Black Swan Green

Run across a field of daisies at warp speed but keep your eyes on the ground. It's ace. Petalled stars and dandelion comets streak the green universe. Moran and I got to the barn at the far side, dizzy with intergalactic travel.

Pining for a real good book to read.

Am attracted to David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. Was tempted to nick it off that show-house unit at Mont Kiara. I don't think anyone would have missed it if I did!

He wrote so beautifully in Cloud Atlas. I found it complicated to read...like cutting my way through dense undergrowth, making slow progress forward with a small machete. But the way he constructed the many stories, one within another and another, with only the Cloud Atlas song to thread it all together...it was amazing. And well worth the effort.

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS by Sunil Badami (appeared in The Australian)

MANY first novels are autobiographical, coming-of-age stories marinated for years in the author's difficult childhood. David Mitchell's Ghostwritten was not your usual debut.Fizzing with originality and verve, it connected discrete narratives involving, among other things, an old Chinese woman living in an ancient tea shack on a mountain, Russian art thieves and a disembodied spirit rushing through Mongolia and its inhabitants.

His second novel, Number 9 Dream, was short-listed for the Booker Prize, as was his third, Cloud Atlas. Even when the latter became a bestseller, little was known about its author: having completed a masters in comparative literature, he moved to Japan for eight years, marrying a linguist he met there while teaching English. In this age of celebrity authors, where the novel seems indivisible from the biography, the England-born, Ireland-home owning but temporarily Netherlands-based Mitchell, 36, seems the most non-celebrity double nominee in Booker history.

"I try to keep the writer in me insulated from the 'authorsphere'," he says over green tea in his office at the Dutch National Institute for Advanced Studies, about an hour from Amsterdam, where he's writer in residence.

We are talking ahead of next week's release of his new novel, Black Swan Green, which he describes as not necessarily the best but "the least imperfect book I've written".

He praises his publishers for "shielding my anonymity and humility". "Success can be one of those things that cuts you off from the wellspring of stories that the world is."

Other writers, especially Italo Calvino and Haruki Murakami, have influenced him, as have friends, though "I don't see the point of being friends with people just because they do the same thing you do".

But his seeking to emulate his influences is "a desire to do for others what other writers I've admired have done for me". Fear plays a part too: "It's like a voice deep inside daring me to write, saying: 'I bet you can't do this, I bet you can't pull it off."'

His books, with what he calls their "symphonic sweep", reflect that. Part of the joy of reading them comes from the repeated motifs and recurring characters "who bash through the walls of each others' worlds", forming a sort of meta-novel, a diverse no man's land of bleeding borders, whose nomadic denizens somehow don't quite belong. Assiduous readers of his previous novels recognise familiar faces in each new one.

Yet his ability to ventriloquise eras and perspectives sometimes makes it difficult to find the real Mitchell in his work. Like the disembodied intelligence of Ghostwritten, his voice is pervasive and elusive. So which of his characters is he most like?

"All of them," he says with a laugh. "And none. All because they come from nowhere but my head and if a part of me wasn't like them I couldn't make them as they are. But I've never written a fictional self and I never will."

Mitchell's temporary workplace is a surreal campus of imposing houses and silent streets, where the brightest and best humanities scholars gather to research pet projects without having to teach. At lunch, our table includes the world's leading authority on Norse sagas and a medievalist specialising in Renaissance Latin.

"Sometimes I feel the poor cousin, surrounded by such intellectual expertise," he says. "Writers seem such dilettantes by comparison."

He considers every word to each expansive answer, sometimes betraying the boyhood stutterer he was -- and was, until now, reluctant to write about. "Not that I was afraid, but you learn devices to cope with it, put it out of your mind. People who wish you well won't mention it and so neither do you," he says. "Strangely, more people seem to know what it's like to be blind than it is to stutter."

Black Swan Green marks a departure from the intricate Russian doll narratives that have made his name. Set in a Worcester village in 1983 England, it follows 13-year-old Jason, struggling with puberty, unpopularity, a troublesome speech impediment and the growing tension in his parents' marriage.

He is sympathetic, funny, engaging, striving to understand the confusion inside him and in the world around him. His stories are riddled with misapprehensions and mispronunciations: the machine his therapist uses to measure his speech is "the metro gnome".

Yet despite being tangled up by hormones, schoolyard politics and his tongue, he's believably articulate. Through him, Mitchell evinces the ennui and intricate politics of small-town adolescence, interspersed by moments of poetry ("Run across a field of daisies at warp speed it's ace. Petalled stars and dandelion comets streak the green universe") and terror ("Hate smells like burnt dead fireworks").

Mitchell shies from the term coming-of-age novel, saying "it's a collection of short stories I imagined commissioned by different editors". So what's the difference between a chapter and a short story? "Short stories should start after the beginning and end before the ending."

However, the novel doesn't suffer for being read as a straightforward narrative and Mitchell is wary of falling back on old tricks. "You spend your 20s finding your voice, but you need to work out how to lose it before you can keep going," he says, paraphrasing Philip Glass. "I don't want to be the guy who always writes the same kind of novel, always known for the wacky structures."

He notes that "however breathtakingly inventive a book is, it is only breathtakingly inventive once".

In some ways it's a risk not to give his readership more of the same and it's paradoxical that many may consider this more conventional structure an innovative shift.

Mitchell says Black Swan Green is cannibalised from an aborted first novel to which he only now had the confidence to return. Why now? "A combination of different things: having children, wanting to make sense of that strange in-between time when you have adult emotions and desires you're unable to make sense of," he says. "I needed three books' experience to be able to write about that fear and uncertainty without cliche."

As with Jason, Mitchell grew up writing secret poetry in a village, but his new novel is only "38.2 per cent true", he says. "The stage is the same, the costumes similar, but the cast is different. I had a much happier upbringing; my parents are still together." Although he concedes that "if you want to write stuff that means anything, you have to try to put a kernel of truth in it", he refrained from writing in people he knew because "you still have to live with them".

The novel he's researching sees him on more familiarly exotic ground. Comprised of six novellas spanning 80 years, it's based on Deshima, the first Dutch settlement in Japan, with alternating chapters from Japanese and Dutch perspectives. He'll be moving back to Japan next year for the foreseeable future, not just for research but also so his children "can connect to their maternal culture".

As with reading his books, an afternoon with Mitchell is completely engaging: you cover vast and sometimes unfamiliar terrain, illuminated by his uncommon intelligence. And when you reach that last page, you're a little sad it is ending. However, despite his being a candid and charmingly self-deprecating subject, who can be sure if they have managed to know him? So many interviews, he comments wrily, "only have a sliver of me hidden in them".

As Kierkegaard observed, the more you pursue something, the more it retreats. It's certainly true of artists such as Mitchell, who seem to disappear into their art.

Given how much his work has had to say so far, that's probably more than enough for him. And hopefully, for his many readers.