David Mitchell: Author of Cloud Atlas

When your novel has been made into a film starring Tom Hanks and Hugh Grant, it’s safe to say that you’ve made it big. David Mitchell visits Beijing this month, but before he arrived we had a chat about bilingualism, Asia and the wondrous addiction known as reading.

On going from English teaching to novel-writing
“I used the isolation that you feel as a hulking big Caucasian in an East Asian country to make my life more hermit-like and really teach myself how to write. I was in my twenties, had no clue how the world worked, but I got some lucky breaks and here I am.”

On the difference between Japan and China
“Japan can be so Germanic in terms of efficiency and systems. A Japanese builder might say, I will start this house at half past 11 on July 14 and it will be finished August 31 at noon, and it really will be. In my limited experience with China, it felt more Mediterranean in this respect. Of course, this is a highly Eurocentric metaphor, but I can’t help that I’m European.”

On his favorite kanji character while learning Japanese
“Oh, that’s lovely. Tennka, the word for ‘ignite.’ It starts off as a little spot, and then it goes boom. It’s gorgeous, it’s a visual explosion.”

On bilingualism
“On the one hand, Anglophones are fortunate, but they’re also impoverished. This poverty of language, at least in the school system in the UK and in the States as well … it’s a moderate form of child abuse, not to teach kids how to speak another language and not teach it well so that they want to.”

On why the novel will survive
“The imagination says ‘Feed me, feed me.’ Angry Birds doesn’t cut the mustard, and not even World of Warcraft works the same way as a novel. J. K. Rowling or Stephen King, any of these successful blighters, are drug pushers of the most benign sort – this wonderful drug called reading that has no negative side effects and only positive ones. Once kids get a taste of it, I don’t think it’s amazing that they get hooked and I don’t think it’s amazing that they want this and are nourished by this. Novels provide vitamins that digital art can’t really do.”

On his best Chinese meal
“I once climbed Emei Shan and stayed at a monastery, where they fed us bamboo shoots, chopped chilli and mountain vegetables whipped up with eggs on a metal plate. It was plain, but in that frigid dawn on the mountain … time and place are the best spices.”

Catch David Mitchell at his book talks on Aug 11 and 12. Part of the UK Now Festival.

Click here to see the Beijinger August issue in full.

Photo: Murdo Macleod