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

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.



“I’m aware that female writers have been writing brilliant female characters for hundreds of years. I could make a terrible fool of myself unless I work out what the traps are, find bad female characters by male writers, work out why they’re bad and give my wife every single book to read.”

The realisation that he was creating his own universe along the lines of Tolkien’s in The Lord of the Rings came in a conversation with his editor, said the author, who has been longlisted five times for the Man Booker prize and shortlisted twice. “You’re making your own Middle Earth aren’t you?” said his editor, to which Mitchell replied “Yeah, I suppose I am. I love large-scale exercises. The size of that world, that is the theme.”

The Right Sort, David Mitchell's Twitter short story Read more

He added: “Everything I will do will be in this universe. Even if it’s the book after the next one I do, which will be set around the turn of the first millennium.”

Slade House first saw light of day as a Twitter novel, The Right Sort, last year. But Mitchell said the story “asked more questions than it answered,” so he “re-translated it out of Twitterese and into English”.

Translations have been a big part of Mitchell’s career. He previously taught English in Japan. Asked about the adaptation of 2004’s Cloud Atlas into a Hollywood movie, he said plot changes were “absolutely necessary”.

“I trusted the directors and I think I was right. They never betrayed the trust I placed in them. I was never really worried, more curious. A film is usually in trouble if changes aren’t made. I understood the filmic logic of the changes. They were licensed and in the spirit of the book. All adaptations are translations and I felt they did it justice. The film has come and gone and I have no other motive for saying this.”

