David Mitchell

J

ust to be clear, this is an interview with the author David Mitchell, he of Cloud Atlas and number9dream fame, not Peep Show’s David Mitchell.

But even if I had gotten it wrong (I didn’t, I definitely know what I’m doing, honest), Mitchell the novelist is far too polite to have called me out. The 45-year-old Ireland-based writer is appearing at a pre-Ely Literary Festival coffee and cake event this month to mark the release of his sixth novel, The Bone Clocks.

It’s his fifth book to be longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and while it’s an honour, he also notes: “I’ve only been shortlisted twice and never won; that fact makes my head stay its normal size.”

He speaks with a slight stammer, explored in the semiautobiographical Black Swan Green, which lends his sentences even more gravitas and thoughtfulness. They are traits slightly at odds with his cult-like status as an author (he’s no sweary, belligerent George RR Martin that’s for sure). Yet this quiet, intelligent man has a core legion of devoted readers that happily spiral with him into the depths of the human psyche, barrelling into stories that pile tales on top of tales, nest locations within locations and stack ideas upon wider and wilder ideas.

The Bone Clocks is on sale from Tuesday, September 2, priced £18.99. Read more about Ely Literary Festival on page 148.

But he isn’t entirely sure why his work strikes such a chord. “I’m probably the worst person in the world to ask that question. If I knew the answer I’d do it more!” he laughs, admitting he doesn’t really think about the reader when jotting things down. “I just don’t think you can. Hopefully, there’ll be such a multiplicity of people reading it, and they all have their own backstory and preferences and dislikes and bête noire and foibles. I just hope that what I find intriguing or curious or frightening or funny or thoughtful, other people will too.”

His latest offering, The Bone Clocks, is an intricate saga following the life of runaway Holly Sykes, who accepts the kindness of a strange old lady in exchange for a bizarre kind of asylum. At its heart is a dark Faustian pact: “You get to cheat ageing, you get to cheat death, and all you have to do is amputate your conscience,” explains Mitchell. “Now what do you do given that choice? It’s a deviously designed question because even kind, compassionate, loving people would think about it.”

The initial nugget of an idea, he says rather morosely, came from wrangling with middle age. “Your youth and beauty and your in-tuneness with the world – because your generation is coming up and making it – these go. And the fact that you will one day age and wither and wrinkle up, and bits start dropping off and you get slower. Your sense of immortality goes, you know all this now [in your 20s], but when you enter into your 40s you begin to feel it in your kneecaps and in your skin and in your joints and in your lungs after walking up the stairs.

“You actually feel it and it’s there in the mirror and you’re less keen on having photographs of yourself around because each one is saying you’re getting older and closer to death.”

He adds with a wry laugh: “You walk past care homes for the elderly more and more cagily.”

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A matter of time Cult Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell is coming to Ely for coffee and cake to chat about his new novel The Bone Clocks. Ella Walker finds out about his literary love affair with Twitter and falls out with him over the Thor films.

interview

In contrast to the length and depth of The Bone Clocks, in July Mitchell wrote a Twitter short story, The Right Sort, about a lad tripping on valium, posting 280 narrative tweets from @david_mitchell. With that, he explains, there was no way he could let the story run free. “You can’t let someone out of a trap like that and the trap still be credible.”

He’s previously called that writing experience like wearing a “straightjacket”: “You have to think of [each tweet] as individuals but you also have to think of them as strings, as teams and have a negative one followed by a quietly positive one; have one that nudges forwards the plot followed by one that nudges forward a character, or one that doesn’t nudge forward anything but is just beautiful. Then you need to, if you can, rack up the tension.

“It was like spinning lots and lots and lots of plates on poles, and making sure you get back to plot, character and atmosphere before they drop and smash – i.e. the reader’s forgotten that strand,” he muses. “You’re working with the limitations of human memory, with Twitter stories. That’s your co-partner, your co-writer.”

Paramount with whatever Mitchell’s writing, from short stories to novels to operas, is that he delivers something he is completely satisfied with; no doubts, no regrets: “If I haven’t, I beg for, and get, more time.” “[The jacket price is] a lot of money for quite a lot of people and they’re going to be giving me hours of their lives when they could have been reading something else,” he ponders. “If at least I don’t think that I’ve done my very best and the book is what I want it to be and maybe more – hopefully more – evolving into something better as I’ve written it, if it isn’t, isn’t it a bit disingenuous to hand it in and expect people to be grateful?

“There’s a novelist in [The Bone Clocks] called Crispin Hershey. He’s sort of someone a bit like me but gone bad and that’s something Crispin Hershey would do.”

It’s not as depressing as its jumping off point, but The Bone Clocks is a brick of a book; the kind of tome that’ll make your arms ache reading it on the bus, a workout for the biceps and the mind. It makes you wonder how, with a story of such magnitude and scope, Mitchell stays in control of the overarching plot, particularly when within it roosts a horde of mini-plots like a complexly assembled army of Russian dolls.

“I keep most of it in my head,” he says simply. “But I do have a sneaking envy for minimalists who can write 250-page books that are sumptuous and complete and gorgeous. I always seem to end up going on a lot longer than that.”

But how do you keep track of so many story strands? Don’t you worry they will take on lives of their own? “Oh, I don’t worry about it,” he laughs.

“I hope they will! That’s sort of the best writing really, when you have the illusion that it’s half writing itself and the next move is both unexpected in the present tense, but absolutely obvious in the past tense: ‘What else could it have been?’”

When it comes to buying books himself, Mitchell devours the work of American sci-fi writer Ursula Le Guin but has “no guilty pleasures because I won’t let other people decide if I’m being guilty or not”.

Although he does admit: “I feel a bit guilty about films sometimes, mainly when I get on to a plane and there’s lots of Iranian art house expressionist films and instead of watching one of those, that I know I’ll remember for the rest of my life, I end up watching Thor.”

Coffee and cake with David Mitchell, St Peter’s Church, Ely, Thursday, September 4 at 11.30am.

Tickets £8 from (01353) 645005/toppingbooks. co.uk.

What’s wrong with Thor?

“The second one? Really?!”

But Loki is fantastic.

“Haha. He’s the only halfway interesting character, everyone else – ohh no! All that talent! All that talent!”

So, while he won’t be scripting the next Marvel film, sadly, Mitchell is working on a continuation of his Twitter story (it’s been “spawning siblings”), followed by another more substantial book set at the end of the 1960s.

For now though, immerse yourself in the whirring corners of The Bone Clocks – and someone get the coffee and walnut cake in.

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