David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Too much research and the writing stands still…
MBP: Congratulations on The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010.
DM: Thank you.
MBP: You've been shortlisted twice for the prize (number9dream in 2001 and Cloud Atlas in 2004), and longlisted most recently with Black Green Swan in 2006. Was it still as exciting to be nominated?
DM: For sure. There's only one Booker.
MBP: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is set in the year 1799, on an island called Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor. At that time Dejima was the Japanese Empire's only trading post. Can you tell us a bit more about Dejima at this time - and how you discovered it.
DM: Dejima was an island, but a man-made and very small one - little more than one curved street and 15 or 20 warehouses. It was a walled island, and the dozen or so employees of the Dutch East Indies Company staffed the place year-round were not ordinarily allowed to cross the bridge to the mainland.
The only people allowed onto Dejima were translators, the merchants who did business with the Dutch, and expensive prostitutes who also did business with the Dutch. The annual ship arrived from Batavia (modern day Jakarta) in summer, and stayed anchored in the habour, emptying and filling its holds, until the end of October. Outside this trading season, the Europeans of Dejima were more isolated than astronauts in a space-station - communication with the outside world was impossible. (I could go on for 5,000 words, but that's the novel's job.) I came across Dejima in 1994 when I was looking for a cheap lunch in Nagasaki's Chinatown, got off the tram at the wrong stop, and stumbled across these graceful warehouses from another century, and the Dejima museum. The trading post has been largely rebuilt on its original site in the last 15 years (land reclamation projects have shifted the shoreline so Dejima is now landlocked) so you can walk around the place,if you're curious.
MBP: How does heavy historical research of this kind affect the way in which a novelist progresses a storyline?
DM: Research and writing are a grumpy duo running a 3-legged race: progress depends on them working together, and in sync. Too much research and the writing stands still - you're just filling notebooks. But too much writing without an eye on the historical football (to mix my sporting metaphors) and the fiction-bubble pops because it was stockings not socks, or because Japanese peasants didn't ride horses, or because the word 'brinksmanship' comes from the Eisenhower period and not the Napoleonic.
Research kicks up new plotlines or characters, and writing can oblige you to go rummaging through historical sources where something precious might turn up. Then, of course, you have to hide 9/10ths of your research below the waterline - which I suppose is a fancy way of saying, 'Not even putting it in the text.'
MBP: You've just finished a major US author tour for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - how did that go?
DM: Fine, thank you, but hard work. In the old days when I only sold a few thousand copies, I could enjoy whole days wandering around San Francisco or Seattle or wherever... now I spend whole days being late for the next appointment. Up before dawn, a taxi to the airport, fly to the next city, spend the day doing media work fuelled by American tea, then an event in the evening. Still, I wouldn't wish to old days back in a hurry - if the old days came back there probably wouldn't be any new days. And you can have some illuminating conversations with the taxi-drivers if you let them talk - how else could you discover why the second language in Minneapolis came to be Somali?
MBP: We hear that Cloud Atlas is being adapted into a film. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
DM: I know less than the latest websites! Tom Twyker and the Waciowskis have written what I think is a very impressive script. Rather than trying to shoot my novel, they have disassembled Cloud Atlas and have sort of 'found the film within', if that's not too Pseud's Corner. But I've asked to be kept in touch only on a 'need to know basis': the lawsuit in Bleak House has nothing on a script's hazardous journey to funding and production. They don't call it Hollyweird for nothing.
MBP: You're currently one of the front-runners with the bookmakers to win this year's prize. Would you prefer to be favourite or underdog?
DM: Without being dismissive of the honour of being longlisted, you have a calmer mind if you don't think about it too much. Oh okay, the underdog.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
