Mitchell’s best work has until now been a series of astonishing excursions that leave us missing a human connection that would match them in strength and brilliance. Three years ago “Black Swan Green,’’ for all its many qualities, was an effortful, even sentimental, attempt to provide one.
With “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,’’ Mitchell has retained his virtuoso variety and restrained it; he makes it serve as well as enrich a human narrative that grips and moves. Its pages boast enough intricate turns to invite lingering; nevertheless they refuse it. “Thousand Autumns’’ is a page-turner. It is Mitchell’s masterpiece; and also, I am convinced, a masterpiece of our time.
The novel is set at the end of the 18th century in Dejima, a tiny enclave in the harbor of Nagasaki used by the Dutch East Indies Co. as entrepôt for its lucrative trade with a Japan that bans all other contact with the outside world. Japanese inspectors and translators go there daily to conduct business and enforce the restrictions; of the dozen Dutch staff, only the chief resident and his deputy are allowed occasional mainland visits to officials in the Nagasaki administration.
Mitchell uses these twin, barely connected, mutually obsessed isolations as a burning glass to concentrate and ignite a chain of stories of extraordinary power and variety. They range from lethal enmities within each community to a delicately rending romance, a monstrous ministate cult, devastating treacheries, near-saintly heroisms, and brilliantly rendered historical maneuvers by the Dutch, the British who seek to displace them, and the Japanese.
At the hesitant center of these stories, which wield the most sophisticated post-modern twists and ironies together with the most straightforward and rousing of dramatic adventure, is the accountant, Jacob de Zoet.
