THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET by David Mitchell (Knopf Canada), 496 pages, $32 cloth. Rating: NNNNN
David Mitchell has forsworn the shifting times, settings and genres of his previous fiction in this historical novel. It moves forward from one place: turn-of-the-19th-century Nagasaki, where the xenophobic shogunate has quarantined its Dutch trading partners, with their contagious Western-ness, on the tiny harbour island of Dejima.
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In the vivid opening chapter, a plucky, self-possessed Japanese midwife attends a difficult birth, leaving us longing for her reappearance even before Jacob De Zoet, an upright young Dutch clerk whose more prosaic travails on swindler’s-paradise Dejima fill the early part of the book, falls in love with her.
Mitchell’s experiments have earned him a po-mo label, but he’s also a master storyteller. Setting up narrative expectations of forbidden romance, daring escape, swashbuckling rescue and British naval battle, he undercuts them at the last minute with plot turns that are all the more bittersweet and wrenching for being more like life.
The one character who doesn’t get this treatment is the villain, the abbot of a sinister religious cult. Could Mitchell have pushed his tale onward as relentlessly without the engine of our desire to see this evildoer brought down? Even if this part of the story goes a bit over the top, The Thousand Autumns is still a tour de force.
Along with his facility for narrative, character and register, Mitchell has an almost miraculous way with words: achingly beautiful haiku-like descriptive lines punctuate passages of dialogue a startling incantation complete with rhyming couplets precedes the book’s climax. It takes a prodigious talent to make all this work.
Mitchell reads with Marc Levy, Michael Lista and Jess Walter, Tuesday (October 26), and appears with William Gibson in Bridges Over Time, Wednesday (October 27).
