David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time

Abstract

To date, David Mitchell’s fiction comprises six adventurously heterogeneous novels. Three are “cosmopolitan”1 in scope and structure, composed of sections that skip freely around in time and space: Ghostwritten (2001), Cloud Atlas (2004), and The Bone Clocks (2014). There are two very different coming-of-age tales of teenage boys: Number9dream (2003), set in Tokyo, reads like a Haruki Murakami novel unfolding inside a video game; and the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green (2007), narrated by a 13-year old in the English Midlands. The historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2011) faithfully evokes Dutch contact with Japan in Nagasaki Harbor at the turn into the 19th century, before turning into a romance-thriller. Both within each text and across his corpus, Mitchell creates a complex dynamical tension by developing disparate stand-alone storylines and weaving these narrative threads into tapestries by turns intricate and fragile. His narratives combine linear and cyclical structures and temporalities in different ways, including having texts begin and end with sections told by the same narrator (Ghostwritten, Bone Clocks), bearing the same title (Black Swan Green), or returning to the same time period (Cloud Atlas). Mitchell’s narrative time oscillates between discrete succession and cyclic repetition: time may be broken into episodes causally connected in complete story arcs, or bent into concentric circles like the “infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments” (Cloud 393) that Isaac Sachs imagines in Cloud Atlas. Because his plotting is iterative and recursive, Mitchell’s