MURRAY: I’m intrigued by your whole accumulative “Über-book” project, as you’ve called it before, the increasing interconnections and links among your novels both to date and to come. Shortly after the publication of Utopia Avenue, I spoke with Mitchell about his Über-novel, the status of the novel, music, genre, television, and the possibility of the pursuit of Utopia. If the novel has a superpower, Mitchell says, it’s the power of “polyphony.” The novel is, quite literally, this thought process in motion, in narrative form. The novel relates : it lets us go places other genres of prose and other modes of thought do not. Perhaps this is why Mitchell’s Über-novel is such a timely project: the novel’s expansiveness invites us to see our likenesses among others, our standpoints in relation to society, and the fact that these things are historical, not static. For Mitchell, no subject or genre seems out of bounds: a historical novel of a Dutch trading post in 19th-century Japan or of the 1960s’ psychedelic rock scene, a narrative of a young poet, a Matryoshka construction of distant pasts and futures, or his own Middle-earth-sized fantasy.Įspecially as our world increasingly re-compartmentalizes, the novel can offer an antidote to the often narrow, and narrowing, narratives on which we lean to make sense of our individual realities, beliefs, politics, and values. Mitchell’s novels offer us micro- and macro- at once, bounded reality and expansive universe. His novels, each a stand-alone narrative, accrete into an ongoing meta-project he calls an Über-novel. AFTER ABOUT HALF A MILLENNIUM, what does the novel still do for us? David Mitchell has some answers.

David mitchell cloud atlas author