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David Mitchell: Until he got off the wrong street car. And modern day Nagasaki, like
many Japanese cities are probably... They're the sort of quite, assaults on the eyeball
really. It's quite chaotic and jumbly and overhead cables and advertisements, but there's
a very graceful building I spied from afar, and it's just beautiful and white and obviously
from a different historical period. And I went and that's where I discovered... That's
the moment I discovered Dejima. I wasn't invited then; I just had aspirations. And I didn't
get lunch that day. I got something more worthwhile than lunch, I got half a notebook full of
notes about this place that I knew I'd want to write about one day. It took me some time.
Four books later, it was at the front of the queue. And so it was the place that made my
little novelist onboard Geiger counter go ki, ki, ki, ki, you know 'cause you've got
one too.
Randy Boyagoda: I don't know if it goes ki, ki, ki, ki like that as quickly but...
DM: That's 'cause I'm an older model...
RB: Oh, I see, I see. Mine is an iPhone out back...
DM: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah...
RB: What's strange and you're pointing that this novel seems to... At least the idea of
it predates the other novels that you wrote or that we've seen since. The big difference
I found in reading this book was the third person narration. Your earlier books feature
a wild array of wonderful first person narrators. Why did you choose to go with the third person
narrator this time?
DM: Because I wrote it in the first person for the first 18 months, and it wasn't working.
It wasn't working, and when it's not working, you have to sit down and with a blank piece
of paper and write to yourself why it isn't working. And you have to be very honest and
sometimes it can be quite painful 'cause it might involve throwing away quite a lot of
work. But on the other hand, you wouldn't have reached that point without the work,
so maybe it's necessary. However, it wasn't working in the first person, and I sure as
hell couldn't write a 500-page book in the second person.
[laughter]
DM: But it was scary because it was out of my comfort zone, didn't know how to do it...
RB: What did it give you that your first person... In terms of the opportunities as a writer
imagining the story, with a third person narrator, what could you do that you couldn't do with
first person narration?
DM: I should know, I should have a sharp answer, but it certainly made it work. I spoke to
AS Byatt of all people and said, "The problem with the third person... " It's not that I
have her home phone number, it's just we were doing an event at one point and the conversation
came about at this very useful moment, "And the problem with the third person... Well,
with the first person, you know the person; you know what they do, what they think about,
this, this, this and this, you know how they speak and pretty soon the plot begins to coagulate.
You know what they'll do 'cause you know who they are. That's your plot. So you just start
off with the person. And then the problem of the plot sort of spreads out its tendrils.
Third person, where do you start? Where do you stop? You got infinity. How do you frame
it? What do you leave in and what do you leave out? What do you put in?" And Antonia Byatt
just gave me her special Paddington stare and said, "You put in what you think the reader
wants to hear."
[laughter]
DM: I assumed it was a... Oh, oh, okay.
[laughter]
DM: Maybe a creative writing course could have been a good idea...
[laughter]
DM: Yeah, okay. [chuckle] And then of course you've got kind of respect for the third person
narrative, you've got those sort of the 18th century ones in the way where the novel started
where you have omniscience. And there's mad, sold novels from "18th Century" "Fielding",
and "Smollett". "Smollett"'s great, really good, where he says, "Hello, welcome to my
novel." He literally writes this at the beginning of the Tom Jones... Not quite literally but
almost, "Step inside. We're gonna have a a stagecoach journey together. I'm gonna tell
you about this chap called Tom Jones. And at this point Tom was thinking... " So this
is omniscience, but then... I don't know. That's not done very often these days.
RB: No.
DM: You kind of see why. And just wrote myself a few... You have to work out what to do with
thought, whose thoughts are you gonna be able to hear. And so I just taught myself a simple
ground rule as per section of writing, there is only one head upon which the third person
narratorial helmet, the 3NH for short, it's obtainable as an app by the way...
[laughter]
DM: Sits, and it's kind of got a spike that goes into the brain, and only in that head
can you hear the thoughts of. So that was my law, and I stuck with it and...
RB: You should definitely teach creative writing.
DM: Oh, I know.
RB: I can imagine the students hearing that and thinking, "That makes total sense. I'll
go ahead and do that with the spike on the head."
DM: I can imagine the students hearing that and thinking, "I want my money back."
[laughter]
DM: So are you a first person junkie or are you a third person...
RB: I'm a third person control freak myself.
DM: Right, right, right. Right. I could have... Yeah, yeah.
RB: I think we're all hoping that for your next book, you write in the fourth person.
Let's see if you even come up with that one.
[laughter]
DM: As the great James Wood quote, "The house of literature has many windows but only two
or three doors." Isn't that smooth? Isn't that beautiful?
RB: Yes, very nice. I wanna ask you a couple of questions about your main characters, about
Jacob specifically. And one of the things that I found enjoyable and unexpected for
a contemporary novel, was that you took his religious faith very seriously, particularly
in the early parts of the novel, you have this devout dutiful clerk, and one of the
loveliest implications in the book is of Jacob with his contraband family, Salter, taking
out of his hiding place in the wood boards and then praying in a corner of his room that
his family still be alive when he returns home, the homesick traveller, I think is how
you describe him. At that point, he is not knowing yet how long he's gonna be there.
But as I said, it's very rare that we find thoughtful and moving representations of people
who actually believe still in something higher. In contemporary literature, what did writing
about someone's faith like that allow you to do in terms of exploring this character's
world?
DM: It's not so much from what it would allow me to do as it needed to be there for the
book to work. It's sort of the overriding question, I guess you're the same. Looking
at it backwards and de-constructing a done book, then you can sort of see the pieces.
But before, when it's not yet a done book, when it's not nearly yet a done book, the
advance spent book, at that stage... I keep talking about money, don't I? The overriding
question is, "What can I do to make this damn thing work?" And firstly, Dejima and the Dutch
East Indies Company were nests of thieves, nests of vipers, all in it for themselves,
and that was taken for granted. By making Jacob not a viper, I immediately make him
different, to more or less everyone else in the book.
DM: Secondly, we're in the past, it's a historical novel. It doesn't do to... It took me a long
time to learn this when I was writing the book, hence, four years. But historical fiction
isn't just another genre with old-fashioned costumes and scratchy wigs. It's a much more
serious project to take on. "Hey, you've written some exciting 1899, you know... " What difference
shapes one time period from another? And I think the answer is, it is what is taken for
granted. A big set, a big walloping group of things that are taken for granted in one
period that are not taken for granted in 2010.
RB: Right.
DM: One big thing that was taken for granted in the past wasn't a universally devout period
of course, but Christianity was a much more formative, overriding, believed in, mind-forming
phenomenon and set of beliefs.