27/05/2016 Meet the Author

then, let's have a look at Meet The Author. This week it is David

Mitchell. David Mitchell is a writer

with a restless imagination who loves playing around with time

and perspective and the magical. His first big success

was Cloud Atlas. His new novel Slade House

brings together all those enthusiasms in a ghost story fantasy

that is creepy and very funny Once every nine years two strange

children lead real people through the iron gate to Slade House

into a different world. And there, they're stripped of much

that makes them human. Welcome. David Mitchell, magical,

fantastic things happen inside Slade It is a familiar scene

and people are drawn to an iron gate once every

nine years to a place where the rules are different,

where things are different. This is something we all remember

from reading in our childhood Is that something that lodged

in your mind as a boy, that image, Yes, the door to Narnia

casts a long shadow. And many of our earliest,

most visceral reading experiences involve fantasy and unless the world

of the book is set exclusively in that world, as it is,

say, with The Hobbit and the Lord Of The Rings,

and it's not that kind and we start in our world

then you need a door, you need a portal of some type,

you cannot avoid it. If there was a nifty way

around using the door There are few things more

elemental than doors to go Indeed, going down a dark tunnel

as it were, it is something that stirs feelings in us

of excitement and the unknown. The unknown that they reach

inside Slade House is a different It is a strange machine,

in a way, isn't it? It is a diabolical

machine. Without wanting to give too much

away, it is a kind of machine that needs to work out how

to lower your guard, and how to, sort of,

inject you with a particular substance that will allow this

weird surgery to happen. It is different for every person,

which is handy for the author, because it allows you to avoid

the sin of repetition and to set up patterns in the reader's mind

through which you As a writer, this is a short

book by your standards. Not quite a novella,

whatever that is. Nonetheless, you pack it

with all of these ideas like sparks You're somebody who loves

to have a fairground going around I guess I'm a child

of the video age. I think screen drama does

influence or has influenced It is clear you like playing

with these ideas that have been, sort of, maturing away in your mind

as a reader and whatcher of films and player of video games,

you like using all these influences We pile stuff onto it before

we are writers through our childhood and teenage years and when it's

in the compost heap it changes. And what comes out the bottom

or the top is somehow something that gives energy back,

that is the point, isn't it? It is the raw material,

the stuff that our narratives You can keep adding to it in later

life but once you are busy earning a living as a writer and busy

being a dad you're less able to throw things in a backpack

and vanish for half a year, which you can do in your 20s much

more easily, it's harder to put You are involved in this future

library project, tell us about that? Future library project

is a fairly audacious, is different things to different

people, began as an art project created by a Scottish artist

called Katie Paterson, it has three main strands,

number one is plant 3000 trees or perhaps 1000 trees

in a plantation in a forest outside Oslo, strand two,

persuade an author from a different country around the world

for the next 100 years to give something, we're not supposed

to speak about what it is, it might be short or a full-length

novel which we will never show anyone and which we will destroy all

trace of once we've handed it over. Strand three, in 2115 these 100

books that have been accruing in this special dark room

in the State Library in Oslo will be published as an anthology on paper

derived from the Norwegian spruces that will spend the next

100 years growing. And a sort of declaration of faith

that people will still want to read There will still be readers

and still be books and there will still be forests

and there will still be and the anti-civilisational forces

that dominate the news won't Writers will still be playing

with all of the ideas and influences and happy memories that you throw

together in the darkness As long as people want to read then

there will be writers needing Human beings are

hungry for narrative. It might be the narrative around

a campfire in the Stone Age and may The novel is having a really good

run, 300 years old and counting, it can read parts that other

narrative forms cannot reach. As long as people are hungry

for narrative there will be providers for that hunger,

people who are wires to only really be happy when they are nerdily

constructing these little plot structure character ideas,

themes and making them like Lego, David Mitchell,

thank you very much.