Abstract
Islands are a powerful recurring motif in the writing of David Mitchell. His globe-trotting fictions negotiate the trope of ‘islandness’ as ambiguously positioned between desire and hostility, stranding protagonists on bountiful shores or dooming them in squalid insular exiles. As seemingly contained spaces detached from the centres of the world, islands are malleable platforms for the projection of literary experimentation. In David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999), Cloud Atlas (2004), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) and The Bone Clocks (2014), islands become utopian imaginaries, sanctuaries for the outcast, sources and tools of power and sites of corruption and entrapment, while constantly mediating between reality and the imagination, the past and the future. First and foremost, however, the analysis of the functions of islands in Mitchell’s work informed by Yi-Fu Tuan’s and Michel de Certeau’s conceptual frameworks of ‘place’ and ‘space’ reveals that, much like the author’s many individual stories, islands are never isolated, but always relational entities enabling protagonists to interact with one another and become interconnected with the larger world around them. If we want to understand how deeply topography, spatiality and identity are interwoven in Mitchell’s work, we cannot circumvent his islands.
Highlights
This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, which is a journal of the Open Library of Humanities
First and foremost, the analysis of the functions of islands in Mitchell’s work informed by Yi-Fu Tuan’s and Michel de Certeau’s conceptual frameworks of ‘place’ and ‘space’ reveals that, much like the author’s many individual stories, islands are never isolated, but always relational entities enabling protagonists to interact with one another and become interconnected with the larger world around them
Entering David Mitchell’s ‘archipelago of islands’ via his first novel, Ghostwritten, we find two utterly distinct representations of islands as momentary sanctuaries for refugees, each of which could not be more unlike the other
Summary
This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, which is a journal of the Open Library of Humanities. The following close reading of four of David Mitchell’s nov‐ els (Ghostwritten [1999], Cloud Atlas [2004], The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet [2010] and The Bone Clocks [2014]) elucidates how islands, in his work, are negotiated as places of refuge and sanctuary for the exiled (Okinawa, Kumejima and Clear Island in Ghostwritten), and evoke a sense of Arcadia (Clear Island in Ghostwritten) and uto‐ pia (Iceland in The Bone Clocks and Hawaii in Cloud Atlas) on the one hand, whilst serving as sites of corruption and impending nuclear threat (Swannekke Island in Cloud Atlas) and cultural clashes (Dejima in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet) on the other hand.
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