The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Untold stories of a Norwegian wood
David Mitchell tells Gaby Wood why he’s glad that his latest book won’t be printed in his lifetime
On a drizzly day earlier this year, the novelist David Mitchell walked into Nordmarka forest on the outskirts of Oslo, and prepared to bury his latest work. There was just the right amount of rain, he later said; “graceful rain”. Half a mile into the woods, he came to a clearing where about 100 people had gathered. The local foresters had made a fire, brewed some coffee, and tied a small red ribbon around each of 1,000 knee-high saplings to indicate that they were not to be harmed.
Although there were small children in the audience, it is unlikely that any of them will be beneficiaries of the strange legacy this ceremony was meant to mark. In order to picture the result, it is necessary to imagine at least one unborn generation further. Mitchell’s book – a 90page novella about which we can know no more than the title – is to be kept hidden for 98 years, and will only be published when the trees, having grown to maturity, can provide the paper on which to print it.
Mitchell is the second author of the 100 who will contribute to Future Library, a project conceived by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson. The first was Margaret Atwood, who delivered her manuscript, Scribbler Moon, last year in a grey archival box wrapped in purple ribbon. The third writer in the sequence has just been announced: Sjón, the Icelandic novelist also known for his collaborations with Björk.
“The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said,” Mitchell read, quoting Philip Larkin in the forest. A choir sang, and as the voices echoed through the trees, Mitchell lifted the walnut box he’d had made for his manuscript. On its lid was an impression of his own hand, cast in silver. (He liked to think of the box as a cryogenic chamber, “amply worth the effort” it took to make, given the century his book would spend in it.) He announced the title – From Me Flows What You Call Time, taken from a piece of music by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu – and as he passed the box to Paterson, his handprint caught the light.
When I first heard about Future Library some years ago, I assumed it was some kind of hoax. Katie Paterson was proposing to ask a different author to write a brand new book each year for 100 years. Well, she couldn’t ask all of them, because at some point she herself would be dead, but that was the project. None of these books would be read until 2114, at which point all 100 would be published. The authors would be sworn to secrecy about their contents. Meanwhile, Paterson would plant enough trees to print the books when the time came to unearth them.
How could such a promise possibly be kept? It was hard to imagine 100 writers not wanting to be read in their lifetime. On the other hand, perhaps Future Library was a ticket to posterity – a guarantee that one’s work would be relevant a hundred years from now. (Mitchell calls this the project’s “cocktail of vanity and humility”.) If it were you, would you submit your best book, or your worst? When would the ink start to fade? Could the manuscripts be stolen? And how would we know if any of it had worked, when none of us would live to see the results?
Yet now the library has begun; it can already partially be indexed, although not borrowed from. Atwood, Mitchell, Sjón and Paterson all have more imagination than I did. That goes without saying – they are novelists and artists. But they also have more faith in the world to come.
Mitchell suggests that Future Library is “a vote of confidence in civilisation”. He didn’t know what to make of the project either, at first: “I wasn’t sure how for real it was,” he says. But when encouraged by Simon Prosser, the publisher responsible for bringing out the work of Ali Smith, Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer among others (and a member of the Future Library trust, charged with seeing the project to completion), he saw it as an opportunity to “put your money where your mouth is”.
Writing a book for a future library was a way to express the belief, as Mitchell puts it, that “things that are important to me will still exist, and that the orchestral blast of bad news that you get when you open newspapers and click on websites – all the dystopian stuff about climate change, about terrorism, about demagogues seizing control of large, industrial countries – that that side won’t win. The side that values reading, that values seeing things from other people’s point of view, which is a great forte of the novel – that currently deeply embattled side has an equal shot at influencing the future.” Here, he says, was “a tiny way for me to do a little bit more than hoping”.
The idea first came to Katie Paterson many years ago while drawing tree rings on a piece of paper. “Very quickly, I saw chapters, and leaves of the book, a forest that prints a book, but that grows through time,” she says. Paterson, whose work has been shown at the Hayward Gallery and Tate Britain, is broadly concerned with landscape, space and time, “human time, cosmic time, geological time,” as she puts it. She has designed a lightbulb that simulates moonlight; worked with DNA researchers to create a fossil necklace; and collaborated with architects on a miniature forest made of trees from every forest in the world.
Some time after she’d drawn that first sketch, she was invited to Norway for a conference about “slow space” – the commissioning of public artworks on an extended time scale. She thought to herself: