The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet - David Mitchell, 2010.

David Mitchell, during an interview, once asked himself the question,
“Would I have become the same writer if I’d spent the last six years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, or on an oil rig or in the circus?”
with reference to the time he spent in Japan after graduating from Kent University. Considering that four of his five novels are based predominantly around Japan and East Asia, the answer, as he himself is probably aware, is a resounding ‘no’. And it is for this time spent teaching English in the Orient that we must be thankful. While Mitchell’s previous novel, Black Swan Green, was nothing to complain about, the early 1980s Worcestershire setting of the author’s youth lacked the mythical mysticism, and ability as a storyteller, of his other works. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is a gratifying return to his unique method that has made him one of the most exciting writers of his generation.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet recalls the Kansei-era Japan of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, a world closed to foreign influence, where Christianity is a crime and honour and deference the highly-valued virtues. In this mysterious land there is but one nook of occidental influence, the man-made island of Dejima, off the Nagasaki coast, the trading post of the Dutch East India company, where the only Europeans in Japan must live, and never cross to the mainland. De Zoet falls in love with a Japanese midwife (Mitchell himself is married to a Japanese woman), however her sudden disappearance provides the Dutch clerk with the grounds to discover the dark occurrences happening behind Japanese officials’ shady dealings, and their ambiguous moral codes, twisted into rationality by misread Buddhist teachings. Mitchell intersperses his chapters regarding De Zoet’s unattainable love with others pertaining to the downfall of the Dutch East India company, and the onset of the British on Dejima, as her vast nineteenth century global empire began to take shape.

The sheer research Mitchell must have put in to write The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is staggering. A firm knowledge of Japanese tradition and lifestyle is evident from Mitchell’s previous novels Ghostwritten and number9dream, however the secretive nature of Japan two centuries ago is akin to writing a accurate encyclopaedia today of Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea. Coupled with this, the author’s child-like imagination is unparalleled in contemporary English literature; such metaphor and similie regularly causes the reader to stop and re-read out of utter delight, whilst the page or so of rhyming description at the start of one of De Zoet’s later chapters is fresh, unexpected and exceptionally beautiful.

David Mitchell's fifth novel is one which will ensnare all but the most closed minds, a lengthened fable which posterity will hopefully treasure in both university libraries and children’s bedside tables for years to come.

The Child In Time - Ian McEwan, 1987.

The tragic event that overshadows children’s author Stephen Lewis’ life throughout The Child In Time is that which occurred two years prior, the protagonist and his three year-old daughter were at a supermarket when she was snatched, never to be seen again. What follows is not only an account of his complex grief and a fractious relationship with his wife, but a study of the very concept of time and its limitations, set against the backdrop of a somewhat alternative contemporaneous society in a bleak Britain facing extreme weather, nuclear war and leadership by an unnamed Prime Minister akin to Thatcher.

From the beginning of the novel McEwan leads the reader to believe that his title refers to the missing child, the would-be five year-old Kate. Stephen sees in all other children aspects of her and imagines how she would appear knowing full well that is more than likely she is no longer alive. Therefore it raises the question of whether time is a fixed dimension in which Kate had existed, but no longer does, or is time transient, and possible to revisit?

However, one’s thoughts tend to shift to Stephen himself being The Child In Time after an unexplained, brief hallucination of his parents before his birth; he finds himself discussing the concept of time with physicist friend Thelma, while her politician husband and fellow friend to Stephen, Charles, finds himself having a nervous breakdown. This crisis being a depression into childhood; Stephen discovers his friend behaving like a pre-pubescent boy- a man searching desperately for a simple, juvenile existence, a desire to return to a time already passed, if you like.

Ian McEwan writes in captivating prose; his ability to define life-shattering events in an implicitly concise and accurate manner bear resemblance to the opening chapter of his 1997 novel, Enduring Love. The author’s evident scientific interest and knowledge is as involving here as it was to be with both Enduring Love’s study of de Clerambault’s syndrome, and Saturday’s (2005) complex descriptions of neuroscience.

As elegant as any of McEwan’s work, The Child In Time develops the theory that time is immaterial, yet also immemorial and perpetually immune to any human attempts at interference, influence, and perhaps even, comprehension.

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises - Earnest Hemingway, 1926.

It is a generally accepted opinion that Ernest Hemingway was one of the finest authors ever to have lived. His most well known work, The Old Man and The Sea, is often mentioned in discussions as to the true ‘great American novel’, but while other such contenders by writers as renowned as Steinbeck and Fitzgerald are set in their homeland, Hemingway’s tells of one Cuban man’s struggle with the Caribbean sea, and life itself. 1927’s Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises was a forerunner of the aforementioned, and similarly was set overseas, in post-WWI France and Spain; Hemingway was to return to the Mediterranean in his work two years later, with A Farewell to Arms, a First World War tale of an American in Italy. Likewise, Fiesta is the story of an expatriate, Jake, and his hopeless love for beauty Brett, amid the Parisian, Pernod-sipping upper-classes, and his 'afición' for bullfighting in the dry, dusty streets of Pamplona, during the titular fiesta weeks in northern Spain.

34 year-old Brett is a compulsive adulterer, claiming (admittedly, believably) to be in love with Jake, while having open affairs with numerous men, all seemingly friends, all seemingly content with this arrangement, bar one, Jew Robert Cohn, disliked much by all characters, somewhat pitied by the reader. Instead it is Brett’s fiancé Mike who proves disdainful, a man who cannot hold his drink and regularly attacks boxer Cohn. The group of socialites consume vast quantities of alcohol throughout the novel, and never appear to work, despite their varying desgrees of financial stability.

Hemingway presents the ferocious bull running and fighting scenes of Pamplona with an unrestrained passion of the pastime, while heart warming descriptions of the Navarre countryside and its welcoming inhabitants serve to highlight the contrast between such a docile, simple existence, and the blood-stained sport that its proponents so adore. The Spaniards' subsistence and its perceived authenticity make the licentious Parisian elite seem shallow and false in the face of more genuine livings.

With his excellent command of the sparse prose and economic structures for which he was known, and a specificity unparalleled in literature, Hemingway manages to make atmosphere, ardour and infatuation teem throughout Fiesta, which may just come to be seen his masterpiece.