David Mitchell

There are many kinds of authors in the world, but there are two in particular that I'm going to focus on today: authors who write brilliant books (and may or may not know it) and authors who write brilliant books, know it, and let you know that that they know it.

David Mitchell is the second kind of author. He can create wonderful characters, suggest complicated meaning, and twine plot lines together remarkably smoothly. The problem comes when he thinks that he readers won't catch this, and so feels the need to tell them how brilliant he is.

Quite frankly, that pisses me off. I hate it when authors underestimate me and feel that it's necessary to spell out the meaning of their books. In Mitchell's second novel Number9Dream, one of the big themes is the meaning of the protagonist's life and what his identity is. I get it. And I definitely get it without Mitchell sitting his protagonist--Eiji Miyake--down with one of his friends to discuss the meaning of life. I enjoyed the characters, I found the plot interesting, but I was turned off because I felt talked down to.

What's most frustrating about this is that by pulling stunts like this, Mitchell undermines his own brilliance. Truly wonderful authors are able to convey their main themes and ideas without staging elaborate, artificial conversations about these themes.

Mitchell's third novel Cloud Atlas, pulls a similar stunt, but with the structure of the book. The book is a series of stories, organized like nesting dolls. Each of the stories has something in it that connects it to the previous story, such as the protagonist of story 2 is reading the diary of story 1. It's clever, and interesting, and makes you want to see how the stories all connect together. But in one of the stories, the protagonist is a composer who's writing a piece with a structure like the novel. At some point, the composer makes the comment that this structure is either brilliant or a cheap gimmick. Now, any author who will put something that self-referential into his novel must be darn sure that it's brilliant, otherwise he'll risk looking really stupid. And while I certainly don't hesitate to call an author brilliant, an author calling himself brilliant is irritating. And cocky. And again, it sells me short. Mitchell is unsure that I'll recognize his brilliance, so he makes sure to tell me.

Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten, avoids these problems for the most part, and as a result, I actually really liked it. Like Cloud Atlas, it weaves seemingly unconnected plots and characters together, but does it in such a subtle way that initially, it could be missed. And throughout the novel, Mitchell hints at a greater meaning, particularly in the "Mongolia" section, but does so without coming out and directly addressing the theme that he wants us to notice. I also liked the characters a lot--there's a sassy physicist that I just loved (Hey P., I think you'd get a kick out of her too...she uses data from CERN). And I disliked one of the main characters, not because she wasn't well-written, but because she was written so well that I could picture her exactly and knew I wouldn't like her. Overall, I really liked the novel.

Mitchell has a fourth novel out that I haven't read yet called Black Swan Green that I really hope tends more towards the organic, unconstructed feeling (while still being extremely structured and constructed) of Ghostwritten than his later work. That's where Mitchell's talent really shines through, unobstructed by his own commentary.

But then again, maybe I've completely misread these novels and David Mitchell is simply too brilliant for me to even understand.

But I doubt it. :)