Transcript from interview with David Mitchell

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Ramona Koval: David Mitchell's first book Ghostwritten was described by AS Byatt as 'the best novel I have ever read'. His second Number 9 Dream was shortlisted for the Booker and the James Tait Black Memorial prizes, and his third Cloud Atlas was hailed as spectacular by both critics and general readers alike, another Booker nominated work.

His latest novel is Black Swan Green, the story of 13 months in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor, the year his parents split up. A lot happens to him that year; he survives another year in the schoolyard, and a boy with a stammer doesn't have it easy, and he emerges as a young poet, although he publishes under an assumed name. That description is really very one-dimensional and as usual this David Mitchell book is very much multi-dimensional.

At our session in Wellington at Writers and Readers Week last week David began by reading from Cloud Atlas, and those who have read the book will know that the text has a very interesting structure, with the first half of the book being the first half of a series of stories (like ABCDE), and the second half completing them in a Russian doll-like stack (EDCBA), and with each of the chapters written in a different kind of English, from the language of an 18th century shipboard journal to a projected future language. So when he sat down to talk after his reading I asked him how we went about working out what these languages might sound like, what's his system?

David Mitchell: It depends if we're in the past, the present or the future.

Ramona Koval: Take your pick.

David Mitchell: In the past, if you've got an American narrator in the 19th century then Melville is a good place to start, so I read Moby Dick and cribbed down all the things that I wouldn't say myself, antiquated terms of phrase and items of vocabulary, and just worked them into the narrative as I wrote it. We speak 21st century English, so the present is not problem, and the future is the easiest of all because you can make it up and you won't get any angry letters from Tunbridge Wells to say 'I'm disgusted by Mr Mitchell's misuse of English.' So in the far future part, English sort of gets crushes and melded. I was teaching English in Japan at that time, so I based a lot of the English that might be spoken 600 years from now on my Japanese students' mistakes of English. So I used the way...their mistakes with irregular English verbs, for example.

Ramona Koval: But is that because you think English is going to be the global language probably? Or maybe Chinese will be, but anyway at the moment it looks like it's English, so English will accommodate itself to all the mistakes that everybody who is not an English speaker will make.

David Mitchell: It will, it does, and that's a fabulous thing. It's great how language evolves. It inches forwards by mistakes. I'm into very controversial linguistic areas here, I suppose, but it does seem that something like 'long time no see', which would once have been a native Chinese-speaker's misappropriation of 'I haven't seen you for a long time', that sort of gets adopted first with a sense of irony, and then even the irony evaporates and it becomes standard English. Isn't it fantastic? We're all a part of it, a great linguistic democracy. Great. Love it. Next question.

Ramona Koval: I'm just enjoying the pleasure you have in language, and obviously why wouldn't you have pleasure in language? But not every writer has that sort of pleasure.

David Mitchell: Maybe they do, they just don't whitter on about it so incessantly. But we're so lucky. Perhaps people in all language groups have a sneaking suspicion that however egalitarian they may wish to present themselves, really their own language has...it reaches the parts that other languages cannot reach. But English is this great central reservoir. We've got words like 'circumambulation' that I can't even pronounce without thinking. There in the depths we can kind of scoop up...but we've got more recent great American contributions coming into the language, and even from New Zealand as well. So I consider myself fortunate having English as my birthright, as a writer.

Ramona Koval: And you are interested in the building blocks of sentences as well as sentences, and I'm thinking now of the structures of your book and the engineering that goes into something like Cloud Atlas and the Dream book. So I wanted to talk to you about whether you perhaps wanted to be an engineer or an architect when you were a young man, because they seem so architectural. You can walk through these books and you can actually visualise the whole structure of them and you can actually climb on the scaffolding and look down.

David Mitchell: Thanks for the nice things you said about my writing there, Ramona. I did want to be an inventor, that was my very first thing, which is a pretty fair description of a novelist.

Ramona Koval: What did you invent?

David Mitchell: I invented spaceships. I made very elaborate cardboard spaceships and space station with UHU glue, who are not a sponsor of this festival. That smell of it...you shouldn't smell it too much, kids! But yes, I used to invent very elaborate space stations. Then I wanted to program computer games, and I did for a while on my Sinclair 48K ZX Spectrum, which was the future for a while. They no longer exist, so they haven't sponsored me, obviously. You can see the adult vocation in childhood forms of play, and I bet when you were a kid you were one of these kids who were always asking questions and wanted to interview people.

Ramona Koval: It's true, though it's not about me today, it's about you. Black Swan Green of course is a much more conventional book, although there are hidden worlds within the story, the world of Jason Taylor who has a hidden identity as a poet and even an assumed name. Tell me about the structure of this book, because actually there are worlds in this book too. It's small on the outside and big on the inside, if you know what I mean.

David Mitchell: Like Dr Who's spaceship, the TARDIS.

Ramona Koval: I was going to say TARDIS. Because sometimes you take us off the page into a magical space, not really magic realism in a way, but a kind of thrillingly invented language world that he finds himself when he's by himself.

David Mitchell: There's a few questions in there. It is a more conventional book, but for me after the first three, that was unconventional, if that makes sense.

Ramona Koval: So this is unconventional.

David Mitchell: It was for me, even though it looks like a conventional book from the outside at least, as you say. Perhaps to my satisfaction then I had exhausted the possibilities of novels with monkeyed-about-with structures, and so in a sense a more ordinary book was a more revolutionary next step for me. His language...it's tough when you're writing a novel narrated by a kid because unless you kind of cheat by making him a genius you're stuck between writing plausible 13-year-old but using his language and giving him a sufficiently interesting voice to retain an adult reader. Certainly when I was 13 the things I said weren't that interesting, and the idea of 300 pages of it would have sent me to sleep, certainly. However, what kids do do (and this was my way out of this fix really) is accidental poetry.

Kids of a certain age, hopefully 13, are on the cusp of acquiring an adult vocabulary but they'll still assemble and conjugate words that adults don't or that we could censor ourselves and prevent ourselves from saying. If a kid steps on a piece of crusty several-day-old snow that hasn't melted and it goes crunch, and it's very much like stepping on a Cadbury's Crunchie (who are also not sponsoring me) and we might not say that unless we are writers or eccentric or have some disorder, but a 13-year-old would; 'Wow, it's like stepping on a Crunchie.' So even though things Jason says aren't that coherent or articulate, in his own mind he's a poet, but most kids are, I think. I haven't been inside the heads of other kids, I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that that goes on.

Ramona Koval: He works at expressing himself in poetry, but he has difficulty in expressing himself aloud in the language that he loves.

David Mitchell: Yes, like me he has a stammer and I very much wanted to write about it, that was one of my motivations for the book. It's not talked about very much and well-meaning friends don't want to ask about it for fear of hurting my feelings, but this means I think it's probably much easier to find really good accounts of what it's like to be blind or deaf than it is to actually be fine but not be able to speak without an arsenal of techniques and evasions that people who stammer need to use. So I wanted to write about it and, perhaps in this area more than others, send...we're into Dr Who area again, but send a message to my 13-year-old self just containing all the things I wish someone had told me then. I think the science of speech therapy has advanced a lot since those days, and I think kids these days get a lot more useful help. But back in my day, not so great.

Ramona Koval: I was struck then by your description, equating it to blindness or deafness. Do you feel as if it is as big a disadvantage to you?

David Mitchell: No, of course not. I can see and I can hear and this allows me to interface with the world much more directly. Perhaps it isn't as major an inability as deafness or blindness, and this is why it has slipped under the radar of help and of knowledge for a long time. My book is one modest way to rectify that.

Ramona Koval: So you just talked then about strategies that you employ to get a sentence out, and if we had a tickertape of your brain going up behind us here...

David Mitchell: I'd be arrested.

Ramona Koval: ...apart from those lines, we would probably see a whole lot of instructions to yourself about the sentence that's coming up and how to negotiate it, a kind of map of what you want to say.

David Mitchell: Yes, you would.

Ramona Koval: Can you tell us a little bit about that map?

David Mitchell: It's complex. The relationship of a stammer with spoken language is very complex and it's largely beyond my understanding. Of course I have a greater understanding that a non-stammerer would, but why I can speak in front of a few hundred people and not be afflicted...dunno, I don't really know. I can draw up a general list of rules and these include...when it's really important that I don't stammer, like now, I don't. This is one rule. Rules can be broken, and they're listed in a book folks, but in terms of your question, what does happen is...I do this less now, I've come to a more useful working accommodation with my stammer and it tends not to sort of mug me as much, but what I used to do more was to examine the sentence ahead and if necessary engineer it so that I would be avoiding a word that I thought I might stammer on.

Really severe cases, if someone is asking you if you would like water or milk and you know that you tend to stammer on words beginning with 'M'...there's always one or two key consonants at any one time, and interestingly these consonants alter through life. So at the moment, say, I would have a hard time with 'Ks', hard 'Cs' and 'Ss', whereas years ago I remember being unable to say words beginning with 'Y'. I dreaded being 12 years old because then I couldn't say words beginning with 'T', say. But now I can do these fine. How come? I don't know. But water or milk, can't say words beginning with 'M', the worst thing, even if you want milk you'd ask for water because you can't say 'milk'. You live with it and you devise coping strategies. Compared to what a lot of people live with happily, it's a lucky break really.

Ramona Koval: I'm just thinking now about how it might have influenced the way you've written, the idea of...the breaking down of things, the geography of the sentences that you're about to speak, the geographies of these words that you create.

David Mitchell: Linguistically it doesn't change how I write because of course I'm totally free on the page...

Ramona Koval: No, but it changes how you think though, surely?

David Mitchell: As a kid it gives you a whacking vocabulary really early. You do need other ways to get around words. It gives you a sensitivity for language register, by which I mean if you don't think you can say 'pointless' because you're stammering on words beginning with 'P' at that point, and it's more likely you will know substitute words like 'futile', however this brings you up against the other problem whereby if you use the word 'futile' amongst 13-year-old they'll do yer bleedin' 'ead in because a 13-year-old has no right to be using a word of a higher register like 'futile'. So this is useful stuff for a writer and it's stuff that I still use now. All writers do but I was aware of it from a much earlier age, which does show what we think of as our handicaps and our inabilities can actually be teachers, they can actually have very useful functions. Would I wish my stammer away? I'd like to wish it away but I certainly wouldn't want to pay for that wish by losing what I'd learnt about language through it.

Ramona Koval: Jason develops this idea of his stammer as 'hangman' because the stammer is so pervasive that it has an ego and it has a kind of presence.

David Mitchell: It does rather feel like that. When you're a kid especially you personify abstracts in order to understand them better and in order to feel as though you're doing business with them and interacting with them. So it made sense for Jason to do that.

Ramona Koval: This is a cousin to all the books that you've written before because we have characters that reappear from the other books. They're a different age and they're referred to. This Madame...now I'm going to mispronounce... Crommelynck...

David Mitchell: Unless we have any Belgians in the audience, it's Madame de Crommelynck, and if we do then they're very welcome to come up and correct me afterwards.

Ramona Koval: She's a character from that, and she's just fantastic. In one of these magical moments he goes in to see this woman who is this Belgian countess, I suppose, she's been everywhere, she knows everything...

David Mitchell: She's like you, Ramona.

Ramona Koval: She's like me, thank you. I thought she was probably about 40 years older than me.

David Mitchell: Okay, she's like how you will be in 40 years time.

Ramona Koval: We're all a bit demented in our own ways. She was very wise and she was prefect for a young poet, wasn't she, she knew what he should read and what he should listen to. She was talking straight to him. She was a gift.

David Mitchell: She was. Well, he deserves a gift after everything else I put him through. I wanted an opportunity to talk about art in the book and there wasn't one, and wasn't really one when I was a kid either. But I advertised this vacancy amongst the cast of people I'd already written, and she applied for it and she passed the interview unanimously. So bring her in and hopefully she brings with her the ontological certainty. If you read this book and believe it's real, then in theory someone from this book who then appears in this will bring that realness with them and make Black Swan Green a more real place as well. So there's a technical reason for doing it as well, but it's also just kind of fun.

Ramona Koval: But you do want everything to connect, don't you.

David Mitchell: I stand accused. Yes, I'm guilty, I suppose. Yes. Nothing more profound really. Isn't it great when things do? Doesn't it remind you to be happy that you're alive when things like this happen, when something from a long time ago that you thought would never re-enter your life, it does, hopefully not in a negative way. When you see an old friend that you haven't seen for 15 years who you never expected to see, they just pop up. Isn't that wonderful? Maybe I do a little bit...

Ramona Koval: How important is music to you for that, old songs?

David Mitchell: As everybody knows (which is a Leonard Cohen song of course), songs bring things back instantly, in as undiluted a way as smell. Songs are companions in life as well. We might have a song that we knew when we were 13 years old and if it's art it evolves as we do and we can listen to it when we're 80 and it's a touchstone, all the way back. I couldn't...I would live without music of course but I'm very glad I don't have to.

Ramona Koval: So this young poet, Jason...you wrote poetry too when you were this age. You published under the name of James Bolivar.

David Mitchell: How do you know that?

Ramona Koval: I know stuff, I'm so old now, I know stuff, it's not hard. What happened to the poetry with you?

David Mitchell: Realistic assessment of my own gifts happened...

Ramona Koval: By you or others?

David Mitchell: By me. Of course when I was 15 I thought I was absolutely wonderful, and then luckily for me and posterity I read some real poets and met one or two, and realised that it is a higher art that I can't really attain. It's not where my vocation is and it's not...what gifts I may have, poetry isn't what these equip me for best. You can't make a single mistake in poetry, every last word and inflection has to be perfect. Short stories are higher than novels for this reason. Short stories are somewhere between the novel and poem.

Ramona Koval: Because the novel is more forgiving?

David Mitchell: Yes, novel comes with getaway cars. You can write a duff scene or a half-duff scene and if the next one is brilliant then the half-duff scene can still earn its keep. But a half-duff scene in a short story and the short story is dead. I've written a few, I know.

Ramona Koval: Is originality more important to you than telling a story or creating characters?

David Mitchell: What's important is a really simple question; is it good or not? Is it any good or not? If you are true to yourself then originality happens by default because every single person in the world has original a personality as their iris. It seems that it's not original when we...I haven't had this thought before and it might be a load of nonsense, so I apologise in advance if it is...but it seems that we are like other people and one book is like another book if we allow our true selves to be overly doctored or influenced by the 'other' or rather the 'others'. But I think if you (I hideously mix my metaphors)...if you mine yourself deep enough then the metals you will find will be precious and original. So originality isn't a thing, it's the absence of other things, which is great news.

Ramona Koval: It's not really a young person's book, is it?

David Mitchell: Yes, a few schools from around where I grew up have adopted it. So certainly a few hundred schoolkids in Worcestershire are reading it this year and perhaps hating me because I'm...

Ramona Koval: Have you had any communications from them?

David Mitchell: A few, yes. Luckily people who take the time to write you a letter about a book usually do it because they love it rather than they hate it. I haven't had any hate mail, no, not yet.

Ramona Koval: You've spoken before about going to live in Japan in 1994 as the beginning of your life as a proper writer. You were a foreigner with little Japanese and you say it afforded you the luxury of having no social belonging and probably no real responsibilities, I guess, and also you didn't have to talk, I suppose. What did that...so they think about your stammer, or that was a way of presenting yourself without a problem?

David Mitchell: My evasive strategies were sufficiently developed by then for that to not really be a factor.

Ramona Koval: Did that feel like you were a different person?

David Mitchell: I went there because of wanderlust more than anything else really. I feel like a different person every few years actually, I guess we all do, we become a dad or get married or get unmarried or change your job or have a near death experience, this sort of nudges you along the great journey.

Ramona Koval: But also it probably provided you with a kind of writer's retreat, like in a bubble. You were always in a writer's retreat because you didn't have to communicate with people, you couldn't read anything, you couldn't watch television. Was that something that stimulated you towards the page, because what else were you going to do?

David Mitchell: Yes, I think so, I'm sure it helped. I've been looking for a good way to articulate this for years and you've just supplied it. Japan was my writer's retreat. That's great. Is it okay if I use that in the future?

Ramona Koval: Of course, feel free. What about in Ireland? You live in Ireland now.

David Mitchell: I'm a dad, as I've said about three times already. I've got some photos to show you later.

Ramona Koval: They're very beautiful children, I've seen them before.

David Mitchell: And of course when you become a dad everything becomes very simple; what's best for the kids? We went back to Japan last year just for a year so that our daughter could learn the language, which she did in about three weeks. I've been doing it for nine years and it's still very ugly. Then we realised that, for who we are, West Cork is the place, so we went back to Ireland.

Ramona Koval: So do you feel like an outsider there?

David Mitchell: It's good with an international marriage to live in a third country because then it's no one's fault when things go wrong, and things in Ireland do go wrong. It's not a systems society, it's a leisurely...which is a great Irish word...if you don't have much on this afternoon you say, 'I'm quite leisurely this afternoon,' and there's something very Irish about that...which does mean that if you want an electrician this afternoon, forget it. You'll get one next month maybe. But it also means that people are less stressed, I think, and it's a good place for children.

Ramona Koval: And what about a good place for writers? Because we have this idea that it's a place full of writers and they don't pay tax and everyone's a poet. Is that true?

David Mitchell: It's a place for writers...anywhere is a place for a writer. Humanity is so fascinating and our work is to put that fascinating-ness into the book. Yes, it's true that there are generous tax breaks and it's disingenuous of me to not mention that when people say, 'So why do you live in Ireland?' 'Well, the environment is great, a good place for kids,' and they're waiting for me to mention this. But it is being reduced, which is fine as well. The midwife who helped deliver my son...I don't know if I mentioned I'm a dad, by the way...but she is of more value to Irish society than I am, and if anyone deserves a tax break it's her and not me. But my principles are not that strong that I will insist on making voluntary donations to the state, I haven't gone there yet. Have I answered your question?

Ramona Koval: Yes, you have. I've got a question about the work you're working on now, and I believe we're going to Japan and we're going back in time, and we're going to a place where language is very important again.

David Mitchell: We are. It's the Napoleonic era in Europe, and while Japan was closed to the outside world for 248 years or so there was one exception that no one outside Holland really knows about which was an artificial island, very small, perhaps about the size of this theatre, in Nagasaki Harbour called Deshima, and on this for the whole of those two and a half centuries the Dutch East Indies company was permitted to trade with the Japanese, and it was staffed by about 10 or 15 Dutch guys a long way from home.

The ships would come once a year from Batavia, which is now Jakarta, and they weren't allowed off the island, and the only three categories of people who were allowed on were the merchants who did business with them, the prostitutes who also did business with them, and the interpreters who belonged to a hereditary caste, it was passed on from father to son. The Dutch officially weren't allowed to learn Japanese, although they tend to be such gifted linguists that they did, but officially they weren't allowed to. And no Japanese other then the interpreters and a few academics towards the end of the period as well were allowed to learn Dutch. So language is power, and the interpreters had it.

Ramona Koval: But then how are you going to translate that into English with all of those different kinds of languages and the importance of which language you speak?

David Mitchell: With difficulty. The other thing about originality that I didn't say earlier, the more...to use an adjective I've just borrowed from Christian Bok the poet who's also at this festival, he talks about Sisyphean constraints, and the more Sisyphean the constraints, provided you can...just to turn Houdini into a verb...as long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.

Ramona Koval: That was a triple somersault with pike, wasn't it!