Book Review: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Published on Friday 30 April 2010 19:04

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell Sceptre, 469pp, £18.99

I FIRST met David Mitchell six years ago, at the West Cork cottage in which he still lives with his Japanese wife and their young children. It was one of the first interviews he had given about what turned out to be his breakthrough novel, Cloud Atlas. At the end, he showed me some of the Moleskine notebooks in which he'd started writing up his research for his next books. "Have you ever heard of the island of Dejima?" he asked.

He told me about a man-made island, the size of half a football pitch, curved slightly in the shape of a fan, built in the 17th century by the Japanese in Nagasaki bay. The 15 or so Dutchmen who lived on it were the only white people in the whole of Japan, their warehouses the only place in the country where western goods could be found. The Dutch weren't allowed off the island, and apart from a hereditary caste of about three families and a few politicians and courtesans, the Japanese weren't allowed on it.

"Imagine that," he said. "The whole of the West going into Japan through this narrow pinhole and all of Japan that goes out into the rest of the world going through it too. And I want to write about it when, in the Napoleonic wars, all of the other Dutch overseas possessions have been seized by the British, and back in Europe, the United Provinces have been overrun by the French, and this tiny island is the only place in the world where the Dutch flag still flies."

I knew then, as he told me about his new novel, that it would be good. I didn't realise it would be a masterpiece.

So yes, imagine Dejima the way David Mitchell does, because he builds it, convincingly, three-dimensionally and bustling with life, in the reader's mind. Imagine, on this artificial island, the young, red-haired assistant clerk Jacob de Zoet arriving with the new governor, commanded by him to root out corruption among the ten Europeans and a couple of Malay slaves with whom he is marooned at the edge of the world. Across a tiny landbridge, a city he will never be able to explore; beyond that the paddyfields reaching up the slopes of the mountains of the Cloistered Empire, everything about it fascinating and forbidden.

Originally, Mitchell had planned to write the novel in chapters whose narrators would alternate between de Zoet and a Japanese concubine. In the finished novel, he's dropped that in favour of a third-person narrative, and made Orito Aigabawa a midwife allowed by Nagasaki's governor to study western obstetrics under the instruction of Dejima's Dutch doctor. That's her reward for a successful forceps delivery of his favourite courtesan's baby, which at one point had been stuck in the transverse breech position with only its arm visible.

This is a graphic opening (doubly so, with the addition of an 18th-century engraving of the procedure), but symbolic on a wider level of the contact between restrictive Japanese assumptions – they believe nothing can be done to save the baby because its spirit is not ready for the world – and western culture that animates the rest of the novel. Though the book is in part about de Zoet's infatuation – or could this really be love? – with Aibagawa, it's these first cultural contacts that lie at its heart. Contact needs understanding, which needs language, which needs translation. Without it, the two worlds will remain forever divided by Dejima's land-bridge, the Japanese children on the landward side using their thumbs and forefingers to mock the Europeans' round eyes, the Dutch talking about the "slit-eyed leeches" on the other. No wonder that when de Zoet sends Aibagawa a marriage proposal it comes in the form of a Dutch dictionary.

Dejima's Europeans have a rough-hewn, often venal earthiness which contrasts absolutely with Mitchell's equally credible portrayal of the rigidly ordered Japanese society. He describes the unsettling, unstable ground between them with something close to perfection, often lyrically, yet using language that sounds either forced or mistranslated ("Birds are notched on the low sky. Autumn is ageing") that reminds us everything is being seen through foreign eyes.

When I interviewed him about Cloud Atlas, Mitchell – engagingly modest in person – was eloquent about his ambitions for his fiction. The imaginative range of his writing which so many critics had admired was just, he said, the result of setting himself ingenious restrictions. This was the novel's "secret architecture": with Cloud Atlas, an exploration of how six interrelated stories could be told in the form of a memoir, letters and a pulp bestseller.

The new novel isn't as ostentatious, its "secret architecture" less visible, but its range is just as impressive. This isn't just a story of the cultural intermingling between the Dutch and the shogun-era Japanese, fascinating though these encounters are, with the Dutch struggling to explain the meaning of such words as "privacy" that lack a Japanese equivalent, and the Japanese never admitting it when they don't understand.

Depicting all of this – the backgrounds and motivations of the European adventurers, the two societies gradually learning from each other despite misunderstandings – would be enough for any novelist. For Mitchell, it's only the start: no sooner has he finished doing this, than he cuts the ground from under his two protagonists: Jacob is humiliated by his double-dealing governor, and Aibagawa is forced into a nunnery that resembles a cross between the Leah Re-education Centre in The Handmaid's Tale and the Renaissance convent in Sarah Dunant's Sacred Hearts.

At this point – there's a rescue bid – the novel switches into action mode. But even here Mitchell is assured, sketching in societal attitudes through the myths the nuns tell each other, reassuring one another that, in what the reader can see is patently a dystopia, everything is clearly for the best.

No sooner has Mitchell veered towards melodrama, however, than the storytelling opens still wider. What had hitherto been a story of corruption in a trading post at the end of the world now moves into geopolitics, as gout-ridden Captain John Penhaligon sails into Nagasaki bay aboard HMS Phoebus, dreaming of writing his name in the history books as the man who secured the Far East for the British Empire. Japan as a client British colony – or at least a Japan fully opened up to British trade – isn't too presumptuous a thing to imagine: the Dutch base at Batavia (the future Jakarta) has already been conquered while, back in Europe, their country has been wiped off the map by Napoleon. All that stands against them is Jacob de Zoet … Yet as the British captain ponders whether to rain shock and awe on that fan-shaped trading post in Nagasaki bay; as Jacob de Zoet comes to terms with a moral dilemma that, at this last possible moment, one of his fellow-Europeans has just imposed on him; as the abduction of Aibagawa to the nunnery is finally revealed, Mitchell's descriptive powers take wing yet again. A seagull flying overhead that day, he writes, would see: "weavers of mats, cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses …"

And it's this kind of free-flowing descriptiveness, this sheer revelry in language, this fascination with what it can and can't explain, that underpins an already fascinating story. So credible has Mitchell made this melange of love story, quest, myth, melodrama and historical fiction that you'll probably finish it, as I did, and straight away check out what bits were true to the historical record, which facts were bent and which dates massaged. Then you'll realise that none of this matters, because masterpieces make their own rules, and this book is definitely one of them.