Mitchell, the macronovel is as much an emotional undertaking as an intellectual one. (He credits/blames his publicist for forcing him to join Twitter to promote his new book.)įor Mr.
THE BONE CLOCKX SERIES
Mitchell released a short story, “The Right Sort,” about a boy on Valium, as a series of 280 tweets. Mitchell and his wife, KA Yoshida, who have an autistic son, translated “The Reason I Jump,” the memoir of an autistic Japanese teenager, and are working on another book with its author, Naoki Higashida. He has since experimented with an ever-widening range of literary forms. “This is why his work is so addictive - he’s creating his own universe,” said Sarah Dillon, a lecturer in literature and film at the University of Cambridge, who has edited a volume of scholarly essays on Mr. There are several others, but the most significant reappearance is Marinus, a Dutch doctor from “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” who plays a pivotal part in the occult war in “The Bone Clocks.” Mitchell’s semi-autobiographical novel about a British boy who struggles with a stammer, returns as a young man who makes a Faustian pact with a shady cabal. Hugo Lamb, a callous teenager from “Black Swan Green,” Mr. Mitchell has long been fond of recycling his characters and themes, and “The Bone Clocks” takes this tendency further than any of his previous works. But it quickly becomes clear that “The Bone Clocks” is the latest piece of a much larger story, a tapestry that weaves together threads from his previous books, and probably lays the groundwork for future novels. “The Bone Clocks” unfolds chronologically, and a protagonist, Holly, anchors the narrative. Mitchell’s other, more experimental books. “Wrong versions become the scaffolding that you use to build the novel,” he said.Īt first, “The Bone Clocks” seems more linear and plot driven than some of Mr. But when he started over, he had much of the novel mapped out. “It’s one of those ideas that sounds good, but when you start writing it, you hit the problem: ‘Ah, that’s why no one has done this before,’ ” Mr. After writing 13 of the stories, he got stuck. He tried to write it as 70 short stories that each took place in a single year of Holly’s life, from 1969 to 2039. Mitchell envisioned an even more intricate structure. When he began writing the novel four years ago, Mr. “In the same way that my novels are built of hyperlinked novellas, I’m sort of building what I’ve taken to calling in a highfalutin way the ‘uberbook’ out of hyperlinked novels, because I’m a megalomaniac, and I like the idea of maximum scale,” Mr. Themes and motifs that echo across his books - survival, mortality, the perils of power and the possibility of rebirth - are amplified and refined. Characters from his earlier books appear in major roles that cast their previous literary incarnations in a strange new light. Mitchell’s most ambitious work yet, and provides the key to a larger narrative puzzle - a kind of rambling macronovel - that he has been assembling across his books. “The Bone Clocks,” which is being released on Sept. “His new novel is really the first time that many readers can begin to piece the books together.” “ ‘Universe’ doesn’t seem ample enough, because each book shows you how much bigger his world is and expands the limits of what we think his stories are,” said David Ebershoff, Mr. Academics and superfans pore over his works with the intensity of Talmudic scholars, and gather at David Mitchell conferences that feature panel discussions on subjects like “Narratology and the Mitchell Multiverse.” Five of his six novels have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, including his latest, “The Bone Clocks.” His genre-defying 2004 novel, “ Cloud Atlas,” sold a million copies in North America and was adapted into a feature film. Mitchell has evolved from being a cult author with a small but rabid fan base to a major literary figure whose work has been compared to that of Nabokov, Pynchon and Dostoyevsky.
His paranoia may be justified. In the past decade, Mr. “I live in faint dread of people coming to find me,” he said. Mitchell said in a recent telephone interview. If you traveled to a small parish outside the coastal town of Clonakilty, Ireland, and asked one of the local people to introduce you to the resident writer, you’d invariably be led to David Mitchell.
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