David Mitchell is an author who needs no introduction — or he would be, if it wasn’t necessary to follow his name with “Cloud Atlas, not Peep Show”. Listening to him, you can’t help feeling that this case of mistaken identity rather works in his favour: “My privacy is really important to me. Anonymity is a terrible thing to lose, and we are in a culture that cherishes and holds as an achievement the losing of your anonymity, getting your name out there, becoming someone known. You need to be careful what you wish for.”

Social media is an area Mitchell seems to have been cajoled into, but he has made it his own. In July, The Right Sort, a “long short story” written in tweets, whet the appetites of those fans eagerly awaiting his latest novel, The Bone Clocks. But we shouldn’t start expecting any kind of regular Twitter activity — for Mitchell, Twitter presents an artistic opportunity rather than a platform to discuss his everyday life. “I enjoyed the challenge of writing a story for Twitter, I liked how it forces you to think in different ways about narrative because you are moving through a landscape very quickly, like looking through a narrow train window as opposed to reading a page of text where you are looking down upon it like a balloonist might.”

Twitter’s unforgiving character limit is not the first linguistic obstacle Mitchell has wrestled with in his fiction; his last novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), deals expertly with the many difficulties posed by a language barrier. When asked whether his experiences living in Japan had affected his use of language he replies, “In a way, not learning the language maybe had a greater influence than learning the language. I’m still only really intermediate and so I still do struggle to express the finer points of what I want to say, as does Jacob [de Zoet], as does Jason in Black Swan Green (2006), as do a lot of my characters. They are more verbal inside their heads than they are outside, their thoughts are more eloquent than their speech, and miscommunication, non-communication — you could even apply this to the translation of The Reason I Jump — the inability to communicate rather than the ability is one of my archetypal themes, and being in Japan did that theme no harm, and probably helped it to bloom.”

The Reason I Jump (2007) is Naoki Higashida’s account of growing up with severe autism, written when he was a teenager with the use of an alphabet board. Moving and enlightening, it was translated from Japanese into English by Mitchell and his wife Keiko Yoshida, who have a son with autism. The project was therefore a personal one, as well as a public service that has opened a unique document up to the English-speaking world. Now Mitchell is working on a new book with Higashida, at least two years from publication at the moment, on the subject of writing, how we understand smells, and autism in adulthood: “I think it will be a different book to The Reason I Jump, but still quite a valid one, and hopefully a unique one, and hopefully an original book as well in what we discuss.”

All of Mitchell’s novels to date deal with the problems that can arise due to miscommunication or the inability to communicate. The Bone Clocks demonstrates this most obviously in its third section, which discusses the Iraq War and relentlessly offers up views and explanations that contradict each other; everyone is at cross purposes, and being “on the same side” is not the same as being on the same page. War is shown to thrive through miscommunication, whether deliberate or accidental.

The Bone Clocks takes as its main character Holly Sykes, with each section examining, often through the eyes of others, different stages of her life. The novel is populated, however, with immortal characters: the Anchorites who prey on psychic children in order to stay alive, and the Horologists, who find themselves reincarnated after each death. Mitchell’s fans will spot an old favourite, one Dr Marinus from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and Mitchell himself has described The Bone Clocks as the second book in  the Marinus trilogy. The doctor is a difficult character to describe as Mitchell demonstrated himself: “I just verbally outlined my ideas for Marinus years ago — when I was writing Black Swan Green actually — to my brother, and it was this look of engrossed fascination on my brother’s face which said, ‘Oh you’ve got to do that one day, you’ve got to write that!’ And that was the spark that really made me want to have a go, he’s — or she, depending on which lifetime he or she is on – a kind of maximum character, right now she’s a she, so I’ll call her she, although actually in a little thing I’m doing now, quite a small thing, he’s a he again, oh no, he’s a she!” Having settled on a pronoun, Mitchell continues, “She’s a kind of maximum character, she’s as old, older than the modern era, she goes back to late antiquity, I think I have her starting off in the 6th century, something like that, and she has seen history and all those years and all these lifetimes, well, that fascinates me. What’s the psychology of involuntary immortality? What would you do if you knew you would be coming back again and again and again, what if your metalife made Groundhog Day look minute and inconsequential in comparison? What would that do to you? What would that do to your sense of ethics? What would you care about? Could you bring yourself to love? Knowing that whatever you love you will outlast many many many lifetimes over? Wouldn’t you be lonely, at least until you meet other people of your kind? Would you try to meet them? What would be the meaning of your metalife?” Marinus is amusing, intelligent, grumpy-but-good, and her ability to be anyone, at any time, makes her appeal to a writer like Mitchell obvious.

Mortality is a theme that has always been present in Mitchell’s work, notably in Cloud Atlas but also present in his debut novel Ghostwritten, part of which is narrated by an immortal, incorporeal consciousness. It is telling, then, that the main character of The Bone Clocks is mortal; by focusing on Holly, rather than the immortal heroes and villains, Mitchell is asking, “To what degree are our lives, as bone clocks, as ordinary mortals, conditioned by the fact that regardless of our religious beliefs we know that we are going to die? And unless you have a deep conviction, and deep belief in reincarnation, which I don’t, then to what degree does that define our one life?” After a book like Cloud Atlas, in which the same birthmark appears in different eras and texts, and events replay themselves across time, you could be forgiven for assuming that Mitchell has some kind of spiritual or religious agenda, but as the novels keep coming it becomes clear that any agenda is purely literary.

Towards the beginning of his career, Mitchell thought that the experimental novel was “a smart thing to do and a clever thing to be”, and certainly discussions about the unusual structures of his books mark his works as innovative on, at very least, a formal level; now, however, he is more concerned with the magic of writing: “Ultimately, I think, the magic is actually something very simple, you write a character that the reader can identify with and care for, and then frighten the reader that bad things will be happening to the character, and make them care. This principle is at play… well, you can see it in Chaucer, and you can see it in Game of Thrones. Experimental novels which dispense with that principle, well, you have to be very careful before you jettison that fundamental glue between the world you have made and the reader that you want to spend time in that world.”

Often described as a postmodern author, you will find Mitchell’s quotes on the back of Italo Calvino novels, and references to Jorge Luis Borges in his own works. To describe him this way, however, is to focus on his themes and structures while ignoring the very human aspect of his work, and his desire to write books that will thrill and captivate the reader, rather than draw attention to the artificiality of fiction. In answer to his own question, “In the field of literature, is postmodernism a dodo?” he almost tentatively replies that, “As an influence, as a colour in the paintbox, postmodernism is there, but as a dominant force it may have spent itself. Ultimately, I feel that postmodernism attacks the bond between reader and text, and if as a reader you catch sight of the writer smirking in the shadows, saying ‘This isn’t real, this is a text, this is a book’, then the illusion is punctured and this big beautiful shimmering bubble of fiction, where the text you are reading is more real than the room you are reading it in, is dissolved, and that lovely, primal reading experience you had as a kid when you were first read a story is dispelled.”