Good, Evil, and the Rest of the World Between: A Review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

In my living room after church, we discussed good and evil.

The conversation began with a question about how we could claim that one faith was right and another wrong. What followed revealed the difficulty of that idea- establishing right vs. wrong, defining them in your terms, and then assuming that your brainpower, faith, fervor, or whatever is sufficient to guarantee that your terms are correct, and that they supercede the terms of others.

Then you have cultural complications, which it turns out vary from person to person, and adjust or often determine our terms. Then there's religion and all its nuances and claims. Add to that any number of confounding factors, turn up the volume, stir, and you get the world we live in.

So we westerners who tend to like the idea that there is a right and that it's pretty much exactly what we think, gravitate toward art which affirms this. I believe it's why The Lord of the Rings was so popular, why we loved Star Wars. Our fantasies smooth the edges and make perfect our imperfect ideas.

The challenging thing about David Mitchell's latest novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is that it sets up its conflicts between faiths and cultures and ideologies, the twists them sideways and metes out justice in a confounding way.

The story revolves around Jacob de Zoet, a clerk, an underdog, who works on an island off the coast of Nagasaki in Japan at the turn of the 19th century. The manmade island, Dejima, exists to allow the Dutch to trade with Japan without setting foot on Japanese soil.

Dejima is a perfect setting for the story, an island between the East and the West, mistrusted and neglected by the surrounding powers, peopled by employees of a dying company.

Into this play of power, this mess of cultures, and this crux of history, Mitchell does some masterful dreaming. He spends the first act setting up his pieces, shifting allegiances, brewing a storm. Throughout the story, he sets a romantic or an idealist up against a corrupt system. The idealists and romantics are thwarted repeatedly until the final act, where those who survive see their virtue suddenly at the center of a struggle between nations.

In its own way, while it is far more nuanced and bold than the previously mentioned Star Wars and LOTR epics, Thousand Autumns is a moral tale for a postmoral audience. Its good guys bear the same traits-- They have progressive attitudes about equality between the sexes; They listen well to all viewpoints; Then, when all hands are on the table, they act according to their internal sense of conviction.

Their belief systems differ. One good guy is a Humanist. Another is a Christian. One is a Buddhist. But their values are unified, and they always supercede mere expediency. There is always a sacrifice. There is always something selfless. Their creeds vary, but their values are ultimately the same.

It is hard to make a statement about the conclusion without spoiling it, but I will say this. I think good wins out, if imperfectly. There is a cost. There is loss and sadness and complication and poverty waiting even after good has won. In the postmoral fable, there is no happily ever after, just a complicated moving forward.

It's easy to critique this outcome, this path of praising values while eschewing ideologies. You could call it the other side of the same coin.

What I appreciate is Mitchell's seriousness, his artistry, his passion in this experiment. He places us at the island between East and West, the heart of Christianity, Humanism, and Buddhism, and the crux of culture and commerce. Then he looks to see if, between all these absolutes, we still have something good to hang on to. It's a set of intersections worth exploring, and Mitchell leaves us with plenty of insights to challenge, tease, and enlighten us as we follow him, and explore the island ourselves.