The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

His naiveté leads to a stunning inability to read the allegiances and motivations of those around him, setting in course their betrayal of him and his exile in Dejima. The clerk Jacob de Zoet has embarked on his career in the East to earn the guilders and esteem that will allow him to marry a sweetheart back home, and his superiors exploit his gullibility by asking him to work on a chronicle of petty corruption (a trick that exonerates the company’s senior figures). There is also a half-civilized ape, called William Pitt, that first appears in the novel holding a bloody, freshly amputated leg courtesy of Dejima’s resident Dutch surgeon, Marinus. This little patch is a strange floating world of its own, a cramped universe containing the swindling Dutch company officials and their warehouses, gouty sailors speaking in salty doggerel, Asian magistrates and chamberlains, Japanese interpreters and a small contingency of East Asian slaves. The country’s terra firma has yet to re-welcome the footprints of foreigners, so most of “Thousand Autumns” takes place on Dejima, the tiny island in Nagasaki’s harbor where perforce exchanges of all sorts (mercantile, military, linguistic) take place.

It is 1799 and the eponymous hero is a pious clerk from Holland during the waning days of the Dutch East Indies Co.’s trade monopoly with shogun-era Japan. It almost completely forgoes the first-person voice that Mitchell mastered in his prior work and limits itself to a short span of years (a nanosecond compared to the centuries-jumping “Cloud Atlas”) and a few locales in and off Japan. Like “Black Swan Green,” Mitchell’s new book is more verbal calisthenics than structural gymnastics. To wit: After the high-wire sampling of disparate genres in his formally daring Calvino- and Murakami-soaked “Cloud Atlas” (2004), who could have foreseen the intimate 2006 “Black Swan Green,” a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story of a stuttering 13-year-old in Thatcher’s England?

Throughout his barely decade-long career, the 41-year-old has moved limberly from one literary form to another. Not only is the novel, set in Japan at the end of the 18th century, the least experimental book the British novelist has ever written - in fact, it cleanly passes as “historical fiction” - but with each passing book, he embraces a new genre, an innovative approach to fiction that has become the two-time Booker finalist’s quirky signature. David Mitchell’s new work, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” is conventional in more ways than one.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell