The fascination of islands

British author David Mitchell. Photo / Supplied

Whether it is Hong Kong in his debut novel Ghostwritten or Japan in last year's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell is obsessed with islands. As we sip green tea in a cafe in Spitalfields Market in east London, the 42-year-old writer cheerfully admits he even "lives on an island called Ireland".

He is looking forward to returning to New Zealand - "a wonderful country" - next month for the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival. He first visited the North Island nearly a decade ago while researching his Booker Prize-nominated third novel Cloud Atlas, which opens in the Chatham Islands in the 1850s before eventually ending up in a dystopian Korea and a post-apocalyptic Hawaii.

"Islands are controllable," he says. "There's no vastness on an island. The perplexity of vastness isn't something that troubles you on an island. In a way, a novel is an island as well. It's got its own shores and borders and a horrible little tyrant rules over it and says what goes on."

Mitchell first read about the Moriori in American academic Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, which explored how Eurasian civilisations have conquered and, in some cases, exterminated many other races over the centuries.

"The novelistic possibilities just leapt out at me," he says. "Of course, I had to go there. You can't fake the Chathams. If you haven't been there, you haven't got a chance.

"Anthropologically speaking, the Moriori forgot the certainty of the outside world, which became a point of mythical status. They forgot boat-building technology as well because they didn't need it. It went the way of our appendixes."

Curiously, Jacob de Zoet, the Dutch clerk who gives his name to Mitchell's latest, hails from the original Zeeland. "He should really have been an Amsterdammer but some musicians from Middelburg in old Zeeland invited me over to witness the premiere of a composition they made of Cloud Atlas," says Mitchell.

"Certainly in the British Isles, everybody knows New Zealand much more than old Zeeland. They might be hard-pushed to say where old Zeeland is or to find it on a map. That makes it an anti-cliche. It's also such a great landscape. You get great skies there and it's so flat. All of the Netherlands is flat but Zeeland is like the Netherlands with knobs on. There's like a big eyeball of god looking down at you and you're at the mercy of the elements - or the mercilessness of the elements with all the storms."

Set in the port city of Nagasaki in 1799, no lives are lost in The Thousand Autumns but some damage is done in a sizeable tremor. Auspiciously, I meet Mitchell just after the considerably more devastating recent earthquakes in Christchurch and northeastern Japan. "There are fictitious earthquakes where as an artist I try to represent what one is in the best way I can with those squiggles on the page we call words," he reasons. "Then there is me, the human being, who sees what a real earthquake can do and is deeply troubled by the effect and human misery they cause. The human me looks at the artist me and thinks 'exploiter' but then if you thought that all the time you'd never write a page."

The idea for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet first occurred to Mitchell after he visited the Museum of Dejima while backpacking around Japan in 1994. "I wasn't a writer back then but I knew that one day I would be," he recalls. "Again, like the Moriori, it's like metal-detecting. There are seams that you find that are potentially very rich and this was another place like that. It was the inverse of most colonial experiences; where the white people go in and behave like the Pakeha generally do, which is to take over the place.

"Japan wasn't having that at all, so they quarantined them off on this little island, which was essentially a prison and they were like hostages. In the early days, it was worth it for the money and the metals like gold, silver and copper, but towards the end it was probably kept on just as a trophy because no one else was there. Individuals could make money but the company lost money, which contributed to its downfall."

A small artificial island in Nagasaki Bay, Dejima was the sole outpost of the Dutch East India Company during Japan's near 200-year self-imposed Period of Isolation. "Hermit societies are always interesting," says Mitchell. "North Korea now is horrendous and hideous in some respects but it's fascinating as well. I'm glad we don't have to live next door to it but it's still a fascinating place to think about and study."

Mitchell first explored Japan in Ghostwritten and his second book number9dream, which centres around a 19-year-old who immerses himself in the city's burgeoning cyber sub-cultures after travelling to Tokyo to track down his father.

Born in Southport, Merseyside, Mitchell spent eight years teaching English in Hiroshima, where he met his wife, Keiko. "I suppose I should know what it is about Japan that fascinates Westerners but I never feel like I do. They're like us but totally alien as well. They have large structures, they industrialised early and their systems are world class and yet it's a society of relative opposites. That juxtaposition is interesting in itself. The aesthetics of the place and the emphasis the culture places on aesthetics is attractive to Westerners and always has been."

With its more traditional structure, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet seems to be Mitchell's most naturalistic novel. However, he insists appearances can be deceptive. "There's one viewpoint at a time at least," he says. "It's slightly fancier than it looks. Part one has one viewpoint, part two has two viewpoints and part three has three. It goes from a one-stroke to a two-stroke to a three-stroke engine, which hopefully accelerates things along a bit. It's pretty realistic on the whole."

His first novel to be set entirely in the past, it took four years to complete as Mitchell painstakingly ensured every small detail was correct. "There were so many potential problems that could make the book not work," he says. "If I'd anticipated them all before I started then I might not have begun, because they really were enormous. When I was writing the book, it was more a case of problem-solving - like what language do they speak? And do they speak authentic language because if you do that it would have sounded like Blackadder, which would have been ridiculous. But if you fill it with neologisms like 'hang on' instead of 'wait' or 'tarry' then pop goes the bubble of fiction."

Indeed Jacob's delicate negotiations are often at the mercy of his translators. "The moment you have an interpreter making decisions you've got a fictional discourse on the power of language," says Mitchell. "He who speaks both languages - and you notice it was a he - has power for sure and that's still true."

Over the hour I spend with him, Mitchell proves to be charming and engaging company, occasionally breaking off from our conversation to thank the cafe owner for his delicious miso cookies or to praise Damon Albarn's songwriting skills as Gorillaz's second album Demon Days plays in the background.

"I've got a soft spot for this album," he says. "He's a rare beast. A survivor. Every song has got like a fifth or second passage, which is like the cornerstone of it."

Mitchell is also a rare beast as his novels are popular bestsellers despite their fractured narratives and experimental techniques. "I just like to write the kind of books that I would like to read," he says. "And maybe also the books that my wife would like to read because she has to live with me. She's my proofreader and if she thinks what I write sucks then we have a problem because I spend so much time in these worlds."

According to Mitchell, Keiko is his harshest critic. "She can be pretty brutal," he laughs. "She'll say, 'that's not writing, you can do better than that!' But if you can get a tired mother interested in your books then the odds of them being good are pretty strong. We've got two small kids and she's often exhausted. I can tell how well the manuscript is working by what she cooks - although I have to say that we're a post-feminist household and I also do my share of the cooking - but if she spends more than an hour making dinner then I know it's no good. But if it's a plate of frozen rubbish from the freezer then it must be really good. The better the food then the worse the manuscript is as she'd rather read than cook."

* David Mitchell is a guest at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, May 11-15.