![]() The danger was, and is, clear: what if someone hadn’t read Cloud Atlas? Narrative coherence of Book B cannot be contingent upon having read Book A. ![]() That’s when I first realized that by having characters cross between my novels, they bring their emotional baggage with them - baggage that a brand-new character couldn’t bring unless you write them a backstory. In a way, Black Swan Green resolves this 50-year-old, dangling plot line. She serves as an artistic mentor to Jason Taylor, and in return, in his fumbling way, he enables her to resolve feelings of guilt about Robert Frobisher’s suicide five decades earlier. Later, in Black Swan Green, I brought back Madame Crommelynck from the “Letters from Zedelghem” sections of Cloud Atlas. Ghostwritten is an early miniature model of the whole of the Über-novel in that sense. Something happens in every chapter in Ghostwritten that sets off a line of dominos that enable, or become, the next chapter or a later chapter. In Ghostwritten, I applied the same principle to plot: you get little flashes, flickers, or hyperlinks. I remember little about the latter, except that characters we’ve known intimately from one section walk in as brusque semi-strangers in other parts of the narrative. I borrowed the idea from Haruki Murakami who has a few recurring characters and names, and also from The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch. After my first book, Ghostwritten, I just thought it would be neat to put one or two things from that into number9dream. Can you pinpoint when that project came into being? Was it a gradual realization of what you were doing, or were you always meaning to make this interwoven, proliferating narrative? What does such maximal writing offer to you, as a novelist, that self-contained narratives maybe can’t?ĭAVID MITCHELL: The Über-novel has grown from a series of accidental discoveries. MURRAY: I’m intrigued by your whole accumulative “Über-book” project, as you’ve called it before, the increasing interconnections and links among your novels both to date and to come. Shortly after the publication of Utopia Avenue, I spoke with Mitchell about his Über-novel, the status of the novel, music, genre, television, and the possibility of the pursuit of Utopia. If the novel has a superpower, Mitchell says, it’s the power of “polyphony.” The novel is, quite literally, this thought process in motion, in narrative form. The novel relates : it lets us go places other genres of prose and other modes of thought do not. Perhaps this is why Mitchell’s Über-novel is such a timely project: the novel’s expansiveness invites us to see our likenesses among others, our standpoints in relation to society, and the fact that these things are historical, not static. For Mitchell, no subject or genre seems out of bounds: a historical novel of a Dutch trading post in 19th-century Japan or of the 1960s’ psychedelic rock scene, a narrative of a young poet, a Matryoshka construction of distant pasts and futures, or his own Middle-earth-sized fantasy.Įspecially as our world increasingly re-compartmentalizes, the novel can offer an antidote to the often narrow, and narrowing, narratives on which we lean to make sense of our individual realities, beliefs, politics, and values. Mitchell’s novels offer us micro- and macro- at once, bounded reality and expansive universe. His novels, each a stand-alone narrative, accrete into an ongoing meta-project he calls an Über-novel. AFTER ABOUT HALF A MILLENNIUM, what does the novel still do for us? David Mitchell has some answers.
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