David Mitchell conjures new worlds

Praise is heaped upon him by reviewers and co-novelists (AS Byatt declared that his writing “gives intense pleasure”). His runaway success Cloud Atlas sold more than half a million copies, after getting a nod from Richard and Judy, while in 2007, Time magazine listed Mitchell as (somewhat preposterously) the 16th most powerful artist or entertainer in the US – placing him two notches above Brad Pitt.

What has been the key to Mitchell's success? Arguably, his feverish desire to conjure up fresh worlds, his versatility. His books serve up a thrilling farrago: they are mysterious and fantastical, oblique and philosophical; they are also cracking yarns, impossible to put down. Each of his books — from his 1999 compendium of interlinking short stories Ghostwritten to the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green, about a teenage stammerer — has been daringly different to its predecessor.

As I speak to him over the phone from his home in West Cork, I soon realise that he is much as he is in print — utterly unpredictable. He is cerebral and sombre, also irreverent and spiky. He is thoughtful and reflective, careful in the way he answers questions (he confirms that he is a ‘stammering idiot by nature’). But he is also delightfully funny when he wants to be. It took him four years to write his latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, his first foray into historical fiction. He researched his densely vivid story about a young Dutch clerk who arrives on the Japanese island of Dejima in 1799 by reading dozens of 18th-century novels. His first attempts at his book “read like one of Smollett’s novels, but were haunted by the ghost of Blackadder”.

Dejima, a tiny man-made island that once acted as a Dutch trading post, became the conduit between isolated Japan and the outside world for more than two centuries. He said: “Dejima was the reason why Japan was ready to have 200 years’ worth of industrial revolution in about three decades, in my opinion.”

The novel follows de Zoet’s attempts to negotiate this hectic, polyphonic island, a meeting place of different nationalities. “I’ve never had to handle so many vocal registers. That was a bit of a brain gym.”

Will the book be shortlisted for the Booker prize, like Cloud Atlas and Number9dream?

Mitchell says that he pokes his fingers in his ears whenever he hears the dreaded ‘B-word’. Has he been disappointed to not win yet?

“It’s like I say to my eight-year-old daughter when we play snakes and ladders. It’s just a roll of the dice — it’s just a collection of judges and the human dynamic between them.” He comes to Oxford on Monday to talk about his latest book.

Although he describes himself as a “tongue-tied sociophobe”, he enjoys discussing his work in public.

“We novelists spend years holed up in rooms. This is why we are envious of musicians; they get instantaneous feedback from their audiences. Our feedback is non-existent. Our art is consumed by strangers that we have never met and never will meet in locations tens of thousand of miles away from where we are. Just for an hour, in these public events, we get to be oral musicians.”

So what’s next for Mitchell, the hermit literary magician? He likes to move on to a new project as soon as possible, but is coy about his next novel. “It’s difficult these days because you say something and then it gets on Wikipedia and you end up reading about a book you’ve not yet written.”

He will reveal, however, that it contains a character from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and that it’s about “the recent past and the present and the future”. It’s a typically cryptic answer from the sphinx-like Mitchell, but one that hints at more pyrotechnics courtesy of that zig-zagging imagination of his. His army of fans will, no doubt, be delighted.

David Mitchell will be at the Holywell Music Room on Monday (see Bookings, right). The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is published by Sceptre.