Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is rightly considered a masterpiece of imaginative writing. This novel, which is rooted in historical fiction but takes us way beyond it, runs it close and is perhaps even more enjoyable.
Mitchell famously undertook meticulous research for the novel, determined to represent historical details at the beginning of the 19th century as precisely as possible, but if you're expecting 500+ pages of dry historical detail, that isn't - thankfully - anything like what you're going to get. Mitchell uses the palette of trade between Japan and the Dutch East Indies Company on which to draw a tale that essentially pits corruption against defiant morality, as Japanese culture clashes with European colonialism, neither escaping the malicious forces at play on both sides of this cultural divide.
The eponymous hero begins the novel as a humble clerk investigating allegations of corruption among his Dutch colleagues. When it becomes clear that corruption has infected even those whose services he is in, he stands firm in its path, incurring the wrath of his superiors and suffering demotion as a result. Within this amoral cesspit he faces his own moral conundrum: his love for a Japanese midwife tests his commitment to the woman he has promised himself to in the Netherlands.
De Zoet's character becomes a superb study of morality in a hostile climate, yet it many ways it's the array of dubious characters around him that make this novel so compelling: the German mercenary Fischer, the disgraced Shitker, the company's deceitful head Vorstenbach and the evil Enomoto surrounds the protagonist with an array of nefarious temptations as seductive as they are destructive. Corruption is as deeply rooted in imperial Japan as it is in the Netherlands, falling under Napoleon's yoke even as the events of the novel take place across the other side of the world.
Ultimately it's De Zoet that has the moral fibre and sharp wits to resist the British attack on the base, an attack overseen by another brilliantly written character, the gout-troubled Penhaligon. If the failure of the British attack represents its empire finding its limits, we're also aware of the fragility of the Dutch adventurers too. If the challenges to the three empires require the fortitude a man like De Zoet to sustain them, the novel seems to be asking, are there really enough self-sacrificing De Zoets around on which to build lasting prosperity?
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