David Mitchell

The novel is a series of nine episodes, each about a different character in a different city: a young record store clerk in Tokyo, a British investment banker in Hong Kong, an old woman running a noodle shop on the side of a holy mountain in China, a former courtesan turned art thief in St. Petersburg, a philandering ghostwriter in London, an Irish scientist hiding out in her hometown, a Manhattan DJ, a demented follower of a Japanese doomsday cult and even a disembodied entity that travels from one human host to another via touch. These people don’t know each other, but they’re linked by a web of glancing connections — shared acquaintances or sexual partners, a ride on the same boat, a brief meeting on the street. One character almost accidentally saves another’s life; one witnesses another’s death.

About a third of the way through, an underlying thread emerges, a somewhat half-baked scenario involving a manmade (but not man-mastered — oh, no!) superintelligence grappling with humanity’s self-destructive tendencies. This story line turns up too late to unify what’s essentially — like Richard Linklater’s film “Slacker” — a variation on Arthur Schnitzler’s “La Ronde,” the sort of literary game that, to be fair, is devilishly hard to pull off: How do you make purposely random segments feel like part of a whole? (Linklater did it by making his characters part of a subculture that he wanted to document.) And some of the chapters in “Ghostwritten” do work on their own, for Mitchell has a genuine aptitude for storytelling.

Too often, though, even the enjoyable segments of “Ghostwritten” bring to mind other writers (who tend to be more accomplished with the sort of material at hand): The Tokyo episode feels like Haruki Murakami, the London bit like Nick Hornby, and midway through the disembodied entity chapter I thought, “Hey, wasn’t this a Denzel Washington movie?” The apocalyptic superintelligence plot itself appears courtesy of a zillion science fiction stories and films. The result is often readable, but never inspired, a peculiar effect considering the project is the kind of thing usually only attempted by eccentric geniuses following fiercely individual visions. It’s as if a B-plus architecture student decided to build his own interpretation of Antonio Gaudm’s Sagrada Familia.

And like Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” (published earlier this year), “Ghostwritten” injects pop attitude into what were once frustratingly cryptic or dauntingly cerebral postmodern experiments. But, unlike Danielewski, who grafted Borgesian ontological puzzles onto a Stephen King plot, Mitchell doesn’t yet seem to have invented a cocktail that really packs a wallop — though perhaps someday he will. “Ghostwritten” feels like the product of a sensibility that’s still unformed and still too easily swayed by literary influence, yet it is often entertaining. It may be bubble-gum DeLillo, but it does prove one thing: Underripe maximalism beats underripe minimalism any day of the week.

More important, however, “Cloud Atlas” is deliciously fun to read; this determination to beguile is what’s most innovative about Mitchell as a novelist interested in playing with the form; he realizes that experimentation doesn’t constitute a license to bore. Furthermore, in the books Mitchell has published since “Cloud Atlas” — the coming-of-age novel “Black Swan Green” and now a historical novel, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” — you can detect an appealingly humble and questing sensibility at work. Booker nominations and best-of-the-2000s list placements aside, it’s clear that Mitchell knows he’s still figuring it out — that he isn’t going to settle for becoming either the M.C. Escher of literary fiction or a postmodernist mandarin.

“The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” is less successful than “Black Swan Green,” but eminently worth reading all the same. It’s a tricky book; the first part, some 170-plus pages, feels like a worthy but not especially exciting historical novel. It describes the experiences of the titular Dutch clerk as he arrives at Dejima, a small artificial island in Nagasaki harbor, in 1799. The island is an outpost of the once-formidable Dutch East India Company, and the bridge that joins it to the mainland is the sole avenue by which the Japanese are permitted to encounter Europeans (and vice versa) under the extreme isolationist policies of the Edo period.

An upright but likable Calvinist, Jacob serves the new chief of the compound in his crusade to clean up the skimming, bribing, swindling and smuggling perpetrated by the company’s motley crew of hands and officials. This does not make him popular. Meanwhile, the community’s doctor, a gruff paradigm of Enlightenment attitudes, has been allowed to teach European medicine to a small group of Japanese students, one of them a talented midwife named Orito Aibagawa. Jacob becomes infatuated with Orito and, despite his engagement to a woman back in the Netherlands, proposes that she become his “Dejima wife” — a necessarily temporary arrangement since no Japanese are allowed to leave the country and no foreigner can take up residence there.

This is a premise so overburdened with cultural baggage that it comes pre-scored with arias from “Madama Butterfly.” Mitchell tries to pinch off budding charges of exoticism by making Orito somewhat physically marred by a burn (that is, she’s not idealized) and by having Dr. Marinus ridicule Jacob as one of the “hundreds of … besotted white men” convinced that his “adoration for his Pearl of the East is based on chivalry: behold the disfigured damsel, spurned by her own race! Behold our Occidental Knight, who alone divines her inner beauty!” Unfortunately, Jacob can’t be defended effectively because his position isn’t defensible; Dr. Marinus correctly tells him that his devotion would be best expressed by leaving Orito alone.

It also soon becomes obvious that the corruption in Dejima is incorrigible, leaving our hero with one purpose that can’t be achieved and another that shouldn’t. This makes for a passive protagonist and a somewhat hamstrung narrative until a minor character — a sinister aristocrat right out of a penny-dreadful melodrama — swoops in to kidnap Orito and carry the novel into an invigorating gothic register. The point of view shifts to Orito and several other Japanese characters, upending the view of things previously established through Jacob’s eyes. There’s a fortresslike convent up in the mountains where unspeakable rites are performed and a swashbuckling rescue plan.

Later still, the novel’s third part flips back to Nagasaki harbor, where (in a development based on a historical incident) the captain of a British frigate attempts to take over Dejima and the Dutch monopoly on trade with Japan. (While Jacob has been pining and Orito languishing, the Dutch East India Company has gone bankrupt and Napoleon has conquered the Netherlands.) It’s an opportunity for Jacob to prove himself, but events prove to be determined more by coincidence, luck and the unpredictability of compassion and self-sacrifice than by anyone’s well-laid plans.

What knits together the three parts of “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” with their three disparate types of storytelling — genteel historical love story, gothic adventure and maritime yarn — is an underlying theme of confinement and isolation and how both may be transcended, even to the point of escaping the limitations of the body itself. The transmigration of souls is a device Mitchell has deployed more than once, but in this book the villain is the notion’s foremost proponent; he literally steals souls.

For the more ethical characters in “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” it’s not so easy. The novel is replete with islands and fortresses both literal and metaphorical. Bickering characters cooped up together in Dejima, in the convent, and aboard the good ship Phoebus demonstrate that if anything is universal to the human condition, it’s office politics. There’s also a single chapter, told from the point of view of a Malay slave, that contains some of Mitchell’s best writing yet. This man, Moses, ruminates on what it means to have your hours, your family, your very skin and fingers, owned by somebody else, and on the refuge he’s found in creating “a mind like an island … protected by a deep blue sea.” And right there Mitchell proves that of all the ways to bridge what another of his characters describes as the “intolerable gulf” between people, the imaginative adventure of writing and reading a novel remains one of the best.

In fact, the one persistent puzzle in Mitchell’s books has been what the author sounds like when he’s not assuming the voices and motifs of other writers. In “Cloud Atlas,” his most successful novel, he writes each chapter in a different style: Defoe, Isherwood, any generic thriller writer, Amis, Philip K. Dick and Russell Hoban (specifically Hoban’s great 1980 novel “Riddley Walker”). The sections, set in time periods ranging from the 19th century to the post-apocalyptic future, are split in half and arranged in an arresting chronological V. What it all finally adds up to is a rather weightless rumination on the cycles of life and history, but the experience of reading “Cloud Atlas” was flawlessly diverting.

Mitchell’s fourth novel, “Black Swan Green,” is poised to capitalize on the readership that discovered him with “Cloud Atlas,” but it might frustrate them. The structure and material are entirely conventional — in fact, “Black Swan Green” almost seems like an explanation for why Mitchell usually writes novels like “Cloud Atlas” instead of the intimate, autobiographical fiction that other readers prefer. It describes the 13th year in the life of one Jason Taylor, a middle-class boy growing up in Black Swan Green, a village in Worcestershire, England, during the early 1980s. Jason’s day-to-day existence consists of casual brutality mixed with crushing banality, an experience that Mitchell seems to be exorcising with this book. Of course, the autobiographical tone of “Black Swan Green” could be false, another one of Mitchell’s uncanny impressions, but it writhes with a loathing that would be mighty hard to fake.

Here at last, it seems, is Mitchell’s own voice, albeit an immature version of it. Jason’s narration is an unstable blend of literary panache and schoolboy slang: “Graveyards’re sardined with rotting bodies, so of course they’re scary places. A bit. But few things’re only one thing if you think about them long enough.” Two implacable forces dominate his life: his distracted parents and the ruthless social hierarchy of his comprehensive school. (Comprehensive schools were introduced in Britain in the 1960s in order to end a prior system of class segregation and teach children from all backgrounds together.)

Among his classmates, Jason suffers from three liabilities: His family are “townies,” he’s not nearly as tough as the local louts, and he stammers. “It’s all ranks, being a boy, like the army,” he explains, and throughout most of the novel he strives, largely in vain, to improve his status. This is not a boyhood idyll in the fashion of “Tom Sawyer,” but a deadly earnest struggle in which a boy’s fate might hang on any detail. “Games and sports aren’t about taking part or even about winning,” Jason observes. “Games and sports’re really about humiliating your enemy.”

A goodly portion of “Black Swan Green” details Jason’s own humiliation, which reaches its nadir when, after a brief moment of upward mobility, he becomes the main butt of the head bully’s attentions. Meanwhile, he valiantly tries to avoid realizing that his parents’ marriage is disintegrating. Occasionally the outside world sends a ripple through this kid’s miserable world: A local youth is killed in the Falklands War, outraged homeowners mount a protest against a nearby gypsy settlement, Thatcher takes a notch or two (or three) out of everyone’s financial security.

It’s in Mitchell’s sketches of adult cowardice, superficiality and mendacity, though, that “Black Swan Green” really blazes. In one early scene, a family dinner, Jason’s father and uncle engage in a faux-jovial jousting match, each man boasting about his own success by pretending concern over his brother-in-law’s fortunes in the current economic climate: “No, no, it’s you shopfolk that my heart goes out to. This recession’ll bleed the high street dry before it’s finished. Quote me on that.” An encounter with his father’s arrogant boss on a seaside boardwalk only serves to inform Jason that the pecking orders among businessmen work much the same as those among boys.

The women don’t come off any better; Jason is always being buttonholed by mean-spirited, gossipy ladies who affect gracious attitudes and “posh” accents while twisting the knife. Mitchell has their voices down pat, and some of their conversations resemble a fiercer version of Monty Python parodies: “She didn’t know a dickie bird until she went through his bank statements. What a way to learn your own home is in hock! Can you imagine how duped you’d feel? How betrayed?” Even Jason’s own mother seems most intent on translating her grievances against his father into new kitchen tiles and a backyard “rockery” with a “water element.”

There are a few leavening elements in Jason’s year: an adventure or two, an elderly foreigner (a character from “Cloud Atlas”) who encourages his artistic side and some sympathetic teachers. But these interludes have a stock quality (there’s even a scene where Jason, hiding in a tree, spies on a young couple having sex), and if they hint at another better life further down the road, it’s not for long. An extracurricular encounter with real literature leads inexorably to judgments like, “getting creepstained as a model student in a subject as girly as French’d sink what’s left of my middle-ranking status.”

All this amounts to a damning portrait of the pettiness of British middle-class life and an excellent argument for why a sensitive, aesthetically inclined young man might run off to Japan (as Mitchell did). Though it’s less playful and complex than his earlier books, it also feels more emotionally rooted — even if the emotion it’s rooted in is a still-raw disgust. “Black Swan Green” gives us at last a glimpse of who David Mitchell really is by showing us what he absolutely, positively never wanted to become.

The novel begins as the journal of Adam Ewing, an American notary seeking passage back to San Francisco from the Chatham Islands (near New Zealand) in the 1800s. He befriends a raffish doctor, acquires the tiniest spark of empathy for the black islanders who have been decimated by a series of exploitative invaders, and even helps a runaway slave he finds hiding in his cabin. Just as the shipboard situation gets menacing, the journal is cut off, not midsentence, but midword.

The book’s next section consists of letters sent from Belgium in the early 1930s, written by Robert Frobisher, a young, wastrel British composer who insinuates himself into the household of another much older composer whom Frobisher considers “one of the greats.” He offers to serve as the master’s pupil and amanuensis. Frobisher’s story also gets cut off, and the next section describes the exploits of a reporter named Luisa Rey who is hot on the trail of a conspiracy to cover up the dangers of a nuclear power plant in a fictional California city during the 1970s. The following sections, each interrupting the one before it, concern: an aging, seedy British book publisher imprisoned in a rest home in the present day; the interrogation of a Korean “fabricant” or cloned servant sometime in the future and, even further in the future, the first-person narrative of a goatherd living in post-apocalyptic Hawaii.

I won’t describe what connects these stories, since figuring out Mitchell’s scheme is at least half the fun of reading “Cloud Atlas.” The theme has something to do with the unpredictable endurance of human communication, and a neatly delineated opposition between a crudely Nietzschean worldview — that human beings are innately predatory and life consists of eating or being eaten — and a crypto-Buddhist ideal of kindness and the prudent moderation of desire.

This time around, Mitchell’s remarkable knack for literary mimicry doesn’t undermine the project by making you wish you were reading the other writers he’s imitating instead. His allusions are less obvious and less slavish, even if the writers he’s cheekily riffing on — Joyce, Melville, Defoe — are more canonical. Somehow this seems less crass than piggybacking on Haruki Murakami and Nick Hornby.

But the serious borrowing Mitchell does in “Cloud Atlas” is from genre or near-genre writers: the Frobisher section is a vamp on Evelyn Waugh, the Luisa Rey section is your basic, serviceable thriller, the Korean section — which features lines like “I was the first consumer she’d seen to facescape fully like a well-known service fabricant” — is itself a clone of countless dystopian science fiction yarns. Still, only the final post-apocalyptic section strikes me as egregious; it’s too derivative of Russell Hoban’s great 1980 novel “Riddley Walker,” a book that’s not widely enough read to be justifiably stolen from. Oh, and the premise comes in large part from Kim Stanley Robinson’s alternate history epic, “The Years of Rice and Salt.” (No doubt readers with different areas of expertise will discover other spoor here. Feel free to write in with your own findings.)

Nevertheless, what “Cloud Atlas” lacks in originality it makes up for in powerful, fluent storytelling. Other such literary experiments tend to be labored and, frankly, a bit of a slog; Mitchell seems to intuit that in this game too much intellect only drags things down. It’s true that in the end, the novel leaves one itch unscratched: Does this writer have any voice of his own, a center? Other novelists with similar gifts for ventriloquism — notably A.S. Byatt — never leave you doubting that they do, and in truth, “Cloud Atlas” adds up to a little less than the sum of its parts. But reading it is a pure delight. It is a fine entertainment masquerading as a work of art, and since fine entertainments are nearly as hard to come by, it would be unseemly to complain. (Though if you like “Cloud Atlas,” try to locate a copy of “Riddley Walker” too.)

Our next pick: The suburban golden boy has been dead for five years. So how can his ex-girlfriend be carrying his baby?