The Crossover Worlds of David Mitchell

If it’s possible to have a favourite writer, when there are so many amazing writers in the world, then David Mitchell is probably mine. At the end of last year, I read Mitchell’s most recent novel, Utopia Avenue, which tells the story of the rise of a fictional band in the late 1960s, the eponymous Utopia Avenue, and immerses the reader completely in the psychedelic world of the period. As an avid reader of Mitchell’s fiction, I couldn’t help but notice what he calls the ‘crossover characters’, in the book, characters or relatives of characters who appear in other Mitchell novels. This immediately triggered the desire to re-visit some of those other novels just to remind myself of how they might fit together.

It's a bit like reading T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land and recognising all the borrowed lines and literary allusions, a process that makes the reader feel pleased with herself and clever, despite not really understanding all that the poem is about. But with Mitchell’s fiction the reader gets to feel clever and does understand what is going on – most of the time. Utopia Avenue’s guitarist, Jasper De Zoet, made me revisit the 2010 novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet just to clarify how they were connected. When Luisa Rey popped up, I had to have another look at Cloud Atlas, and the sudden appearance of a very young Crispin Hershey sent me straight back to probably my favourite Mitchell novel, The Bone Clocks (2014).

Again, it feels wrong to have a favourite, but The Bone Clocks ticks all the right boxes for me. I love the structure: six interconnecting stories linked by the central character, Holly Sykes, moving across her life from 1984 to 2043. There is an over-arching plot relating to an ancient struggle between Horologists and Anchorites – read it to find out what they are – which brings an undercurrent of a kind of magic realism to the novel. But each section also engages with other issues and ideas. For example, ‘The Wedding Bash’ invites the reader to think about the politics of the war in Iraq in 2004 through the eyes of a war correspondent. ‘Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet’ offers a thankless impression of the multiple global literary events that successful writers might have to attend just to stay in the game. And ‘Sheep’s Head’ at the end of the novel offers perhaps the most terrifyingly convincing representation of the near future that I have ever read, forcing us to engage with questions about climate change and global politics that are very much part of the now.

Mitchell’s work blends genres. Some of it is historical fiction, some Sci Fi, some magic realism, often all in the same volume. His crossover characters ask us to think about who we are, how we fit in, or don’t, and invite us to address key elements of ourselves and our world. If you haven’t visited yet, I strongly recommend that you do. You will be in for a treat.