Karma is a useful concept for single life: British writer David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas has completed 20 years, and yet its appeal to readers is unceasing. When you look back at the novel, what realisations dawn upon you?
I feel the need to resist the temptation to read it in editing mode, and change everything. I want to say, ‘well done’ to the kid I was when I wrote it. It’s the best thing I could have written at the time. Cloud Atlas is my hit album. It has sold more than anything else I’ve ever written. It bought me some financial and literary independence.
Pico Iyer called your approach ‘novel globalism’ in the Time. Globalisation is premised on inter-connectedness. What draws you to such narratives?
I think interconnection as an archetypal theme got into me when I was a kid. Or maybe, it was this obsession with causality.
An early memory of mine is of my grandfather, who was a tailor. He got a job during WWII in a factory in North India to make military uniforms. My grandfather and his family spent the duration of the war in India. SS Cairo, a white liner went with my father from Southampton and docked in Mumbai. I still have a postcard of it.
The next trip out, it was hit by a German torpedo, and it sunk. Some people survived, others didn’t. But that just hit me hard. All of these causalities; this sort of infinite domino tip-tip-tip-tip…is what reality is. And, that is delicious to me.
Reincarnation or karma is a prominent archetype in your works. Your interpretation of the concept is quite close to the Hindu beliefs.
Tell us more.
I am agnostic, but this doesn’t mean that religious concepts aren’t useful. When Christian, and some non-Christian, cultures talk about heaven and hell, I find the words to be useful instruments. Karma is like an intellectual equipment to use.
Even in the course of a life, I think most of us die, and are reborn metaphorically, figuratively, several times. Karma is a principle enshrined in a multi-life paradigm. Alternatively, it’s a useful concept for a single life. I guess it’s also just about the nature of the narrative itself.
Cloud Atlas contains narratives occurring in New Zealand, Belgium, California, Britain, Korea and Hawaii. Has it ever proven to be daunting to write about different cultures or geographies?
It was easier when I started off in the ‘90s. The old Creative Writing Workshop advice—write what you know—has, in more recent years, become a kind of a commandment. I don’t want to just write novels about middle-class, middle-aged English guys with university degrees. I’m too hungry to try to see the world through other people’s eyes, maybe with slightly differently coloured skins.
That’s where the excitement is for me. I think it’s just really important that we do try. Republicans should try to think like Democrats, Democrats should try to think like how Trump voters think. And, maybe in a multi-cultural society like India, it’s that or it’s civic distress. In the UK, in Ireland, and everywhere else, it’s the same story.
I would love a world where it is a civic responsibility to try to think like other people in your society. That is a little glimpse of utopia.
Tell us about your next book. When is it slated to be out?
It’s about now, about life, about love, about little cracks and fissures and get-out clauses in the finality of death. It’s a bit mad and a bit risky. Maybe like Cloud Atlas, it isn’t exactly a novel.
I should finish it this summer. It should be out next year.
Cloud Atlas
By: David Mitchell
Publisher: Sceptre
Pages: 544
Price: Rs 999