Ghostwriter

David Mitchell has proven to be a writer of supernatural talents. Now, he turns his attention to the theme of childhood in his latest novel, Black Swan Green. Edward O'Hare meets the Cork-based author

Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell. Sceptre, €15

'Thin skin and bookishness when you are a kid is oddly enough what stands you in very good stead when you are older,"confides David Mitchell. He should know what he is talking about. The author of four novels, he has put his childhood fascination with literature to good use. In his latest, Black Swan Green, he charts the transition from child to man of a 13-year-old boy in early 1980s England.

David Mitchell's early life was made difficult as he suffered from a stammer but writing Black Swan Green gave him a chance to reflect on the challenges he faced as a child. "I think what it has taught me more than anything else is about stammering and how it is best of all to evolve a policy of militant indifference towards what the other person would think if you started stammering. When a stammerer is on his own in an empty room and says the same words he has stammered on they come out fine. It's not the software in the brain that is the problem, it's the anxiety."

David Mitchell seems to be in a state of perfect harmony with all aspects of himself. With tightly cropped brown hair, and dressed in simple clothes, he is taller and more powerfully built in person than in photographs. He holds the listener's attention with a dark, penetrating gaze.

At a small table in the spacious atrium of a Dublin city-centre hotel David Mitchell takes afternoon tea. There is a warmth in his voice and no trace of a stammer.

Speaking about the inspiration for his novels he describes how "everything sets [his] imagination in motion. There are moments, kind of fruit-machine combinations of light, mood, breakfast, time of day, receptivity, energy or tiredness and when everything is right you become seized by ideas and a lust to convey them."

The experimental element of his books is not something David Mitchell deliberately tried to achieve.

"I was never really aware of experimenting," he says. "All I knew was that I wanted the novel to do something like this and I asked myself what was the best form and structure that would allow me to do this with the given book. The answer to that question is the book and its mechanics and structure.

"You have to leave any anxieties outside the door or you would never write anything," he continues.

In Cloud Atlas David Mitchell depicts a race of clones bred only to serve and a future Earth where civilisation has collapsed due to some unthinkable ecological catastrophe. "We use technology so unwisely that it damages our means of sustenance, our environment and it damages us ethically," he says, explaining his inspiration for the novel.

Cloud Atlas became an instant classic. It garnered ecstatic reviews from most of the major book critics and was voted "Read of the Year" by Richard and Judy Show viewers in 2005. David Mitchell has no idea why it was that novel that made him a household name.

"It's got good stretches but it has it's share of clumsinesses as well."

Cloud Atlas traverses the globe and thousands of years of human civilisation. It offers readers six stories in one novel, including a conspiracy thriller, historical recreations, comic sequences as well as nightmarish visions of the world to come. Does he think that this variety contributed to it's success? "It's done well for me and maybe that's the reason."

According to David Mitchell it is the reader's connection with the characters that makes a work of fiction engaging. "I believe we love the books we love not because of ingenuity but because we make an emotional connection with the people in them. The author makes us care about these people and then makes us worry that bad things are going to happen to them. In a way, the formula is that simple. That is how Tolstoy wrote, and Dickens and Austen. All the greats have that much in common."

In Cloud Atlas David Mitchell introduces readers to Robert Frobisher, an enigmatic charlatan who cons his way into the confidence of a wheelchair-bound musical genius, only to seduce his wife and daughter. Frobisher is one of those blackguards the reader cannot help but follow. A gleam of light passes across David Mitchell's shadowy eyes. "I love that word, epecially when it is used in a period context," he says before doing his Scarlet Pimpernel impression: "Sir, you are a blackguard and a black-guard."

Yet, beneath their surface comedy, there is an overpowering sense of sorrow at the heart of David Mitchell's books as creativity, love and even humanity itself inevitably fall victim to greed and hatred. In Cloud Atlas, a character attributes the development of human civilisation to the Will to Power, the fundamental human impulse to dominate first put forward by German philosopher Nietzsche. The book also suggests that the Eternal Recurrence, another of Nietzsche's theories, may be responsible for shaping human destiny.

"I wonder if the appeal is aesthetic," he says, explaining his use of fiction to explore these colossal concepts. "It's simply a beautiful idea in it's elegance. Imagine the literal repetition of all things right down to the smallest atom. I think that it is a useful metaphor because so many things are like Eternal Recurrence, from the mistakes we make in life to the history of any one given civilization."

David Mitchell is due to fly back to his Japanese wife and two small children later this evening. He has not been back to his home in Clonakilty, Co Cork for over a week but he loves living in Ireland. "I wouldn't be here otherwise. It's wonderful."

He has already started on his next writing project. "I am doing a Dutch-Japanese historical novel set in the Napoleonic era, though not set anywhere in Europe. Most of it takes place in Nagasaki. It will cover the period from 1795 to 1817. I'm doing research at the moment. I will have it done in three years."

Finally, does he have any advice for a would be writer of fiction?

"Remember, originality is not out beyond the orbit of Pluto. It's in truth. If you are true enough to yourself then by default what you write won't have been done before."p