“Like a young child baking a cake, they’ll be throwing on the hundreds and thousands, the little edible ball bearings, the gummy bears – it’s just a nightmare of confection,” he laughs. At one point, he even describes his (self-identified) overtly trigger-happy approach to using simile in number9dream with a simile. He is wearing a striped T-shirt, hair longer and scruffier than in his press photos, thanks to lockdown life, no doubt, and speaks with both willingness and eloquence. So yes, Mr David Mitchell is as nice as his reputation says he is. “It’s a good day when I meet a new name and get a brief tutorial on how to do it properly.” He then proceeds to ask me about my childhood and my parents, and even manages to discover that I’m attempting to write fiction for the first time, but struggling given current circumstances. “There’s a little bit of a person’s soul in their name and I really don’t want to botch it,” he says. He asks me how I pronounce my surname, so I repeat it three times for him and tell him it’s Taiwanese. Yes, somehow, the interviewer has become the interviewee. Seven weeks before his new novel, Utopia Avenue, is released, he is sitting at home, at the edge of Clonakilty in West Cork, Ireland, interviewing me over Skype. “Literary” and “rock star” don’t usually go together, but let’s call it how it is: Mr Mitchell is a literary rock star.
Mr Mitchell cowrote that (with Ms Lana Wachowski and Mr Aleksandar Hemon). And, if you’re an older millennial like me, odds are you’re pretty excited (ie, giddy) about the next instalment in The Matrix cinematic universe. Last year, Cloud Atlas made the top 10 in The Guardian’s 100 best books of the 21st century, coming in at a not too shabby number nine.
In 2007, Time magazine ranked him number 16 in its 100 Most Influential People In The World (sandwiched between Mr John Mayer at number 15 and Ms Kate Moss at number 17). His follow-ups, 2001’s number9dream and 2004’s Cloud Atlas, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of Mr David Mitchell’s achievements. His debut novel, Ghostwritten, published in 1999, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
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