Tuesday, August 18, 2015

David Mitchell: 'I have created my own Middle Earth'

Cloud Atlas author tells Edinburgh audience that his next book, Slade House, amounts to ‘world building and cosmology’ along the lines of Tolkien’s

David Mitchell.
A Middle Earth of his own ... David Mitchell. Photograph: Patrick Bolger
Cloud Atlas writer David Mitchell says he believes he has created his own version of Middle Earth for all his future books.

Teasing a sold-out Edinburgh international book festival crowd with excerpts from his forthcoming novel Slade House, he said it would inhabit the same Newtonian law-bending universe of 2014’s The Bone Clocks. It was “by far the darkest book I’ve done”, he said, and “an exercise in world building and cosmology.”

Mitchell again plans to jump from genre to genre within the book. “I like to use genre as a tool, like style, structure or a character. Where does it say a book has to remain within a single genre? Why can’t more than one genre occupy the space between the front and back cover?” He added that “fantasy is the easiest genre to do badly. Perhaps it’s the hardest genre to do well.”

But there’s one road he’s reluctant to go down: writing as a woman, even though he has previously written male characters who reincarnate as female. Asked for his experience of writing in the voice of female characters, he said: “It is scary. You get more cautious as you get older. I probably wouldn’t write as an American either. I’d find a reason to make them half British.
More

1 comment:

Mark Hubbard said...

The weakest element of Bone Clocks was the fantasy.