A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell

Patrick O'Donnell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781441157287
• eBook ISBN: 9781441116130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Having emerged as one the leading contemporary British writers, David Mitchell is rapidly taking his place amongst British novelists with the gravitas of an Ishiguro or a McEwan. Written for a wide constituency of readers of contemporary literature, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell explores Mitchell's main concerns-including those of identity, history, language, imperialism, childhood, the environment, and ethnicity-across the six novels published so far, as well as his protean ability to write in multiple and diverse genres. It places Mitchell in the tradition of Murakami, Sebald, and Rushdie-writers whose works explore narrative in an age of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Patrick O'Donnell traces the through-lines of Mitchell's work from ghostwritten to The Bone Clocks and, with a chapter on each of the six novels, charts the evolution of Mitchell's fictional project.

1

A Company of Strangers: ghostwritten

The world runs on strangers coping.

Marco, in ghostwritten (293).

When considered from the perspective of an ongoing career or a completed canon, first novels often can be deceptive. Characteristically comprised largely of autobiographical materials, the initial foray of a young novelist is frequently perceived to be imitative and tentative, only opaquely indicative of what will become the mature author’s signature, her vision, his repertoire. ghostwritten, a novel in ten chapters conveying the stories of nine different protagonists scattered across nine locations ranging from Okinawa to New York, is atypical in this regard. Not only does it evolve many of the patterns and elements that Mitchell will continue to muster in subsequent novels but it also disseminates the autobiographical “I” into the nine first-person narrators—strangers to each other—who inhabit the novel’s dispersed and uneven latitudes. In addition to suggesting that it is authored by an immaterial presence, the novel’s title foretells its attention to ghosts, the immaterial, aliens, strangers, and estrangement; it suggests the degree to which Mitchell considers the act of storytelling as mediatory, not the imprinting of the author’s originary vision but a channeling of voices and identities; it implicates temporality as a mode of conveyance—ghostwritten—inscribed in time, in the past.

The nine narrators of ghostwritten reflect Mitchell’s fascination with a number that occurs throughout his fiction. Examples abound: the title of Number9Dream (containing nine chapters, the last one comprised of the single word “nine”); the “Nine Folded Valleys” of “Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After” in Cloud Atlas (where “nine” and “ninety” recur over fifty times, and over half that many again in blackswangreen); and the nine “unengifted” sisters praying at the Shiranui Shrine in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Mitchell’s use of the number nine is symptomatic of his broader interest in numerology and the fatal or mystical properties of numbers: as some of his readers have discerned, it can be viewed as a structural principle, a means of perspectivally organizing the contact zones of a multiverse.¹ The number nine has particularly variant, contradictory meanings across interconnected cultures (in China, it can signify wholeness, completion, good fortune; in Japan, it can be considered as inauspicious as it sounds like the word for “pain”). As such, nine is a particularly apt number for a novel in which nine semi-autonomous, semicollective protagonists, each alienated in some manner from a homeland while both separated from and overlapping each other spatially and temporally, traverse diverse cosmopolitan landscapes.

Several of the narratives of ghostwritten are cosmopolitan in Schoene’s sense as they portray “serialised snapshots of the human condition, marked by global connectivity and virtual proximity” (98). They are also metropolitan in their depiction of contemporary cities—Tokyo, Hong Kong, St. Petersburg, London, New York—all sprawling assemblages of labyrinthine streets where the itineraries of strangers often intersect. In The City and the City (2009), his allegory of divided contemporary metropolises such as Jerusalem, (formerly) Berlin, El Paso/Ciudad Juarez, or Beirut, China, Miélville relates a police procedural that takes place in the politically divided city of Besźel/Ul Quoma, where the inhabitants of one city are trained not to see the inhabitants of the other, even though they live topographically in the same district, often on the same street. There are areas of the city that Miélville’s narrator terms “cross-hatched,” where divided areas intersect and where citizens of both cities live in intimate proximity but cannot acknowledge the existence of the other—a form of political disavowal that the novel’s narrator terms “unseeing.” The allegory of the cross-hatched city in The City and the City is useful in understanding the narratives and dispersed environments of ghostwritten that, collectively, could be considered as charting the streets, paths, and byways of a globalized metropolis in which the proximity of lives is alternatively acknowledged and disavowed, where the “other” is either seen or unseen according to local cultural and political logics. A preliminary accounting of these stories of sameness and difference will begin to reveal how the repetitions and recurrences of Mitchell’s first novel—its cross-hatchings of numbers, coincidences, entities, locations, and events ranging from the astronomical to the political—articulates a world in which the narrative weave limns the cultural and political circumstances of the human order on a planet inhabited by many orders of being and nonbeing.

Itineraries

ghostwritten is a novel of particularities and detail. The objects, artifacts, sites, sounds, identities, and cultural manifestations its protagonists encounter on their often, meandering, or circuitous itineraries are both significant and accidental; their stories compel the reader to be both a hermeneutist and bricoleur, at once divining the patterned sense of the text and assembling significance out of myriad details lying about that are stumbled upon through disparate acts of attention. A detailed tour of the novel’s nine narratives in ten chapters reveals its through lines as Mitchell navigates the contingent relations between chance and circumstance, the material and the immaterial, cultural location and temporality, and community and estrangement.

1. The first chapter, “Okinawa,” plays upon themes of the cultural outsider and the hunted man as it records the flight of a religious cultist and domestic terrorist, Keisuke Tanaka, code-named “Quasar,” from the scene of his attack on a Tokyo metro line using nerve gas. The event is clearly based upon the Subway Sarin Incident of 1995, in which members of the Aun Shinrikyo (“Supreme Truth”) cult carried out coordinated attacks that killed thirteen people.² In its apocalyptism, the Quasar’s cult, led by the putatively divine “His Serendipity” (5), which mirrors that of the factual Aun Shinrikyo, initiates the novel’s concern throughout with the fragile, treacherous—and indeed, serendipitous—condition of a planet inhabited by peoples seemingly bent on self-extinction.

Quasar escapes to Nawa, the main city in Okinawa, the southern Japanese prefecture consisting of the Ryukyu Islands. When he hears that the cult members are being rounded up by the police, he flees again to Kumejima, a small, remote island that Quasar regards as “a squalid, incestuous prison” (27). There, he failingly attempts to avoid the island’s few inhabitants while communicating telepathically via microwaves and animals with “His Serendipity,” who has been caught and jailed. Quasar becomes increasingly isolated on the haunted, isolated “lump of rock” seemingly at the end of the world that he reflects was

once the main trading center of the Ryukyu Empire with China. Boats laden with spices, slaves, coral, ivory, silk. Swords, coconuts, hemp. The shouts of men would have filled the bustling harbor, old women would have knelt in the marketplace, with their scales and piles of fruit and dried fish. Girls with obedient breasts lean out of the dusky windows, over the flower boxes, promising, murmuring. … Now it’s all gone. Long gone. Okinawa became a squalid apology for a fiefdom, squabbled over by masters far beyond its curved horizons. (27)

Laden with the fantasy and exoticism of orientalist versions of island history that Mitchell will explore at much greater length in Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Quasar’s image of Kumejima’s dynastic past infers the mutable, dialectical relation between center and periphery that plays out across deep time and changing empires, while prefiguring Clear Island, the “island as old as the world” (312) which is the homeland of Mo Muntervary, the protagonist of the novel’s eighth chapter. At the end of “Okinawa,” a partial story foreshadowing the stories to follow as embodiments of pasts and futures awaiting connection with each other, Quasar appears to be fatalistic about the possibility of ultimate escape while a typhoon approaches and clouds begin “to ink out the stars, one by one” (31).

2. In “Tokyo,” a jazz saxophonist named Satoru is serving time as a record store clerk while waiting for his future to unfold. Like Quasar, Satoru is a cultural outsider, abandoned by his father (this will become a thematic recurrence in Mitchell’s fiction). His mother is a Filipino club “hostess” working in Tokyo; she has been deported after the birth of her illegitimate child. Alienated in an impossibly crowded “city [that] never stops rewriting itself” and often viewing the world affectively composed as a series of liner notes from an impressive repertoire of tunes stored in the “place inside [his] head” (37), Satoru’s escape route is not a distant island but “the place [that] comes into existence through jazz” (38). In the quotidian environment of the store, two significant events occur. First, four young women casually wander into the store, three of them (from Satoru’s perspective) “bubbleheads” and “clones of the same ova,” the fourth, with whom he immediately falls in love, “completely, completely different,” pulsing “invisibly like a quasar” (41). This version of the “meet cute” of Hollywood romantic comedy is indicative of Mitchell’s intermixing of popular genres across the nine narratives of ghostwritten and suggestive of the ways in which the chance meeting can be converted into the narrative of finding “the one” as Mitchell tests the diegetic movement from coincidence to fate, subtended by the punctual temporality of propitious timing, here and throughout his work.

Some days later, Satoru receives a mysterious call at the store: the caller utters a cryptic message—“It’s Quasar. The dog needs to be fed!” (53)—and then hangs up after Satoru does not respond. This is one of the key coincidences of the novel, for the caller is the protagonist of “Okinawa” who has been deceived into believing that he is contacting the cult leaders with an encoded emergency message, but, abandoned by them in the wake of the attack and his usefulness expended, he has simply been given a random number in Tokyo to call, which just happens to be that of the record store in which Satoru works. Thus the terrorist Quasar is conflated with the lover Satoru compares to a pulsing quasar, indicative of the range of nominal coincidence in Mitchell’s fiction. The ramifications of the coincidence are magnified as the call causes Satoru to delay closing the store for several minutes, allowing for the reappearance of Tomoyo, the young woman with whom he has become enamored earlier and who is about to depart with her family to Hong Kong. Like Satoru, Tomoyo is an outsider, a racial and cultural hybrid: “I was with my revolting cousin and her friends. They treat me like an imbecile because I’m half-Chinese. My mother was Japanese … Dad’s Hong Kong Chinese” (55). The second chance meeting leads to a relationship and Satoru’s decision to follow Tomoyo to Hong Kong and begin a life abroad.

3. In “Hong Kong,” Neal Brose, a disaffected British lawyer working for a multinational investment firm and facing the impending collapse of his marriage and his professional life due to illegal financial dealings, goes AWOL. Like Quasar and Satoru before him, Brose is a cultural outsider, alienated from his work and inevitably a “qwai lo” (65), in Cantonese, a foreigner in the intricate, colonized social order of Hong Kong. Wrenched with fear about the imminent discovery of his involvement in fiscal malfeasance after an encounter with a financial investigator, Huw Llewellyn, and terminally indecisive about his future, Brose simply wanders off one day from a ferry landing restaurant, having missed the boat to work (where he recalls encountering a young couple in love who are very likely Satoru and Tomoyo from “Tokyo”). He meanders toward the Lantau Peak and its remarkable Tian Tan Buddah, shedding his Rolex watch and, symbolically, all the accoutrements of his former life as he traverses the Borgesian labyrinth of the island: “Paths forked off and forked off some more” (81). Once atop Lantau Peak, he appears to experience a moment of transcendence walking “up the steps of the Big Bright Buddha, brighter and brighter, into a snowstorm of silent light” (106), but we learn later in the novel that, according to his ex-wife, Katy Forbes, this is also the moment of his sudden death from a blood clot caused by “[u]ndiagnosed diabetes” (260).

The fact of Neal’s death typifies the way in which particles of information come to us from the scattered regions of the novel, and in this chapter, the “crossings” of the novel begin to multiply, both within and beyond ghostwritten: Katy Forbes will reappear briefly in “London”; the financial scandal in which Brose is involved will be elliptically referred to in “Petersburg”; Brose’s past as a schoolyard bully growing up in Worcestershire will be taken up in blackswangreen; and his boss, Denholme Cavendish, soon to be indicted in the scandal, is the elder brother of Timothy Cavendish, the owner of a literary agency who will appear in “London” and as the main subject of “The Ghostly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” in Cloud Atlas.

In addition to these “character chains,” there are a number of related imagistic sequences already accruing by this third chapter that generate the tangential, material connectedness of the novel—the sui generis network that is in many respects both its visible narrative work and its content. More than 200 pages after, she is introduced as Neal Brose’s recently departed wife; for example, we are told by a former lover that Katy bears “a birthmark shaped like a comet” (295). This seems an insignificant detail marking personal intimacy and identity save that, at this point, we will have read that a global astronomical event in the form of a comet passing near to the Earth is viewed as the sign of the coming rapture by Quasar, by the old woman of “Holy Mountain,” by an aged grandmother in “Mongolia,” and by the protagonist of “Petersburg,” where a comet also appears in a painting. Further, in the future anterior mode of reading that the novel requires, we will have encountered upon completing the novel the comet again in the novel’s penultimate chapter, “Night Train,” where it is the subject of much conversation as an avatar of a third world war. In Cloud Atlas, several protagonists bear comet-shaped birthmarks, readable as signs of their linkage to each other across vast reaches of history.

The “tracks” of the novel thus engender a certain temporality of reading that compel us to move backward and forward across the time and space of the novel as we note repetitions and linkages. I will elaborate on this later in relation to Mitchell’s larger concerns with “world time,” but in concluding this itinerary of “Hong Kong,” it is important to note here that the chapter offers the initial appearance of one of the novel’s many ghosts. For, one of the things that has come between Neal and his wife is their inability to have a baby—a frustration of desire that materializes as a ghost in the form of a female child haunting their Kowloon apartment. Her presence is complicated by Neal’s affair (after his wife leaves him) with the all-too-real Chinese maid who serves to double the uncanny presence of the ghost. The ghost accompanies Neal on his final journey, and she prefigures, most notably, the noncorporeal, reincarnated intelligence of “Mongolia” who transmigrates from body to body across the novel, a linchpin of the novel’s “hauntology” to be considered shortly and visible everywhere in the details: in its title; in the “ghost town” of Ulan Bator and the punning name of a character in “Mongolia”—Caspar—who serves as a temporary host to the transmigratory entity (186); in the “street of ghosts” that comprises the Nevsky Prospect of “Petersburg” (210); in the character of Marco in “London” who is a ghostwriter and who sees ghosts flitting through the city streets; and in the cybernetic “noncorporeal sentient intelligence” (413) of “Night Train.” “Hong Kong” brings to the fore what I will discuss as the novel’s “surplus”: the sense, evident throughout Mitchell’s fiction, that millennial reality with its vast and elaborate information networks (mimed in the continuous flow of seemingly random information about characters and events that the novel provides, matrixed into significance) is thin and that there is something beyond the visible and the material, more dimensions than just three, a stochastic multiverse.³

4. In “Holy Mountain,” an old woman who owns a tea shack perched on the slopes of a sacred mountain in China (possibly Wutai Shan in Shanxi Province, one of the four sacred mountains of Buddhism) recounts her life of isolation against the backdrop of catastrophic political change. “The world has long forgotten,” she relates, “but we mountain-dwellers live on the prayer-wheel of time” (109). Her story is one of victimization and survival against the backdrop of the violent and chaotic history of the twentieth century. As a young girl she is raped by a passing warlord who impregnates her, thus “ruining” her for marriage and causing her to send her infant daughter away to relatives who can afford to raise her. During Japan’s invasion of China preceding World War II, soldiers loyal to the “Asian sphere of Co-prosperity” beat her father and wreck their tea shack. In the years of contestation between Chinese nationalists and the Chinese Communist Party, the holy mountain is renamed “People’s Mountain,” and the old woman is subjected to extortion by “party officials” while her daughter and her guardians are forced to flee to Hong Kong “after the communists had ordered their arrests as enemies of the revolution” (124). Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, an idiotic thug who bears the perverse village nickname of “Brain” and who is a member of the local Red Guard slaps her and destroys her tea shack again while many of her relatives are deported to correction camps, and the combination of drought and political policy induces the Great Famine of 1958–61.⁴ As China becomes liberalized and engages in Western tourism, the woman witnesses celebrations attending Mao Zedong and begins to see more foreigners visiting the monastery (reopened after its closure under earlier administrations) atop the Holy Mountain; when she climbs up to the monastery herself—thus twinning Neal Brose’s ascent of Lantau Peak—she encounters Brain, now the foreman of a work crew, modernizing a temple.

The invariable among all of these factions, wars, and regimes is the survival of the old woman herself, her tea shack, which she manages to rebuild each time after “men forever marching up the path” destroy it (133), and the “Tree” that stands beside her shack which contains a spirit that gives her advice and counsel. In many ways, the old woman embodies several of the principal contradictions of the novel: she is indigenous, yet perpetually an outsider; as the owner of a concession, she represents the principal of worldly hospitality, yet, like several other characters in the novel, she is often xenophobic; and she is both a citizen of the planet, as she records the momentous events of the twentieth century that have affected her from her local perspective, and at the same time an isolate, surviving in the half-spirit world represented by her tree.⁵ Occasionally she sees ghosts or a passing comet, and she bears a long-distance connection to Neal Brose, for her great-granddaughter, descended from the daughter who has fled to Hong Kong fearing political repression, while visiting her long-lost progenitor for the first time, reveals that she is wealthy because a “foreigner, a lawyer with a big company” has been “very generous to me in his will” (146). Whether Brose has left his maid and mistress the money as the result of their relationship or she has stolen it from him is unclear, but the connection brings to full circle the itinerary of the old woman and the diaspora of her descendents, for in her agedness, she thinks she is talking to her daughter and asks if her daughter/great-granddaughter is returning to China “for good,” for which she receives the response: “Yes. Hong Kong is China now, anyway” (145). The old woman of “Holy Mountain” thus embodies a principle of constancy or permanence amidst randomness and change that operates in the face of the seeming death wish of the twentieth century—the succession of ideologies, regime...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Many Worlds, Real Time
• 1. A Company of Strangers: ghostwritten
• 2. City Life: Number9Dream
• 3. Time Travels: Cloud Atlas
• 4. Timepiece: blackswangreen
• 5. Minor Histories: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
• 6. A Secret War: The Bone Clocks
• Epilogue: Toward a Fiction of the Future
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Imprint