Interviews
Barnes & Noble Review Interview with David Mitchell
David Mitchell has reason to be preoccupied. It's not just the fluorescent-lit din reverberating through Manhattan's Javits Center. Which would surely be enough to distract anyone trying to have a conversation about the architecture of a novel, the endgame of an oil-addicted society, or the peak years of the band Talking Heads — all of which are subjects Mitchell engages with brio. But then there's the matter of the poster hanging grandly over the entrance to Book Expo America, a political- rally-worthy banner that heralds his novel The Bone Clocks Mitchell's own face beams down from its center, and the writer finds in it an example of what he calls a persistent "what am I doing here?" feeling. "It's spooky!" he says in cheerful amazement. "Like Ozymandias."
The Egyptian ruler of Shelley's sonnet, whose statuary head is all that is left to testify to a once-godlike reign, is a character one can imagine the author of Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet taking on eagerly — in part because the novelist has made a habit out of shuttling between past, present, and future with apparently effortless fluency. But also because Mitchell's fiction frequently deals with the hubris of the powerful, the humbling contingencies of fate, and how one era's illusions seem to dissolve when viewed backwards from tomorrow.
With The Bone Clocks the novelist shuffles time, place and point of view much as he did in his internationally bestselling Cloud Atlas, but in this book the individual stories — the adolescent travails of teenage runaway in 1980s England, the coming-of-age of a sociopathic charmer, a journalist's Iraq war nightmare, the late-career crisis of a "bad boy" novelist, and a vision of near-future Ireland after a global catastrophe — are connected not only by character-crossings but by a supernatural super-narrative. Telepathic parasites and reincarnated heroes wage a secret war down the centuries, defined by a mystical "Script," sometimes secreting themselves within the memories of ordinary humans, their conflict eventually erupting in a climactic psychic brawl in the Chapel of the Dusk.
Meanwhile, Mitchell's practice of letting his actors slip from one novel into another is even more than usually on view: Figures from Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet appear, some to play major roles in the action, others making quick appearances that seem largely there for the mutual amusement of author and reader. Readers interested in cameo spotting can make a quite game of it (hint: not all of the recurring players are human).
Marshaling this staggering array of instruments and performers, and an intricate score to work from, Mitchell conducts a symphony on themes that are familiar to readers of his work: the fear of death, the ease with which we justify selfishness and cruelty, and the corresponding beauty of human solidarity in the face of those antagonists.
Despite the distractions of the cacophonous hall and the demands of a crowded interview schedule, the novelist brought passionate animation to our dialogue about his initial plans for The Bone Clocks, the ideas that animate its flights of fancy and dead-serious visions, and the writers who have influenced his unclassifiable work. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. - - Bill Tipper
The Barnes & Noble Review: Can you talk first about the conception and genesis of The Bone Clocks? What aspect of this book was the first part for you, that you can recall?
David Mitchell: A desire to trace the parameter of life from teenage years to old age, to invent sort of the Mike Leigh aspects, you might call them, as opposed to the David Lynch aspects. Sometimes covert, and, in a latter section, making that as overt as it could possibly be.
BNR: Did you begin thinking there will be would be supernatural phenomena as an important part of the book? Were telepathy and reincarnation initially elements of that story? Or did that come in later, as it were?
DM: It's the first time I'm really thinking back: My original aspiration was to capture something massive, to go for broke and call up, or haul in, as many elements of existence as I possibly could. If I'm honest, I think at that point I wasn't even thinking about how this could possibly be any kind of coherent novel. My only plan was sixty stories over sixty years, from age ten through to age seventy. Not all about Holly Sykes.
BNR: So the teenage Holly Sykes, who The Bone Clocks follows from a 1980s teenage crisis through to her old age in the 2040s — later became the keystone in that conception?
DM: Yes. The thread maybe running through all of them. To do a fictional documentary of a life: that's how I started, and it got to about ten or fifteen different stories. Then I found the fatal flaw, which was that a short story is not actually a chapter. I could kind of get away with this in Black Swan Green, because there's only thirteen, and each of those chapters — apart from the last one or two — I wrote as a sort of theoretically abstracted and self-contained short story.
However, when you get past a certain point — when you get into double digits — the reader never knows when to sit up and pay attention and mark down the characters who are going to be coming back, or things that are coming back, or not. So you're constantly not-knowing what's important or not. In a novel, this is sort of sorted for you. But in short stories, everything is important. So fairly early on, I hit this wall or this chasm that I couldn't cross and when you do that — it's always the same, and I've been here before. It means you have to restructure.
So instead of doing sixty stories, I'm doing six novellas, one per decade. That's handle-able. I could get my aspiration to do the parabola of a life, but I'm only making six worlds per novel, and I know where everything is.
That's the super-structure: the portrait of a life. Not a person at a moment in life, but of a life. That's why we get Holly as a teenager, as a young lover, as a mother and a partner, as a widow and a sort of an accidental appear-to-be-a-writer. That's sometimes a feeling that I have, too: What am I doing here again?
BNR: Since you raise that — can we talk about the roman à clef side to The Bone Clocks. You dig rather heavily into the less-than-attractive aspects of a successful novelist's life in the portrait of Crispin Hershey. He works partly, it seems, as a balancing point between Hugo Lamb's sociopathy and the "Good Guys," Ed, Marinus, and Holly — but it's also true that one can't help but see him as a representative of the novelist in the text.
DM: Crispin Hershey is all the worst parts of me, amplified and smooshed together. We occupy the same profession and visit the same book festivals and trade fairs. He has a big mouth, relishes confrontation (unlike me) and says things that I either wouldn't dare, or lack the willingness to handle the fall-out from saying them. He doesn't seem to notice the connection between his rudeness and his unhappiness, or the link between his reluctance to work at his marriage and its slow-motion disintegration. He's a perceptive writer but not a perceptive self- examiner. I've met many novelists who are much more enlightened human beings than Crispin, and a few who make Crispin look sorted.
Holly notices a better man within, eventually, and this perhaps brings the better Hershey closer to the surface. But I wanted Holly to not just be there or to respond to other characters, but also to be seen. That's why she's only a point-of-view character in the first and the final sections. She's seen, by others, as a lover. She's seen as a partner. She's seen as a colleague and a friend by Crispin. She's seen as a fellow fighter in this weird, murderous feud. She's eventually seen as a grandmother figure, this time from her own point of view — but I think she's earned the right.
BNR: Let's talk about that weird, murderous feud. That portrait of Holly's life turns on a fantastic narrative in which you have long-lived groups of people who sort of transcend ordinary lives, the Horologists and the Anchorites. Can you quickly characterize these two sides?
DM: Sure — they are both pseudo-immortals. I call them "pseudo- immortals" because they are not immortal like the Wandering Jew, and they aren't indestructible. They occupy two circles, and the rules for each are somewhat different. The first group, the Horologists, are either involuntarily reincarnated after they die, or are souls who can literally jump from body to body to body, more or less at will, like Esther Little.
They don't know their own creation story. They don't know how they came to be this way. They just were born like Marinus in the sixth century in San Marino, who dies like everyone else, but forty-nine days later is back in a body of the opposite gender to the previous life. No idea why. He has gone through the various possibilities, but has come to accept now that he does not know and cannot know. Maybe he will know one day — or she will know one day — but for now, she doesn't, and that's the way it's got to be.
BNR: Under the leadership of one or two, the Horologists have begun to find each other, and now, once you have enough of them they have figured out "there are multiples of us in the world, and we should band together."
DM: Yes. And one thing that gives them a raison d' être is the other type of immortal, the Anchorites. These are much more predatory. They have entered or discovered a band of occultism called The Shaded Way, and this teaches not only some you might call rudimentary psychic abilities, but also a big one, which is how to treat death. Shaded Way immortality — pseudo-immortality — involves the conversion of psycho-voltaic charge (in other words, other people's souls) into a substance the Anchorites imbibe, which in this case is called Black Wine. In Jacob de Zoet it was called Oil of Souls, I think.
BNR: For those who haven't read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, there is a part of that story which kind of hints or touches on this practice in one evil character, Enomoto, the powerful abbot of a Japanese monastery. It's clear in The Bone Clocks that he is part of this tradition of the Shaded Way.
DM: Yes. In The Bone Clocks, the Horologists categorize the Anchorites as "carnivores" because they consume innocent individuals with some latent psychic ability, like Holly — they take a few a year.
BNR: So they harvest, as it were, some number of souls, usually children — without the rest of the mythology, they're vampires in the tradition of Bram Stoker's Dracula. An innocent person has to be sacrificed; their soul has to be decanted and consumed.
DM: From our point of view, it's evil. From their point of view, it's not significantly different to the way that we farm animals on a huge scale and eat their body parts for our own pleasure, when we don't even need to, to keep us alive. I want their evil to be rational from their standpoint. Otherwise it's merely evil, and that's rather boring.
BNR: They are taking a small number of lives. When they have little verbal encounters with the Horologists, they bring this up. "Listen, be reasonable . . . "
DM: "There's 8 billion people on the planet."
BNR: People die from all kinds of causes every day, many of them human-driven causes. "We're just taking a few," and . . .
DM: And "Join us!"
BNR: That question of dangerously slippery moral questions about individual survival and collective good come back to your vision of the 2040s. I don't want to give too much away, but as we move through time with Holly's life and the lives of others that kind of cluster around her, we follow move from the 1980s into the new century, dive into the horror of the Iraq war, and eventually wind up with Holly as an older woman, living in Ireland in the 2040s, when a global climate crisis has really, really devastated civilization's infrastructure. It's a fairly bleak and fragmented kind of world that she and those people around her are seen facing.
DM: It's looking very sixteenth-century, isn't it?
BNR: Very Hobbesian. The Bone Clocks' coda offers a vision of the networked order having broken down, and a return to a world of pretty unvarnished all-against-all.
DM: Might is right. Unfortunately, I'm not making the 2040s up. That doesn't feel unrealistic to me. It looks like horribly probable. But consider that all of this is only possible because of oil, and we are sleepwalking into catastrophe. Our civilization runs on oil. All of it. And we're not voting for politicians who would do something about it. We're not mobilizing. They're allocating our resources. It's not being worried about it, instead of action.
That's a bit dark — but that was always going to be in the 60 stories, and it made it into the larger six as well.
BNR: That vision of terrifying violence — and the way that these collective global decisions play out with decidedly personal, tragic consequences for individuals — is foreshadowed in the section of the novel that follows Ed, Holly's boyfriend and the father of her daughter. He becomes a war correspondent, traumatized by the loss of his colleagues in Iraq but continually drawn to return to the war zone. When did you decide to make Ed's story — and therefore the Iraq war - - part of The Bone Clocks?
DM: Early on. The Iraq war was the foreign-policy event — many would say debacle — of the decade in both British and American (not to mention Middle Eastern) political history, and has deadened the appetites of our electorates for any kind of military invention, anywhere, however needed or justified. One o The Bone Clocks' objects is to try to bottle the zeitgeist of each decade in the novella set in that decade, so for the 2000s novella, a connection with Iraq was the pre-eminent contender.
BNR: To move from character to the style of your writing, your books always deliver a resolute crackle at the sentence level. At one point I thought of Roald Dahl's fictional drink frobscottle, from The BFG, and the extent to which there's an intensely carbonated fizz and pop to your scenes. Even while you're constructing this grand arc it seems you have to get in there and see if you can squeeze another metaphor out of a character's narration of a moment. So we get a couple of characters in particular who seem born to do that. Obviously, Crispin Hershey, who is a novelist and whose stock in trade is doing that himself.
DM: He can't stop doing it! He'd be a happier man if he saw the world less in metaphor.
BNR: But there's also Hugo Lamb, whom readers originally met as a cruel young man in the pages of Black Swan Green — he's a villain, but he is one of the most charming and ingratiating of your characters. One wants to keep listening to him talk.
DM: Thank you very much. It was sort of decided for me by Jason in Black Swan Green, who notes how Hugo wields power. Jason, of course, who stammers, can't speak very well and is shy, and has sort of a middle-class hang-up in a lower-middle-class school, where speaking in too high a register will get your head kicked in. Jason observes how Hugo can just create reality with his voice. It's like an act of suasion. Just through the power of his voice, he can make people do things that they wouldn't otherwise do, just by speaking. Like Kevin Spacey in House of Cards. It's more powerful than magic, actually. Magic needs to be constantly touched up. But Hugo will just reverse a situation entirely to his advantage. Not unlike Patricia Highsmith's Ripley — but Ripley has got a class chip on his shoulder which Hugo actually hasn't.
BNR: Hugo has a mortality chip on his shoulder.
DM: I'll use that, if I may! Yeah — he has a big mortality chip. It keeps him interested in life. He's sort of an after-Ripley. You can see his future. He can get as much power and money as he wants. He's had any woman he wants. But then what? BNR: For a young man, he's very aware of the limitations of what you can get in a mortal life, something that seems to make him ripe for recruitment by a society of immortals.
DM: Exactly. What's Anchorites' criteria for choosing their recruits? It fits people who can already see beyond the relativity meager rewards of the world of success, and cannot stand the fact that whatever you do, however much you get, you're still going to end up a stinking corpse, like all these stinking plebs. You're no better than them after death.
Now, that's the one to beat. That's the battle to take on and work out. That's interesting. That's what floats Hugo's boat. How can you cheat decrepitude and death? That's what makes him the perfect recruit. Because the price is that you have to be willing to have your conscience amputated and you have to want it that badly, and they can see that Hugo does, or would do, if he hadn't spent that one night with Holly Sykes . . . And he still does want it, but when the chance is . . . There's just a speck of her still in him.
BNR: If the supernatural element of The Bone Clocks was actually foreshadowed in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, were you aware as you wrote that novel that your next would take on a more overtly mystical conception — dueling psychic societies, mind control and immortal intelligences?
DM: An easy question: yes. Doctor Lucas Marinus' atemporality is why, in The Thousand Autumns, he is so unfazed by death (he's on his twenty-eighth lifetime) and so sympathetic to women and slaves (he has been them, many times.) But I wanted to keep the supernatural elements in the background, because it was important to me that the book came over primarily as a historical novel.
BNR: Did you experience any tension between your desire to create that six-novella "documentary arc" of a life and the choice to explore the numinous or supernatural realm?
DM: Often. But this kind of tension or ambiguity within a novel's identity ? not just the plot, but in the genre and structure of the book itself ? can be a strong propulsive force, and a cliché-repellent.
BNR: Were there writers that you were informed by in telling this story which kind of goes in some directions you haven't gone before?
DM: Oh, there must have been. In a way, everyone I like, I am somewhat envious of, and when I feel that envy, I wish to emulate it. Friends as well. Give me some names.
BNR: Ursula Le Guin?
DM: Oh, yes! Oh, she's amazing. I met her. It was one of the best encounters of my life. I was asked yesterday what books I re-read, and very, very few, but The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness about every ten years — and they are better each time. Why? I still don't know. I'm getting on a gender soapbox there. I think if she were male, she'd be published by American Classics, and she'd have sober, hardback . . . Those two books are canonical, I think. They are astonishing novels. But they still put them in with the kind of books that have lizard women on the covers.
BNR: Have you read the Earthsea books?
DM: I've read all of them.
BNR: There was a way in which Holly at the end seemed like some of LeGuin's older female heroines who have quietly resisted the forces around them.
DM: I can name some: Tehanu. What's the name of the character who is a girl in The Tombs of Atuan, that gets out?
BNR: Tenar.
DM: Yes. Love them.
BNR: Whom are you reading now?
DM: I go back to Chekhov every year, probably.
BNR: Which Chekhov in particular?
DM: Just short stories. Also his novella The Duel. Recently, The Book of Strange New Things, by Michel Faber.
BNR: Under the Skin is an amazing book. I have not yet read The Book of Strange New Things.
DM: You've got a huge, delicious treat. It's really good. Like Under the Skin.
BNR: Hugo, Holly, and Marinus all respond deeply to music, pop and classical, throughout, and going back to Number9Dream or Cloud Atlas, which count musicians and composers among their characters, music runs as a strong thread through your work.
DM: It does — it matters to me, and I think it matters to most people. It's just we don't always agree on what music should be the one that matters. But can you imagine a life without music? I'd rather not.
BNR: Do you listen while you write?
DM: There is a stream of writing music that works. Instrumental, small ensemble — Bach is pretty good writing music. Brian Eno is good writing music, actually.
BNR: Chamber rather than symphonic?
DM: Yeah, that can probably get too tempestuous, and it can't be sung in any language I have any knowledge of whatsoever. Fortunately, that's only really English, Italian and Japanese. Or koto or harp music. I don't mean it disparagingly, but music you can call somewhat noodling music, that isn't too insistent about melody.
BNR: One prominent source of musical inspiration stands out in the novel, particularly for Holly: the band Talking Heads. When teenage Holly imagines herself in a rock band, it's as bassist Tina Weymouth. One of her companions in the final chapter is a dog named Zimbra. If there's a Talking Heads song that The Bone Clocks could be associated with, what would it be?
DM: At the request of my UK publisher I spent the morning putting together a Spotify playlist for The Bone Clocks. Its second track is "Heaven," and its penultimate track is "Memories Can't Wait", both from the Talking Heads' Fear of Music album. The sense of pointless stasis conjured by "Heaven" is for the Anchorites in The Bone Clocks, and "Memories Can't Wait" is for the role that Holly's memory plays in the book as an asylum for Esther Little.
BNR: Coming back to Holly's story, or the story of the world as she experiences it...is that going to carry on in any future volumes? Or do you know?
DM: Yes. Three books from now, I will do the third book in what I am very, very loosely calling The Marinus Trilogy, and we'll find out . . .
BNR: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet being the first and The Bone Clocks being in the second.
DM: So there's two and a half more books. There's a novella next in line, then a medium-sized novel, and then a big thumper, and then we'll find out about the Prescients in Iceland — and the fusion-powered ship in Cloud Atlas . . . They are the Prescients . . . The people who are the Prescients, and the think tank that one of Marinus' surviving colleagues is called Prescience.
BNR: Is making some of your characters "atemporal" an author's way of never having to say goodbye?
DM: My hyperlinking of characters between books is more my way of never needing to decide if a goodbye is a goodbye or an au revoir. I can potentially bring any of them back, whether they're atemporal or not. As long as we're alive, The End is never The End.
—September 2, 2014
