was trashed by Iraq. Its endgame was, I believe, politically and militarily mortifying. I am not clever enough or analytical enough on the Middle East to make the connections between ISIL and the Iraq war but they are there. They heighten and do not lessen the culpability of what we like to call a Coalition of the Willing.”
Read in the weeks following the brutal murders of British and American hostages by Islamist extremists, Ed's quandary is timely indeed. Noticeably, The Bone Clocks contains more than one portrait of a writer in crisis. But whereas Ed cannot escape reality's grip on his imagination, others – most obviously the ageing English novelist Crispin Hershey – are sliding inexorably in the other direction towards a life of near-illusion.
These characters recur often enough for me to ask whether Mitchell has similar misgivings about his chosen career. “In some ways [writing] does insulate or disconnect you. However, writers and poets play this up when they are young, often to get laid – to make them appear more extraterrestrial, otherworldly, vulnerable and remarkable than they actually are. They are just word nerds, and let’s not forget that.”
A more sincere and straightforward response is that Mitchell loves his job. “It’s profoundly fulfilling when writing goes well. You sometimes meet writers at festivals who go: ‘Poor me. No one understands how hard my job is.’ I just want to hit them. If you are a writer and make a living out of this, you are bloody lucky. If you think this is hard, try being a slave on a Thai prawn-fishing boat or in a Bangladesh textile factory or a Nepalese stadium builder in Qatar. We have nothing to complain about compared to that.”
One could argue, however, that Mitchell has had some cause for complaint in recent weeks. The Bone Clocks was longlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, but failed to make the shortlist – the lucky winner will be announced next week. And one wonders whether his send-up of literary competition in the form of the Brittan Prize played a part in its rejection. Mitchell himself was a vocal supporter of the much-trumpeted alternative to the Man Booker, The Folio Prize. Mitchell proves typically gracious about the competition. "The Man Booker was very generous to me in my early career," he says, referring to number9dream and Cloud Atlas, which both made the shortlist. "It owes me nothing."
He is similarly careful, albeit in light-hearted fashion, when I hypothesise that the bibulous, out-of-touch Crispin Hershey is a dead ringer for Martin Amis. “Not going there, mate. Not with specific names,” Mitchell says, a touch naughtily. “It’s more me. It’s the aspects of me that are less praiseworthy and would run amok without a stable family and a well-grounded wife who knew me before I became a writer.”
I try another plot involving the puffed-up but genial Crispin. Upon discovering that an old friend has trashed his latest novel, he revenges himself by planting cocaine in the reviewer's suitcase at a Colombian literary festival. The critic winds up in a terrifying prison. I spoke to Mitchell before The Bone Clocks began receiving its usual glowing notices, sprinkled with the odd unflattering assessment: see James Wood's sceptical piece in The New Yorker. Has he ever wanted to wreak revenge on a nasty critic?
“I have been tempted to smuggle cocaine into certain suitcases and then alert the authorities,” he replies, a little mischievously. “Of course I never would, my dear boy.” The real answer is that Mitchell no longer reads reviews. “The good ones and the bad ones are wasps at the picnic of a calm mind. You need a calm mind to work. But my editor knows that any email which accidentally contains encouraging phrases will not be deleted before they are read.”
Mitchell really does mean that about good reviews, arguing that praise can be as “corrosive” to the creative process as censure. “The good ones appeal to parts of me that I am not proud of. I am egotistical enough, believe it or not. You shouldn’t be thinking where you are in the pantheon, or where you are compared to your contemporaries. If you give that any credence, when the wind changes direction your self-esteem is disembowelled. You can’t accept the praise without rendering yourself dangerously vulnerable to negative criticism. The biggest question should be, How do I make this damn book work?”
Mitchell is now 45, and his immediate literary reputation seems assured. There has been the odd hiccup: the movie adaptation of Cloud Atlas was widely disliked, but that is hardly his fault. While he is characteristically kind about the film, he doesn't always sound as secure about his own future.
His unease is partly global in nature. The Bone Clocks ends with Holly living in Ireland (not far from her creator's home in Clonakilty) and facing what appears to be an environmental apocalypse. How concerned is Mitchell that the end of the world is nigh – if not for him, then for his children? "I am pretty worried. Civilisations do collapse. Sometimes they collapse in slow motion. Others collapse almost overnight. You can't see it until the buildings have fallen on you."
But the sense that time is running out has personal dimensions as well. A central narrative pulse in The Bone Clocks is a Faustian pact offered to the ambitious, shallow Cambridge student, Hugo Lamb, who must choose between love with Holly Sykes and eternal life. "What would you do if you had the choice between this beautiful potential soulmate who could help you become a better, less selfish man, but you will eventually age and die? Or, if you amputate your conscience, you can become immune to mortality? You can keep your looks, your youth and your health indefinitely." Mitchell lets the question hang. "I think the honest answer is you wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. I know I wouldn't."
But, I prompt, unlike Hugo Lamb, Mitchell isn’t getting any younger. “Is it my midlife crisis novel you mean?” Mitchell laughs, before returning my serve and asking my own age. “You are old enough to know what I mean. Death is no longer a conceptual thing that is not going to happen, is it? You can feel mortality in your kneecaps, can’t you, and the shortness of your breath when you take the stairs rather than the escalator. You look in the mirror and see your father. Your ears grow larger as your head begins to shrink. If you look closely, the gums around your incisors are receding. That’s where we get the phrase long in the tooth.” Mitchell pauses. “My dentist told me that. He’s a few years younger than me, the b******.”
Mitchell says that the idea of art and art's immortality – whether Talking Heads' or his own – gives small, but significant comfort. "It is true in a non-mystical way that what Shakespeare thought did not die when he did. Wouldn't it be disingenuous to admit that that's a little bit attractive?" Mitchell himself has already published a new story, The Right Sort, albeit on Twitter, and has planned his next major book.
Ask if he thinks about death, and he sounds pleasingly unfazed. "We'd be crazy not to. It's right that we think about it and do what we can to prepare for it. I don't like this aspect of our culture that sees death as the taboo." He mentions reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead while writing The Bone Clocks. But it is another authority who boldly has the final word, and offers a slice of intergalactic carpe diem about life, death and time itself. "To quote Captain Jean-Luc Picard in one of the Star Trek films: Think of death as a constant companion rather than an enemy, a companion that walks on your shoulder through life and just whispers at your ear. Enjoy this. Relish this. It won't last forever."
James Kidd is a freelance reviewer based in London.