David Mitchell @ EIBF

 

I wasn’t prepared for quite how funny David Mitchell would be. Reading from his new novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, to a packed crowd in the Open University Event, he interrupted himself to cootchie-coo a baby in the front row, to assure us he wasn’t in the habit of studying the mating-procedures of rats and even to edit the text as he went along, taking a word out because he noticed ungainly repetition. The Booker-long-listed novel is a gorgeous historical fiction about turn of the Eighteenth Century Edo-era Japan. Impressive historical research is tightly woven with the lightest of touches into present tense narrative. His reading was dynamic, particularly in a second, uninterrupted, deeply poetic, rhythmic and even irregularly rhyming extract that showed off Mitchell’s virtuosity and bravery as a prose stylist. He was asked why he had chosen to write a novel that on the face of it was less experimental than his previous ones. He answered generously but matter-of-factly that he chose the form that could best give his ideas life. This willingness to trust his writer’s instincts to make formal decisions is what makes David Mitchell one of our most exciting novelists. [Colin Herd]