British author David Mitchell, whose new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize. (Torsten Silz/AFP/Getty Images)

“Words are great, aren’t they?”

If it came from any other writer, that musing might feel cutesy. But coming from acclaimed British novelist David Mitchell, it’s both an enthusiastic mission statement and his raison d’etre.

'It’s not good for you to think about your place in the great lumbering behemoth of literature, so I don’t.'

— novelist David Mitchell

In Toronto to promote his latest work, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Mitchell is an unfailingly generous interview subject, not to mention a born storyteller. The author peppers his anecdotes with mischievous cackles, vivid descriptions and, at one point, slips into character while describing a stirring turn of events in his new novel.

Mitchell’s imagination and knack for shape-shifting is on full display in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, an epic historical drama that unfolds on Dejima, an insular, artificial island and Dutch trading post located off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan. The story begins in 1799, as a ship full of Dutch East India Company employees arrive on the island in search of Japanese copper. Among them is Jacob de Zoet, an earnest young clerk who must ferret out any fudged numbers in the Dutch company’s books.

The novel’s complicated first section features descriptions of the gritty, bustling Dejima streets that are so stomach-churning and bizarre, it’s easy to forget the island actually existed. Mitchell says that when he stumbled on a reconstructed Dejima during a visit to Nagasaki, he knew it was fodder for his fiction.

“Japan at that point was like North Korea now, without smuggled-out YouTube footage, without anything. It all came out of Dejima, and the weird, eclectic mix of people who were there,” he says. “There’s no way out, they have nowhere to go. There’s no ‘So, I was a bit bored here so I jumped on a Greyhound bus.’ No, they will stay there – the neuroses, the problems, peoples’ flaws and weaknesses, they’ll just bloom and bear their glorious, ugly, pungent, occasionally heroic fruit.”

(Random House of Canada)

The claustrophobia of that miniature city makes for compelling reading — Mitchell recreates a world where culture clashes and paranoia were the norm. Dealings between the Dutch and Japanese are exacerbated by unreliable translators and characters who are on the take; western Christian texts are forbidden; and one of Nagasaki’s most powerful figures, Lord Enomoto, is operating a secret cult out of a nearby nunnery. When de Zoet becomes smitten with a local midwife named Orito Aibagawa, the watchful eyes of everyone on Dejima make his attempts at courtship next to impossible.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is told in a linear style that feels old-fashioned compared to the mind-bending structure of Mitchell’s beloved 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas. He is characteristically humble when asked if this is a conscious departure: “It’s not good for you to think about your place in the great lumbering behemoth of literature, so I don’t.” But he is delighted to talk about what inspired his latest novel’s stripped-down prose.

“The model [for the writing was] haiku, where you’ve got 17 syllables and they need to inter-echo, and suggest and set something up, and do a kind of story, and have a twist and end on a resolution. You can’t be more minimal and still exist,” he says. “That, combined with a kind of James Ellroy hardboiled fiction thing where you don’t touch the right-hand margin. So your eyeball’s going down, like when you read Japanese.”

The book's lean style lends it a surprising momentum. Though The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet begins firmly in historical territory, rooted in real-life figures and events, it soon morphs into an adventure on the grounds of a Mount Shiranui convent that’s as much a page-turner as a Robert Ludlum yarn. For Mitchell, whose primary goal is “to give the reader the thrill of honestly not knowing what I’m going to be doing,” the novel’s unexpected shifts and twists are par for the course.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet has earned a spot on this year’s Man Booker Prize long list. While the writing has Mitchell's typical elegance, the novel’s true master stroke is its colourful, lively characters, which include a dutiful Japanese magistrate, a streetwise operator known as Arie Grote, a resident physician, the numerous down-on-their-luck hands aboard a Dutch ship, downtrodden Dejima slaves and a heartbroken translator named Uzaemon. Mitchell gives every character their due, sliding effortlessly into each unique dialect and often bringing the main story to a standstill while his eclectic figures reveal their back stories in poignant monologues.

There are many themes at work in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but guilt and redemption are key — the characters who attempt to right past wrongs are the ones who propel the book toward its moving conclusion.

“It’s probably life experience, rather than authorial experience,” says Mitchell about the empathy coursing through his latest work. “We need some compensations for the aging wrecks that we see in ourselves in the mirror, and if those compensations could be a keener awareness of interpersonal dynamics and life itself, I suppose, then that’s an ample compensation for loss of youth.”

Mitchell suddenly becomes aware of his grandiose theorizing. “Do I sound like a 5,000-year-old vampire now?”

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is in stores now.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.