Two-time Booker finalist David Mitchell loves to play with stories. Turn them inside out – accordion them, as if the laws of narrative physics were a mere thing.
With his latest novel, though, Mitchell takes this approach and makes it personal. The deck being shuffled this go-around is not just any tale. This time it’s Mitchell’s own life.
“In a way I’m writing my first novel fourth,” says the 37-year-old novelist, referring to the convention that literary debuts are often highly autobiographical.
Sitting in a banquet of a seaside restaurant in Clonakilty, the coastal Irish town where he lives with his wife and two kids, Mitchell has a point.
Jason Taylor, the narrator of Mitchell’s new novel, “Black Swan Green,” shares many similarities with his creator. Like Mitchell, he grows up in Worcestershire in the ’80s and struggles with an agonizing stammer. He uses the same slang as Mitchell once did, and even suffers some of the same indignities of adolescence.
But here the paths diverge. For Jason’s stammer is only the beginning of his problems. As he skates toward adulthood, his parents’ marriage dissolves before his eyes. Then he loses a watch precious to his grandfather. If that weren’t enough, bullies threaten at every turn.
None of these things happened to Mitchell.
Once again Mitchell is expertly mimicking yet another genre – this time the bildungsroman. Only “Black Swan Green” does not traffic in the veiled autobiography and wish fulfillment that has come to mar the form in recent years.
“I kind of evolved a distinction between a personal novel and an autobiographical one,” says Mitchell. “A personal one is where the protagonist and the writer have many things in common. An autobiographical one is where events and everyone around the protagonist or the narrator come largely from life.”
As Mitchell describes it, this is a book about a boy who doesn’t know what he knows – who has the entire world inside of him but cannot spit it out. Although Jason’s condition is a metaphor for the blind spots one grows out of in adolescence, Mitchell understands the literal condition as well.
“It’s one of those things that well-meaning people won’t bring up,” he says, when I pause before asking if he still has a stammer. “They don’t want to make you ashamed or embarrassed. They don’t want to make you stammer.”
It seems a cruel irony that a man so preternaturally gifted with language should have grown up so tortured by it. Mitchell, however, concludes it was probably this affliction that turned him inward – toward the written word.
“It certainly increased my vocabulary size,” says Mitchell, referring to the strategy he still uses of always being aware of several different “exit strategies” with each sentence he utters. The result is he speaks in clear, complete sentences – almost like someone reading from a book.
“You can think of it like a fuse that burns during a Tom & Jerry cartoon,” says Mitchell, describing how it feels to live with a stammer. “It burns down – this is the time you have to get this word out, this word that you are not ready to say. And the time runs out, until boom, the bomb explodes. And then you’ve had it. You’re stuck.”
The trick, Mitchell says, is “to be able to make that fuse infinite. To honestly not care if someone is going to see you stuttering or not.” For this reason, Mitchell is eager to talk about talking today – and he hopes the book is of help to people who grew up like him. “I didn’t think there was much good fiction that takes you inside what it’s like to have a stammer,” he says. “I hope it does some small service to explaining it to people.”
If it is not already apparent, Mitchell has not decided to try to follow his 2003 blockbuster, “Cloud Atlas,” with another ambitious, globe-
trotting novel. “Oh,” he says at one point, discussing the intricacies of “Black Swan Green,” “it feels so good not to be talking about “Cloud Atlas.”
It’s hard not to see why. Mitchell thinks of writing as “controlled personality disorder. “It’s controlled because in order to make it work you have to concentrate on the voices in your head – and get them talking to each other.”
Since “Cloud Atlas” came out, however, he has spent quite a bit of timing talking about that one book and its cast of characters. It was a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In the U.S., the book sold 10 times as many copies as any of his previous books.
The success has been a great boon for Mitchell, but it also makes him antsy. Already, he is well into a new novel set in a Dutch colony on an island near Japan. The research will involve a move to Holland, and then probably back to Japan, where his wife is from.
In other words, not only does Mitchell like characters, he likes projects. And better yet, projects with very clearly defined parameters. “I feel comfortable operating within stringent restrictions in all the books,” he says, “a list of things I can and cannot do.”
Mitchell is as methodical at peopling his book as he is at figuring out what happens. Several characters in “Black Swan Green” emerge from previous books, some younger in age, others much older.
“It’s enormous fun,” says Mitchell, about sculpting these cameo roles. “It is also creatively economic. If there’s a vacancy for a role, and I can fill that vacancy – like a personnel manager – with someone I’ve already written, then they arrive as a preconceived character. They already exist.”
Listening to Mitchell describe how he works, how he researches his way into a novel – often reading classified ads because they tell him “what people were after” – his novels begin to sound like exquisite computer programs, which they have in fact been compared with by critics.
But there is something even Mitchell’s own thorough descriptions of this method leave out, something he himself cannot entirely explain. It involves the occult power of creativity to inhabit other worlds.
“What distinguishes someone,” says Mitchell, is “by and large what they believe. And if they believe in something I don’t know about, science or philosophy, then I need to know about it.”
The trick about “Black Swan Green,” then, is that Mitchell has, in one book, erased all the erudition he absorbed to write his first dazzling three books – and become 13 years old again.
It is the exact opposite of what he has done before, and much as he enjoyed the challenge, he has come away with exactly what most of us feel after driving by a middle school.
“I wouldn’t want to live through it again.”
John Freeman is a writer in New York.
