For the simpler reader

‘I don’t think I’d care,’ Jacob stands to go, ‘for its adulterants.’

What, really, does Mitchell’s technique allow him to do? In recent days, he has spoken in an interview of his invention, in this novel, of a ‘thought-spike helmet’:

I imagined there was a helmet mounted on the head of one character per chapter. The helmet has a spike in it that can go into that person’s head and read that one person’s thoughts, but nobody else’s.

Is it not rather alarming to find a novelist of Mitchell’s experience describing, as if it were his own personal discovery, an utterly conventional treatment of point-of-view that has been around for at least a century?

Actually, although the texture of the writing is exhaustingly thin, I must admit to quite enjoying the incredibly corny aspects of the traditional historical novel, as served up here, with the central-casting yokels talking historical-novel filth like nothing on earth:

This princeling’s gherkin was so rotted it glowed green; one course o’ Dutch pox-powder an’ Praise the Lord, he’s cured!

And I rather liked the traditional periodic recourse to some really repulsively over-researched bit of bloodletting to keep the local colour up — a difficult birth, a double beheading, a gallstone removal without anaesthetic:

[Marinus] takes out the stone, retrieves his finger from Gerritszoon’s anus and wipes both on his apron.

I even quite liked the hilariously inscrutable Orient scenes: De Zoet falling in love with Orito at once in a garden (‘For a priceless coin of time, their hands are linked’); characters saying, in all seriousness, ‘Japanese custom is different to Dutch’; even a kindly old crone, wise in the ways of herbs, living alone on a mountainside in the usual mountain hut.

But there seems not much doubt that Mitchell, always a playful author, has become in some respects an unserious one, no longer trying to observe freshly before he writes. Those habits of observation are the novelist’s fundamental duty.

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