Without annoying zaniness or exaggeration, he is nevertheless an artist of surplus: he seems to have more stories than he quite knows what to do with, and he ranges across a remarkable variety of genres-conventional historical fiction, dystopian sci-fi, literary farce. Lavishly talented as both a storyteller and a prose stylist, he is notable for his skill and his fertility. The English writer David Mitchell belongs to this returning army of nature. Yet the compliment is not merely inverted, since even freakish mastery of such tricks does not account for those impalpable gifts-the tremor of presence on the page, the overflow of vitality-which rival the abundance, even gratuitousness, of nature itself. They mean that such writers are unnaturally gifted in artifice that, better than the rest of us, they can draw us in, sound a voice, shape a plot, siphon the fizz of suspense.
When people talk about “natural storytellers,” they are probably paying an unintended compliment to the unnatural.
In his latest work, Mitchell conjures up a Dutchman in Shogunate-era Japan.
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