Every David Mitchell Fiction, Numbered
A List to Celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Cloud Atlas
Master Shelf: David Mitchell
Reading and Ranking an Author’s Entire Bibliography
In a review of David Mitchell’s 2012 novel The Bone Clocks the New York Review of Books quoted Mitchell as saying that he likes stories that “stroke your brain and milk your adrenal gland at the same time.” This oddly put point — “adrenal gland” might be two of the most unpleasant words in the English language —lodged itself into my own brain for many years. And this is as good a metaphor as any for David Mitchell and the exact effect his novels have: engaging your mind and your more instinctual impulses for wanting…no needing to know what happens next.
Mitchell is one of the contemporary authors that is most responsible for why I became an editor. Five days ago, marks the 20th anniversary of Mitchell publishing his most seminal work, Cloud Atlas, in the US. If you know Cloud Atlas from the bewildering Tom Hanks and Halle Berry film adaptation of the same name, let me catch you up. Before it was a film, Cloud Atlas was a novel, a novel with a structure that is a Simone-Biles-routine degree of difficulty: it is told thought multiple viewpoints and timelines that span centuries. But the real gymnastics is that for the first half the novel it chronologically jumps huge spans of time one chapter to the next in different viewpoints, then exactly midway the novel goes in reverse chronological order (it might be easier to understand this in numbers, it’s plot is 1-2-3-4-5 6 5-4-3-2-1). The structure of Cloud Atlas is an editor’s nightmare (Mitchell was in fact formerly a book editor) and a reader’s dream. The fact that this conceit was not some wild gimmick gone wrong but produced a fully coherent, great novel cemented Mitchell as one of the most gifted novelists of a generation. To celebrate the 20th year of Cloud Atlas and the preorder, appointment-viewing author David Mitchell has been ever since we will number his fictions, ranking them eight to one.
8. Utopia Avenue (2020)
At some point it became clear that Mitchell wasn’t just writing novels but creating his own fictional universe a la a popular movie franchise but with literary novels. Mitchell used this extended universe to create a fictional band in Utopia Avenue, which overlaps with his other fictions and borrows characters from other books in interesting ways once you start to read the oeuvre. While Mitchell has found moments of human urgency in nearly every conceivable walk of life, character and era, he might have met his match in one arena: music. The music industry, musicians, and their woes might be one of the most difficult subjects to tackle in all of art and fiction. The story beats in a band or musician’s career are dramatic but far beyond the pale of cliché: creative friction, drug addiction, bad managers, and startling breakthroughs. Even with Mitchell’s generational talent, Utopia Avenue fights against this plot inertia. So, while enjoyable for completists, this is a novel to read late in your tenure in the David Mitchell Appreciation Society.
7. Black Swan Green (2006)
With these lists it’s always more difficult to do the lower rankings than the higher because the books are all good (hence the name of the series Master Shelf). Black Swan Green is a more traditional version of a Mitchell novel, it’s semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age, told in the more conventional structure of one year (however, in Mitchell fashion, each of the twelve chapter represents one month). Hugo Lamb, Mitchell’s reoccurring villain, appears for the first time, this time as a fifteen-year-old menace. Like many Mitchell novels it takes simple elements and adds a touch of the unreal. What else is there to say? At number 7 of 8 on the list, it’s still really, really good.
6. Ghostwritten (1999)
In a first work you often see the quirks, obsessions, and seeds of what a writer will become. Mitchell’s first book Ghostwritten gives us rough sketches of the elements that would make him a writer like no one else. Ghostwritten is basically a linked short story collection—it’s labeled a novel on Wikipedia, but I’m not buying it. While many writers claim their short stories are “linked”, Mitchell truly weaves each story in a masterful, pass-the-baton manner as if each character or plot point is passing a little glowing orb from one character to the next. Mitchell in other words is the rare guy with a degree in postmodern literature that knows how to use it in practice.
Do these stories form an entirely cohesive whole? Not exactly. But what separates Ghostwritten from about a thousand other short story collections that might fit this description is that each story is impeccably engrossing. Mitchell often employs a first-person style that feels like plugging into the minds of characters—he’s a master of pinpointing human motivation and rendering it with psychological immediacy. Whether it is a member of a doomsday cult, an old woman at a tea ceremony, or, my favorite story, a gallerist at the Hermitage, the reader is newly locked in from the first sentence of the chapter.
5. The Bone Clocks (2014)
The Bone Clocks, written fifteen years after Ghostwritten, shows at once the tremendous evolution of the same characteristics that made Mitchell’s debut impressive and the same flaws of Ghostwritten on an even bigger canvas. Bone Clocks is a huge, operatic, very realistic, 600-page (semi) fantasy novel that doesn’t quite come together.
Before I was lining up for every new Mitchell release, this was the first of his novels I read. It’s impossible— even for a typical ten-book-a-year reader that I was at the time— not to get sucked in by the opening chapters of The Bone Clocks with Holly Sykes, a fifteen-year-old runaway who gets pulled into a globe- and time-spanning mystery several hundred times the size of her mundane life. Holly’s part is followed by the major return of Hugo Lamb, the dastardliest villain you cannot look away from. Part of Mitchell’s magic is often making the reader forget, for a time, that there’s a greater whole, such is the compelling nature of his storytelling. What were snippets in Ghostwritten had evolved into sweeping almost novella-length versions of these shifting perspectives in The Bone Clocks.
But as it turns out, it’s incredibly hard to find satisfying conclusions when you have multiple characters across several timelines and countries. Even as a lay reader I felt these flaws of Mitchell trying to land a giant, unwieldy plane. The ending I recall as being okay (this is where the novel leans most into fantasy as opposed to magical realism) and so I walked away feeling the book was just okay overall. However, there is a quality to The Bone Clocks that fundamentally almost no simply “okay” book has: I read it rapturously cover-to-cover and went immediately to find the next David Mitchell book.
4. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)
The acknowledgements in this book made me realize something quite obvious: authors are not solely responsible for creating a book. This revelation hit me so strongly because it came after reading a novel as remarkable as The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. For an author known for exceptional structural choices Jacob de Zoet might be Mitchell’s most underrated accomplishment. Jacob de Zoet is Mitchell’s take on a historical novel, set in 1799 Japan and told with layer upon layer of deeply researched detail woven into a typically rich and compelling Mitchell narrative. In interviews Mitchell talked about recreating a sort of third way with the novel’s style, combining both the mountainous historical detail with a modern ear for language and story. Here’s how he describes it to Terry Gross on NPR:
Terry Gross: What was one of the mistakes that you made when you went wrong?
David Mitchell: Language, that was the biggest baddest mistake really, Terry. What language are these people speaking? If you try to get it right, if you try to get authentic 18th century speech you end up sounding like "Black Adder," you end up sounding like pastiche. If, on the other hand, you don't, you don't convince your reader that the language, you know, smells authentic, then - bubble of fiction is popped because the reader's thinking, hang on, this sounds like speech that could have been from a sitcom I saw last week.
So you have to sort of create what I came to think of as a bygone-ese kind of dialect, which is not in fact completely plausible. It doesn't really work if you have characters using the word harken, for example. But which still smells and has the right texture of 18th century speech. And it's tough to do that. It's tough to work out exactly how to do it.
This creation of a new dialect “bygone-ese” as Mitchell calls it is a radical and fairly bold choice. It creates a historical novel unlike any other, one that is completely immersive because it chooses not to be entirely accurate in favor of the adrenaline that Mitchell desires and is able to make his readers feel as if they are sinking into 1799 not reading about it.
3. Slade House (2015)
In what is the ultimate and seemingly inconceivable flex, Mitchell started this novella as a series of tweets. This was when the platform was new and exciting, when we thought it could be a font of creativity and start revolutions! Mitchell wasn’t the only author to try this fun tool everyone was flocking to, but it was a quintessential summary of his genius. Unlike others, he got a genuinely great ghost story and novella out of the exercise. It also illuminated that while Mitchell writes in short, absorbable sentences he doesn’t do so without style and panache. I did the duty of going back to 2014 and pulling the feed—here is the opening of the story and a few paragraphs later where it really kicks into gear.
If you got through that, it’s obvious why Twitter as a medium for novel writing didn’t take off—it’s a painful way to read a book. Even so, Mitchell shows how his technique can work on a micro level— We’re inside the mind of a kid who has taken Valium, who else would think to do that? Who else could pull it off? And you have to love the meta nod at form following function in the tweet “The pill’s just kicking in now. Valium breaks down the world into bite-sized sentences. Like this one. All lined up. Munch-munch.”
2.Number9Dream (2001)
There is no better formula, to me, than for a great artist to pick constraints that intentionally go against their nature. Auteur directors making action films. Crime novelists trying to make their coming-of-age literary masterpiece. The result is usually getting the best of what the artist is good at but with the benefit of more of what they usually neglect— whether that be plot or lyricism or something else. What makes Number9Dream a wonder is that it is Mitchell doing a simple timeless premise and structure: a boy goes searching for his missing father. Set in Japan about a young man finding his way, this is not so secretly an homage to Haruki Murakami, one of Mitchell’s favorite writers and greatest influences. But it is done with Mitchell style which means some of the best dream-like sequences, action, and set pieces you will ever read. Where Murakami is often contemplative and mysterious with his blend of magical realism, Mitchell puts a more jet-fueled, thrilling touch to the classic Murakami bildungsroman. If you’re looking to see Mitchell’s singular ability as a writer, the opening scene is exhibit 1-A—the way he is able to make the fantastical come off as real and tangible is truly something special.
1.Cloud Atlas (2004)
I have a theory, especially with music, that sometimes the most popular and critically lauded thing is in fact the best thing, Occam's razor style. This does not mean it’s your favorite song or that it’s the most representative of what the band is or that they don’t have other great or more special songs—just that it’s undeniably kind of unique and great and world-beating for that reason (something like Radiohead’s “Creep” *a thousand hipsters cry out in protest*).
We might even dub this theory the Cloud Atlas after Mitchell’s undeniable crowning achievement of a novel. No one has ever pulled off something like Cloud Atlas before or since, the follow-through is simply unparalleled. It may not be your favorite Mitchell book after you check-off each title on this list, but it is hard to resist its pull or deny its gravity (see: Radiohead’s “Creep”). The secret to why Cloud Atlas and its crazy structure works (reminder: 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1) is a common theme this list keeps coming back to: Mitchell understands human motivation and that this is what drives a story. That means whether a Cloud Atlas chapter is set in the 1700s or the 2700s, as the reader you’re never unmoored. Settings, circumstance, technology change but humans, Mitchell seems to convincingly argue, do not. What is often criticized about Mitchell’s work is that he lacks a certain sense of theme or issues in his novels. For a literary novelist you can’t say what “concerns” tie his work together on a micro level (something like loneliness) or a macro one (something like colonialism) even though there are points where these themes crop up. This is fair criticism but also one that tries to fit Mitchell into a traditional literary box that he has been demonstrating for more than twenty years he does not belong in. Mitchell is one of the best writers in the world at the magic trick of empathy, putting you in someone else’s head and letting you experience it for yourself— it’s up to the reader to decide what exactly living out these perspectives means and what to do with it.
