David Mitchell: By the Book

“Postwar,” by the historian Tony Judt; David Finkel’s account of U.S. forces in Iraq, “The Good Soldiers”; and a proof of Nadeem Aslam’s new book, “The Blind Man’s Garden,” which I haven’t started yet. Plus my notebook, in case a decent idea ambushes me after turning out the light.

The Icelander Halldor Laxness’s “Independent People,” which I read last year on a trip to the country. Even in chapters where nothing happens, it happens brilliantly. I thought Kevin Powers’s “The Yellow Birds” was shot through with greatness, too. If “a truly great book” implies thickness and scope, then maybe it doesn’t qualify, but either way Powers has written a superlative novel.

I’d rather not put the boot in publicly — it spoils my day when I’m on the receiving end.

If the book is still in print and from a mainstream publisher, I’ll use my local bookshop here in Clonakilty in West Cork; I’ll Amazon it if I’m after something more oddball from, say, the University of Hawaii Press; or use AbeBooks if it’s out of print or print-on-demand. I like to browse the bookshelves of charity shops in university towns, in case serendipity hands me something wonderful I had no idea I wanted. Up to 10 proofs a week wriggle through my letterbox from editors and publishers (even though I’ve stopped blurbing), and occasionally there’s a well-chosen diamond.

First, there’s a primal wow to be had from seeing your characters walking and talking, larger than life, played by faces I’ve known for much of my life. Second, there’s a slower-burning pleasure in merely thinking of your story being out in the world, trickling into minds, wherever there are cinemas. Then, inevitably, the film gets lost in the hurly-burly of life, and I don’t think about it at all, at least until the next interview.

None of the major changes the film made to my novel “threw me off” in the sense of sticking in my craw. I think that the changes are licensed by the spirit of the novel, and avoid traffic congestion in the film’s flow. Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable. In the German edition of my last novel, my translator Volker Oldenburg rendered a rhyming panoramic tableau by rescripting the items in order to make it rhyme in German too. He judged that rhythm mattered more than the exact items in the tableau, and it was the right call. Similarly, when the Wachowskis and Tykwer judged that in a translation (into film) of “Cloud Atlas” Zachry’s and Meronym’s future needs more certitude, then I trusted them to make the right call. They want to avoid melodrama and pap and cliché as much as I do, but a film’s payoff works differently to a novel’s payoff, and the unwritten contract between author and reader differs somewhat to the unwritten contract between filmmaker and viewer. Adaptations gloss over these differences at their peril.

There is one brief scene where the directors continue a character’s story arc further than I imagined, in the case of Cavendish. This extension feels so right that I’ve incorporated it into the book I’m working on, making it “canonical” so to speak. Here’s hoping the Wachowskis won’t object. . . .

Haruki Murakami, probably the most famous living Japanese person, is hardly a “discovery,” but it was a pleasure to read him in his natural habitat. Shusaku Endo was perhaps the closest thing to a “national conscience” writer (in the Amos Oz mold, say) to emerge in Japan. His historical novel “Silence” is wonderful. I have a soft spot for Junichiro Tanizaki, too. His earlier, Poe-drenched work is good fun, but his masterpiece, “The Makioka Sisters,” serves — Austen-like — as a sort of Lonely Planet guide to the matrix of social obligations which people in Japan still navigate. For a crash course in ultranationalism and the pathology of obsession, Yukio Mishima is the man, even if his humorlessness can wear you down. (The end of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, however, is surely one of the best final scenes in the history of the novel.) To mention the war, Akira Yoshimura’s “One Man’s Justice” and Saiichi Maruya’s “Grass for My Pillow” both examine Japan’s bruised relationship with its recent history. Sawako Ariyoshi’s “The Doctor’s Wife” is an excellent historical novel on the status of women in Japan.

Yes, I liked teaching very much, and I have many good memories. My students taught me more about Japan than its authors, really. By the end of my eight years there, however, I’d published two novels, had begun work on “Cloud Atlas” and had come to see my future in fiction. I remember writing very short stories as comprehension exercises for my college students. I never kept any copies, and now I sometimes wonder if they were any good.

How middle-aged does this question make me feel?! It’s tricky to answer, because I’m not very plugged in to the current scene here in the west of Ireland, and I tend to read the dead more than I do the living. But since you insist, three possible candidates for the Granta U.K. class of 2013 are Ned Beauman, Joe Dunthorne and Simon Lelic. Lelic’s three novels are breakneck, intelligent “social thrillers” that even invade my dream-life.

Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience. When you’re 10, there is still an outside chance that you might find Narnia behind the wardrobe, that the fur coats could turn into fir trees. The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep. I don’t mean that kids can’t distinguish fantasy from reality — the playground bully will clarify the matter gratis — but fantasy offers a logic to which kids are receptive, and escapism for which kids are hungry. As an adult, I read less fantasy (aside from bedtime-story duties), but perhaps nomenclature plays a role here, too: both fantasy and S.F. have made inroads into literary fiction and influences even those novels whose imprint logo is reassuringly conservative. Murakami’s “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” isn’t regarded as a fantasy novel, but the plot is propelled by occult magic. Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterly “Never Let Me Go” is old-money dystopian S.F., as is Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Philip K. Dick would recognize both Michael Chabon’s “Yiddish Policemen’s Union” and Philip Roth’s “Plot Against America” as alternate-history S.F. in the grandest, proudest tradition. We imbibe more S.F. and fantasy than we notice. On my last visit to New York, by the by, I had a dinner with a group of literary writers, and the whole main course was spent in earnest and learned discussion of “A Game of Thrones.”

Edmund from the Narnia books is an interesting one. In “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” he commits an act of exquisite treachery by refusing to corroborate Lucy’s experiences in Narnia, before selling his siblings for a box of crack-laced Turkish delight. Way to go, Ed. Yet by “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” Edmund has evolved the strength of character to tell Eustace calmly, “You were only an ass, but I was a traitor.” Stumbling heroes linger longer.

Lots, yes. In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we’re now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals. Michael Morpurgo is a great evoker of place and emotion, and a cool stylist. Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline” and “The Graveyard Book” are both gorgeous pieces of work which will outlive most of us, I expect.

Reading, maybe not a lot, other than to nudge me towards books and away from people, which maybe is a lot, after all. As a future writer, however, my stammer was an effective if merciless boot-camp instructor. It (or “He” as I imagined it) trained me to amass a vocabulary flexible and muscular enough to avoid words beginning with stammer-consonants, and do so on the hoof, before the other person caught on. My stammer also taught me about register — it was no good substituting “autodidact” for “I taught myself” because in a bog-standard state school in 1980s Britain using a word like “autodidact” got you convicted of talking posh, an offense punishable by being hung from iron railings by your underpants. What I didn’t know at the time was how linguistic register helps a novelist flesh out character and lends authenticity to dialogue or narrated thought. So while I wouldn’t say that stammering drove me to become a writer — this impulse comes from elsewhere — it did influence the type of writer I have become. What feels like a curse when you’re younger can prove to be a long-term ally.

I’ve puzzled for days over this, but drawn a blank. In order to concoct a pleasing combo — Mark Twain on the Tea Party, for example — you must already imagine what the author would write — an all-you-can-eat of gourmet ridicule — so there’s no element of surprise. There’s also a “changing the eye of the beholder” problem: sending an age-of-sail novelist into space, for example, would involve so much technical bringing-up-to-speed that I’m not sure whether Conrad, say, would still be writing like Conrad by the time he was climbing into his spacesuit. My only other idea is more vengeful than illuminating: to gather up a party of the most vociferous climate change deniers and send them 100 years into the future so they have to share the fates of their own great-grandchildren. But even then, I suspect, they would find reasons why it was someone else’s fault.

Chekhov. I don’t want to know anything in particular — I’d just like to carve up a pheasant with him, served with new potatoes and green beans from the garden. Then we could polish off some dodgy Crimean wine and play a few rounds of Anglo-Russian Scrabble and lose track of time and the score. If Isaac Bashevis Singer could be there, too, I think they’d get on well. And if Dorothy Parker could drop by at some point, and maybe Katherine Mansfield, and Sylvia Townsend-Warner. . . . And suddenly it’s a party.

I’d have to say, “I’m sorry, but books just don’t work like that, and neither does music, Amen” and take the consequences.