Have just finished David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I reviewed for the Literary Review. Total fabulous (unsurprisingly), a firework of a book that sparks and crackles along. You’re totally gripped from the very first page!
Something that other readers might not know is that it’s also based very firmly in historical fact. It’s set – to begin with, at least – in Dejima, a fan-shaped island the size of a football pitch, just off the city of Nagasaki. Dejima simply cries out to be the subject of a novel. Twenty merchants lived there, theoretically all Dutch, though, given that the Japanese never saw any other white foreigners, other nationalities could easily have slipped in; and the kind of men that lived out their lives abroad tended to be men who had been pressganged as urchins and stayed alive by their wits. The Dutch East Indies Company ship which arrived once a year from Batavia (now Jakarta) was these men’s only link with the outside world. And when something went on out there in the big wide world – such as the Napoleonic Wars, when Holland was taken over by France and ceased to exist for more than ten years – the men marooned on Dejima had no idea what was going on. They only knew that the ship hadn’t turned up and therefore they had nothing to trade, no income and no escape.
Mitchell brings this all magnificently to life! It’s a wonderful book and I highly recommend it.