Avenues to Utopia: David Mitchell and the Contemporary Storyteller

Having finished all his novels (his Uber novel, as it were), I can confidently attest that culture is a kaleidoscope, literature is an experiment in linguistic pyrotechnics, and people are chameleonic melodies which, in harmony or dissonance, squirm like ear-worms throughout space-time.

In short, David Mitchell's unique genius is a masterclass in contemporary storytelling. History flows and time dilates; power corrupts us and justice eludes us; love heals us and art moves us. For Mitchell, people are complicated, morality is grey and the personal is intractably political; beauty is sacred, life is fragile, and the stirrings of wonder and wisdom tingle in the soul of everyone who dares to ponder the deep questions embedded in the everyday.

I can't escape prophesies of myself at a desk, poring over the entire Uber novel once again, painstakingly describing the impact of each page. But for now I present only this frothing, frenzied gush, an 11-pointed star blazing over the reader's horizon, a bookshelf-shaped beacon to the possibilities of the contemporary novel:

1. Cascading Contestations

Mitchell's novels bring all the axes of political struggle to the fore: men and women; young and old; rich and poor; rural and urban; ancient and modern; Eastern and Western; introverts and extroverts; idiots and masterminds; scientists and artists; journalists and politicians; heroes and villains; immigrants and colonists; conservatives, liberals and socialists; the past, the present, the future.

A novel of Mitchellian sensitivity reflects a deep consciousness of sociocultural, geo-historical political economy, and pours it into the ordinary moments, the day-to-day. Or, put less odiously, grapples with everything at once; subtly, seamlessly and in serious solidarity with everything and everyone that make life what it is. The tiers of existence collapse into the substance of experience itself.

The whole world between two covers; a universe in every page.

2. Spooky Somethings

A certain mysterious surplus flickers in the background of the Uber novel: hints of alternate dimensions, substrata of reality, where superstition inflects the real with the unreal. Magic and mysticism, strangers of otherworldly wisdom, the unspeakably weird - all shimmer in the limbo land of an otherwise quotidian social realism.

Mitchell infuses his stories with the paranormal, the politically charged alterity of speculative fiction, a slimy surrealism that perturbs the mood and disturbs any fidelity with the status quo. It is a gesture towards possibility, a meddling with what is that reveals what could be.

3. Synpases, Stories and Synesthesia

Nowhere have I ever felt so disoriented and so rooted at once.

In the Uber novel, sensory experience expands, extending its tentacles across the boundaries of linear description, verging on the psychedelic. Language comes as close as it can to fully rendering the powers of physiology and neurology, a dip into the powers of prose in the hands of a master stylist.

If Mitchell has one gift above all others, it is the art of semantics as sense.

4. Silver Shades of Grey

Turncoats and assassins, sadists and rebels, petty criminals and shadowy conspirators, teenagers and travellers: all dance around the border of right and wrong, holy and profane, charity and greed. All that glitters is rarely gold, and all that reeks has a story.

The ethical universe of the Mitchellian novel yearns for justice, but regards utopianism with suspicion; abhors the plight of the poor beneath the boot of the wealthy, articulating the cruelty of rulers and the tedium of authority with unflinching principle, but never slipping into the easy Romance of dogma or the armchair ideologue's lazy fantasies.

There is a knack to balancing realist political critique with a committed radical will, and yet, novel after novel, time and again: bullseye, bullseye, bullseye.

5. Authentic Erotic

Sex as spectacle saturates a culture too quick to render the body as little more than desirous, performance, an object of pleasure or revulsion. The carnal as conquest, love as lechery.

But Mitchell listens to the song beneath the hunger for sensory connection, the logic behind the lust. Mitchellian sexuality is sensuous and exciting, but fuelled by the complex drives haunting the full spectrum of human liaisons: mystique or salvation; idle entertainment or ecstatic escape; domination or catharsis; paradise or apocalypse.

6. Hideous Insidious

Dauntless David shies never from the violent or the vile. His novels abound with a pulp panache in literary linens: grotesqueries, obscenities, torment and treachery. The villains of the Uber novel are not to be trifled with; the tragedies of the Mitchellverse come too soon for all.

If antagonists are to pass the muster of David Mitchell's standard, there are few lows to which they will not drop, few tricks they will not employ. Evil is not metaphysical, but it is unmistakable.

7. Warmth and Wonder

Yet one would be remiss to dismiss the blossoms amidst the brambles. Hilarities tickle the mind a brighter shade of gold, as characters wax wildly in all their charming oddness and surprising wit. Kindness, compassion, and the miracles of fortune enhance Mitchell's stories with a clear-headed perspective on opportunities, serendipities and the chance nature of the universe.

An enduring humaneness, however delicate or slight, binds the lives of Mitchell's characters, elevating readers to their best selves on the other side of every tribulation. Even sad endings may inspire in us the power to elate.

8. Metaphysical Harmony

The cosmos, for Mitchell, ripples like a weave in the wind, and everything you can imagine stands a thread in its flowing tapestry. Peculiar connections across time, place and circumstance form plot points and character arcs; chapters organise stories into distinct experiences of history and geography, alternating perspectives to invite a deeper engagement with subjectivity, contrastive and authentic; and people recur throughout like connective tissue. There is a sense in which the world - and all worlds - becomes one.

9. Mind's Eye

Debatably, all that we know arrives through the lens of personal experience. Each character in the Uber novel may as well, for it is through their distinctive idiolect, their customised reality, that we learn of their life: memories and longings, secret missions or idle commutes, all filter through a highly personalised perspective. Mitchell's characters have their own voices, their own judgments and agendas, their own lives. And every line of their dialogue and narration confirms their uniqueness.

10. Philosophise or Die

Mitchell forces us to think as much as to feel. Killers and intellectuals, sages and murderers all deliver the themes of these hefty novels. A devoted analytical regard for the world throws reality into sharp relief, even as characters contend with the machinations of power. You don't need to be a literature student to feel it; you find yourself questioning the nature and degree of ethical transgressions, the substance of identity, the illusions of consciousness, and the scale of the universe in a fair amount of rigour for stories so anchored in character and point of view.

11. Liberal Languishing

Last, and for once perhaps least, Mitchell's novels present a penchant for, put plainly, an anti-communist sentiment that I feel reduces the sensible project of socialism to a self-righteous cult of fanatics responsible for historical atrocities. His works leave one feeling somewhat lost, retreating to the intimate realms of personal and spiritual sanctuary rather than resolving to contend with political alternatives to corporate oligarchy or feudal patriarchy, or whatever the particular case may be.

More holistic conceptions of liberation - of workplace democracy, of a consensual society, and other radical proposals - all deserve attention in committed fiction. In Mitchell's work, these subtler, modern examples of a contemporary (genuine) Left are absent, and the gap opened by their dismissal threatens to consume the conscience of those inspired by a vision of an urgent, brighter, plausible, just tomorrow.

There is something of socialist caricature in Mitchell's writings, and as a reader, I feel disarmed before the horrors of war, corruption, neoliberal hegemony, climate crisis and dictatorships that he otherwise so eloquently exposes and opposes. It is my only reservation toward Mitchell's fiction that he inadequately considers alternatives to the injustices he confronts.

And perhaps that will be the next step for contemporary fiction, a step into the clouds from Mitchell's high, high shoulders. For now, we may only study.