Review: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Title: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Author: David Mitchell
Nationality: British
Year: 2010
Publisher: Sceptre
Length: 500+ pages
Rating: 7/10
Summary: Good but not great

The outline

It’s 1799 and Japan is closed to the world apart from the Dutch trading island of Dejima. Jacob de Zoet arrives on the island seeking his fortune in what unfolds as an epic tale of love, betrayal and Machiavellian politics.

Sample

Jacob breaks off a half-dozen young springs. 'Here you are.' For a priceless coin of time, their hands are linked by a few inches of bitter herb, witnessed by a dozen blood-orange sunflowers. 
I don't want a purchased courtesan, he thinks. I wish to earn you.
'Thank you.' She smells the herb. '"Rosemary" has meaning?'
Jacob blesses his foul-breathed martinet of a Latin master in Middelburg. 'Its Latin name is Ros marinus, wherein "Ros" is "dew" - do you know the word "dew"?'
She frowns, shakes her head a little and her parasol spins, slowly.
'Dew is water found early in the morning before the sun burns it away.'

The verdict

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a patchy novel, shifting between the tedious and the inspired. I’m not surprised to see that several readers gave up during the first third of the book as this is by far the weakest part. It’s little more than a series of anecdotes and overwrought scene setting and you need some patience to get through it.

However, the book really picks up in the middle section, when Aibagawa Orito takes over from Jacob as the central character, and the ending is also strong. The problem is by the time you reach it there’s just been too much meandering and you can’t help but feel that Orito would have been a far more interesting character to focus on than Jacob.

The novel is almost like a draft of a much better book that needed a thorough revision by the author before reaching the shelves. It didn’t stay with me and a couple of weeks after finishing it, it certainly hasn’t stuck in my mind.

Should it have made the Booker shortlist? It’s a better novel than some that did, but it certainly isn’t the classic that Cloud Atlas was. It’s a good read about the era, but ultimately I much preferred Alessandro Baricco’s magical Silk on a similar subject.