The Thousand Autumns is a strange, chimeric creation. It’s deeply researched, like a proper historical drama, but it’s also luridly melodramatic, like a 19th century adventure story … There are twists and turns in the plot, but they happen within the safe confines of genre, and so can’t be truly surprising: forbidden cross-cultural romances blossom and are thwarted; irritating characters introduced early turn out to be basically decent; you know you’ve met the villain because he looks ‘like a hunting dog listening to the sound of its prey.’ Part of the novel’s cleverness is that these tropes strike Jacob as unreal, too, as he combs through the company’s books on Dejima: In some ways, he’s a 19th century man trapped in the 18th century. But it’s also the case that The Thousand Autumns is a special kind of modern novel, one in which the story steps through genres the way a concerto steps through its movements.
With The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Mitchell has retained his virtuoso variety and restrained it; he makes it serve as well as enrich a human narrative that grips and moves. Its pages boast enough intricate turns to invite lingering; nevertheless they refuse it. Thousand Autumns is a page-turner. It is Mitchell’s masterpiece … The richness of Thousand Autumns, its innumerable side stories, its minor characters who refuse to be minor, can hardly be replicated in a brief review. And too much of the suspense would be given away — some already has, but the supply is barely scratched — by more detail. What remains to note, after my masterpiece tag, is the poetic fineness of the writing.
Yes, the novelist who's been showing us the future of fiction has published a classic, old-fashioned tale. It's not too early to suggest that Mitchell can triumph in any genre he chooses … Mitchell is working within a literary tradition stained by Western slurs about the inscrutable ways of orientals, their seductive mysticism and occult sensuality, but he represents and deconstructs those racist stereotypes with a shipload of fascinating domestic and imported characters … Even as the forces of evil ramp up, this remains a resolutely thoughtful novel about a country wrenched into the modern age. Carefully controlling all contact with the West, Japan reveres its official translators, its only windows on the world. And so language serves as Mitchell's central subject throughout The Thousand Autumns.
This new book is a straight-up, linear, third-person historical novel, an achingly romantic story of forbidden love and something of a rescue tale — all taking place off the coast of Japan, circa 1799. Postmodern it’s not … This is a book about many things: about the vagaries and mysteries of cross-cultural love; about faith versus science; about the relative merits of a closed society versus one open to ideas and development (and the attendant risks and corruptions); about the purity of isolation (human and societal) versus the messy glory of contact, pluralism and global trade … Its pacing can be challenging, and its idiosyncrasies are many. But it offers innumerable rewards for the patient reader and confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive.
One is impressed, once again, by the evidence of Mitchell’s immense natural gifts: a vast range of characters, each touched with difference; fabulously fluent and intelligent dialogue; scenes that are dramatically shaped but lack obtrusive manipulation; above all, an apparently effortless inhabiting of the Japanese context … By any standards, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a formidable marvel, and it would be perverse to hold Mitchell’s natural facility against him. Yet the book is still a conventional historical novel, and drags with it some of the fake heirlooms of the genre … The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is indeed a representative late-postmodern document...Never, when reading Mitchell, does the reader worry that language may not be adequate to the task, and this seems to me both a fabulous fortune and a metaphysical deficiency.
Ignore details of story and circumstance, and connections between The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Cloud Atlas are evident, many of which relate to the nature of belief, to pernicious ideas of racial superiority, to conscience … Part thriller, part love story, part a tale of vengeance achieved at a too-high price, part argument on behalf of humanistic values, still the novel relies on its smaller parts for emotional movement, not its grander gestures … Mitchell has developed a way of allowing the world to speak its own mind, too, almost as if it existed outside the narrative stream. Throughout The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, he inserts one-liners that approach haiku in their terse form and imagistic content. Sometimes lightly satirical, sometimes ominous, they read as commentary on the action taking place around them.
The surfaces of David Mitchell's vibrant, exquisitely written new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, suggest a conservative, even antiquated tale...But Thousand Autumns succeeds in part because those old-fashioned storytelling skills are so firmly in his grasp … Mitchell's prose is a pleasure in itself, never better than in virtuosic passages when de Zoet's musings collide in real time with what he sees, sentences of thought and observation ping-ponging against each other. This novel is about language – how it connects and distances – and Mitchell revels in wordplay, nautical jargon and jokes. And he does it with little flash: The novel is mostly dialogue and crisp, brief paragraphs.
Mitchell's new book is more verbal calisthenics than structural gymnastics. It almost completely forgoes the first-person voice that Mitchell mastered in his prior work and limits itself to a short span of years (a nanosecond compared to the centuries-jumping Cloud Atlas) and a few locales in and off Japan … The narrative is pockmarked with too many meanwhile-back-at-the-temple leaps, and the thread shows too often when Mitchell tries to stitch together the book's set pieces and character studies. In his earlier books, the disconnect of stories across time and space were fascinatingly and proddingly jarring. Here, they're frequently just jarring. Which isn't to say that Thousand Autumns is a flop — far from it. When not tripping over the intricacies of its plot line, the novel features some of Mitchell's most luscious writing yet. For all the baroque movement of the story, the language is an exercise in extravagant control.
Like Mitchell's earlier novels, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a page-turner, and Mitchell goes all out to keep the pages flipping. He is not afraid of plot twists into sensational territory (naval battles, sex slavery rings, cannibalism) or of graphic scenes … The results can at times feel almost afraid of more contemplative depths. Why does Mitchell feel a need to explain the poetry of the book's title – Japan is The Land of a Thousand Autumns – in alternation with an unseen sailor's loud, groaning poop off the side of the ship? If this is a self-deprecating joke, it feels excessive, too anxious. At the same time, our hero de Zoet is Mitchell's finest, most mature character yet, a classic protagonist: naive but sharp, curious, stalwart. We care about his fate, and the best parts of the book are the ones centered on him.
Mitchell's new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, splits the thematic and stylistic differences between his previous two books, combining Cloud Atlas' fascination with history and the theme of the journey with Black Swan Green's more straightforward narrative structure and understated empathy … Jacob is an unusually compelling character, despite his straight-laced, sometimes humorless attitude. Mitchell allows the reader to experience the clerk's love for his fiancee, his obsession with Orito, and his attempts to reconcile both. It helps that the supporting characters are so well-drawn and fascinating, from the brilliant but hostile Doctor Marinus (Orito's mentor) to the gleefully venal cook Arie Grote, who speaks in an enchanting and hilarious thief’s cant. Mitchell lets his sense of humor shine through, to the greatest effect of his career so far.
Mitchell immerses Jacob, and by proxy the reader, into a tantalizingly foreign world. Nothing is familiar about the Dejima and the intersection of cultures. There is no shorthand that can be used to telegraph the realities of life in this 19th-century setting. Yet Jacob’s world is understandable, and the challenges he faces matter … The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is not as obviously complex in structure [as Cloud Atlas], but that makes it all the more impressive. Mitchell has succeeded in telling a multicultural story from decidedly disparate points of view — from within Jacob’s Dutch world, from within the Japanese culture and from within the larger view of trading history — and he does it in a way that makes perfect sense, with a simplicity that hides the underlying craft.
The primary reason why Dejima is recognizably Mitchell territory is that it is border country – that shadowy land between peoples that inevitably exposes the fault lines within their competing historical narratives … With the exception of the fabulously drawn doctor who is Jacob's ally, I rarely believed in any of the major characters in Thousand Autumns, including Jacob himself. The primary problem is Mitchell's often clumsy third-person narration … Mitchell is a born storyteller, and no reader of Thousand Autumns will have trouble turning pages – or feel cheated by the three stories' climactic final scenes, all of which are really good. But one can say much the same of any decent thriller, quickly consumed and then readily forgotten. Thousand Autumns clearly aspires to more, and it is a tribute to Mitchell's unmistakable ambition, sheer intelligence and prior achievement that for all this novel does well, it is ultimately still a disappointment.
The fact that the novel is called Jacob's Thousand Autumns and not his Education hints at the romance-tinged world-weariness in store. The plot turns on the human contacts that bridge the exploitation and deception of the commercial world and break down the rigid, formal boundaries between the Japanese and the Dutch … Jacob is too eager in everything, of course, and his indiscretions spark decisions that determine the fates of the characters, fates they find a way of choosing or at least explaining as their own. And we are treated to a series of adventures more typical of Mitchell's earlier novels, including an earthquake, a palace intrigue, a ninja-inspired raiding party, a Great Escape from a high mountain sanctuary, and an intense naval bombardment that tests Jacob's mettle and loyalty … Jacob's story is focused and compelling from start to finish. It is a perfect example of what historical fiction can do.
In yet another departure from the postmodern Pynchonian intricacy of his earlier fiction, this is the story of a devout young Dutch Calvinist (the eponymous Jacob) sent in 1799 to Japan, where the Dutch East India Company, aka the VOC, had opened trade routes more than two centuries earlier. But now the Company is threatened by the envious British Empire, which seeks to appropriate the Far East’s rich commercial opportunities. Jacob’s purpose is to acquire sufficient wealth and experience to earn the hand of his fiancée Anna … It’s as difficult to put this novel down as it is to overestimate Mitchell’s virtually unparalleled mastery of dramatic construction, illuminating characterizations and insight into historical conflict and change.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
