Two-time Booker finalist David Mitchell loves to play with stories. Turn them inside out—accordion them, as if the laws of narrative physics were a mere thing.
With his latest novel, Black Swan Green, Mitchell takes this approach down to the molecular level. The deck being shuffled this go-around is not just any tale. This time it's Mitchell's own life.
Sitting in a banquet of a seaside restaurant in Clonakilty, the coastal Irish town where he lives with his wife and two kids, Mitchell talked about Black Swan Green and why its main character, Jason Taylor, shared so many similarities with his creator.
Your previous three novels are remarkable for their ambition and globe-trotting qualities—is this a humble step backwards?
Oh yeah; in a way I'm writing my first novel fourth.
So it's a roman a clef of sorts?
Well, I kind of evolved a distinction between a personal novel and an autobiographical one. A personal one is where the protagonist and the writer have many things in common. An autobiographical one is where events and everyone around the protagonist or the narrator come largely from life. With those two definitions in mind, I grew up in a world very much like Jason's—but my childhood was a lot happier. My parents aren't divorced.
But like Jason, you had a stammer growing up.
Oh, I still do.
How do you deal with it?
I have strategies in place. Sometimes it's something of a last resort. If you are not going to do this, then know the way out. But one of the things I wanted to do in the book: I didn't think there was much good fiction that takes you inside what it's like to have a stammer. I think Updike wrote an essay about it. I hope it does some small service to explaining it to people.
Like Jason, you also grew up in Northern England in the '80s—did you find you could write about this time period from memory?
I treated it like a textbook historical period. I sort of watched films from that time, read newspapers from that time. Classified ads of newspapers are really good if you want to get back. It's the way you get the language and the concerns. What people wanted to buy and sell. What kind of cars there were.
It seems like you do this quite well as fiction writer: You imagine somebody, and you just absorb their concerns. You become the character.
Sometimes writing is controlled personality disorder. It's controlled because in order to make it work you have to concentrate on the voices in your head—AND get them talking to each other.
So, in Black Swan Green, you send him on a quest where he meets lots of other people who draw him out?
Well, I wanted each chapter to be a theoretically extractable short story. But of course, it also needs to be a novel.
Was this was for purely economic reasons?
Bloody-mindedness, I suppose. I feel comfortable operating within stringent restrictions in all the books—a list of things I can and cannot do. An expanse is quite intimidating to fill. The rules I impose on any given book, the obverse of those rules is the book. So, if you write a book in the first person, you can't give any information to the reader that the protagonist doesn't know—unless you smuggle it either through the narrator's stupidity, or, in the case of Jason, of this device of him not knowing what he knows.
That's such an organized way of writing.
It's just how I do it. Have you seen the film Million Dollar Hotel? I mention that because someone walks into a bookshop and says, This is why I don't read. How do you pick one? The writer's version of that same agoraphobia is that you have all these stories you could possibly write—of the infinitely possible number of stories you could write, which one are you going to do?
You worked at Waterstone's bookstore at one point. Did it make you think about how much choice people have about what they read?
You want to hide into nothing if you think about your audience when you write. You'd be thinking about the grannies in the home counties, who stop reading the moment they encounter the F word. So you leave out the F word for her, but then you think about, well, John Freeman in North America, who would throw the book aside if all these kids speak like angels or virginal choirboys. Which one do you listen to?