David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

My interviewer thanks everyone for coming in Chinese, and gives what I gather is a short introduction. Then I do a reading from Echo Must Die while a Mandarin translation is projected onto a screen behind me. It’s the same section I read at Hay-on-Wye, three years ago. Sodding hell, is it already three years since I last published? Trevor Upward’s hilarious escapades on the roof of the Eurostar do not appear to amuse the select gathering. Was my satire translated as a straight tragedy? Or was the Hershey wit taken into custody at the language barrier? After my reading I endure the sound of fourteen hands clapping, take my seat, and help myself to a glass of sparkling water — I’m thirsty as hell. The water is flat and tastes of yeast. I hope it didn’t come out of a Shanghai tap. My interviewer smiles, thanks me in English, and asks me the same questions I’ve been asked since I arrived in Beijing a few days ago: “How does your famous father’s work influence your novels?”; “Why does Desiccated Embryos have a symmetrical structure?”; “What truths should the Chinese reader find in your novels?” I give the same answers I’ve been giving since I arrived in Beijing a few days ago, and my spidery, unsmiling translator, who also translated my answers several times yesterday, renders my sentences into Chinese without any difficulty. Electrotherapy Girl, I notice, is actually taking notes. Then the interviewer asks, “And do you read your reviews?” which redirects my train of thought towards Richard Cheeseman where it smashes into last week’s miserable visit to Bogotá and comes off the tracks altogether …

HELL’S BELLS, THAT was one dispiriting visit, dear reader. Dominic Fitzsimmons had been pulling strings for months to get me and Richard’s sister Maggie a meeting with his Colombian counterpart at the Ministry of Justice for us to discuss the terms of repatriation — only for said dignitary to become “unavailable” at the last minute. A youthful underling came in his place — the boy was virtually tripping over his umbilical cord. He kept taking calls during our twenty-seven-minute audience, and twice he called me Meester Cheeseman while referring to “the Prisoner ’Earshey.” Waste of sodding time. The next day we visited poor Richard at the Penitenciaría Central. He’s suffering from weight loss, shingles, piles, depression, and his hair’s falling out too, but there’s only one doctor for two thousand inmates, and in the case of middle-class European prisoners, the good medic requires a fee of five hundred dollars per consultation. Richard asked us to bring books, paper, and pencils, but he turned down my offer of a laptop or iPad because the guards would nick it. “It marks you as rich,” he told us, in a broken voice, “and if they know you’re rich they make you buy insurance.” The place is run by gangs who control the in-house drug trade. “Don’t worry, Maggie,” Richard told his sister. “I don’t touch the stuff. Needles are shared, they bulk out the stuff with powder, and once you owe them, they’ve got your soul. It’d kill off my chances of an early appeal.” Maggie stayed brave for her brother, but as soon as we were out of the prison gates, she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. My own conscience felt hooked and zapped by a Taser. It still does.

But I can’t change places with him. It would kill me.

“Mr. Hershey?” Miss Li’s looking worried. “You okay?”

I blink. Shanghai. The book fair. “Yes, I just … Sorry, um, yes … Do I read my reviews? No. Not anymore. They take me to places I don’t wish to go.” As my interpreter gets to work on this, I notice that my audience is down to six. Electrotherapy Girl has slipped away.

THE SHANGHAI BUND is several things: a waterfront sweep of 1930s architecture with some ornate Toytown set pieces along the way; a symbol of Western colonial arrogance; a symbol of the ascension of the modern Chinese state; four lanes of slow-moving, or no-moving, traffic; and a raised promenade along the Huangpu River where flows a Walt Whitman throng of tourists, families, couples, vendors, pickpockets, friendless novelists, muttering drug dealers, and pimps: “Hey, mister, want drug, want sex? Very near, beautiful girls.” Crispin Hershey says, “No.” Not only is our hero loyally hitched, but he fears that the paperwork arising from getting Shanghaied in a Shanghai brothel would be truly Homeric, and not in a good way.

The sun disintegrates into evening and the skyscrapers over the river begin to fluoresce: there’s a titanic bottle opener; an outsize 1920s interstellar rocket; a supra-Ozymandian obelisk, plus a supporting cast of mere forty-, fifty-, sixty-floor buildings, clustering skywards like a doomed game of Tetris. In Mao’s time Pudong was a salt marsh, Nick Greek was telling me, but now you look for levitating jet-cars. When I was a boy the U.S.A. was synonymous with modernity; now it’s here. So I carry on walking, imagining the past: junks with lanterns swinging in the ebb and flow; the ghostly crisscross of masts and rigging, the groan of hulls laid down in Glasgow, Hamburg, and Marseille; hard, knotted stevedores unloading opium, loading tea; dotted lines of Japanese bombers, bombing the city to rubble; bullets, millions of bullets, bullets from Chicago, bullets from Fukuoka, bullets from Stalingrad, ratatat-tat-tat-tat . If cities have auras, like Zoë always insisted people do, if your “chakra is open,” then Shanghai’s aura is the color of money and power. Its emails can shut down factories in Detroit, denude Australia of its iron ore, strip Zimbabwe of its rhino horn, pump the Dow Jones full of either steroids or financial sewage …

My phone’s ringing. Perfect. My favorite person.

“Hail, O Face That Launched a Thousand Ships.”

“Hello, you idiot. How’s the mysterious Orient?”

“Shanghai’s impressive, but it lacks a Carmen Salvat.”

“And how was the Shanghai International Book Fair?”

“Ah, same old, same old. A good crowd at my event.”

“Great! You gave Nick a run for his money, then?”

“ ‘Nick Greek ’ to you,” growls my green-eyed monster. “It’s not a popularity contest, you know.”

“Good to hear you say so. Any sign of Holly yet?”

“No, her flight’s not due in until later — and, anyway, I’ve snuck off from the hotel to the Bund. I’m here now, skyscraper-watching.”

“Amazing, aren’t they? Are they all lit up yet?”

“Yep. Glowing like Lucy and the Sky and Diamonds. So much for my day, how was yours?”

“A sales meeting with an anxious sales team, an artwork meeting with a frantic printer, and now a lunch meeting with melancholic booksellers, followed by crisis meetings until five.”

“Lovely. Any news from the letting agent?”

“Ye-es. The news is, the apartment’s ours if we—”

“Oh that’s fantastic, darling! I’ll get on to the—”

“But listen, Crisp. I’m not quite as sure about it as I was.”

I stand aside for a troop of cheerful Chinese punks in full regalia. “The Plaza de la Villa flat? It was far and a way the best place we saw. Plenty of light, space for my study, just about affordable, and please —when we lift the blinds every morning, it’ll be like living over a Pérez-Reverte novel. I don’t understand: What boxes isn’t it ticking?”

My editor-girlfriend chooses her words with care. “I didn’t realize how attached I am to having my own place, until now. My place here is my own little castle. I like the neighborhood, my neighbors …”

“But, Carmen, your own little castle is little . If I’m to divide my time between London and Madrid, we need somewhere bigger.”

“I know … I just feel we’re rushing things a bit.”