I am a little surprised at how nice and quiet David Mitchell is in person. Mitchell the writer is quite the exhibitionist, jamming his books full of splendidly vibrant characters, space and time trotting settings and riotously inventive storylines. Mitchell the interviewee is very polite, very earnest, very well mannered English. He says he sees writing as his "vocation". He studied English and American literature at university because "I loved books and it made sense to study them" and now he writes books for a living as "also I loved books so I wanted to write them." Fair enough.

After university he tried and failed to secure a job in MacDonalds, then sold books for Waterstone's before leaving England for Japan "because of love and money. I had a Japanese girlfriend and no money and I could get a job teaching English there." This turned out to be useful training for writing as "to teach well you have to understand how your students are perceiving what you are teaching, and it so happens that this is a necessary skill for a novelist to have as well. The idea of unplugging yourself from yourself and plugging yourself into somebody else is a common factor I think."

Writers tend toward the peculiar, and to be a really good one, which he is, you have to be a bit of a nutter. Mitchell doesn't seem mad but admits that writing is a strange, lonely profession: "Writing has to be a solitary experience, otherwise it wouldn't happen. Few jobs have as few colleagues when you're actually doing it. Limited insanity is involved, somehow, in how you retreat from the real world."

His first book - Ghostwritten - was a clever collection of stories linking the fates of among others a crooked accountant in Hong Kong, an Irish physicist hiding from the FBI on Clare Island and a disembodied Mongolian consciousness. His second - the Booker nominated number9dream - was about a Japanese country kid who comes to Tokyo to find his father and gets mixed up in all kinds of dizzying Yakuza mayhem while finding love. Both were startlingly original and funny with it.

His latest - Cloud Atlas - is another intricately and imaginatively structured tale. Six narrators guide us forward and back in time from the nineteenth century to a post-apocalyptic future. We set out observing the niceties of colonialism and colonists in 1850 from our berth on a trading ship in the South Pacific. Then we are whisked forward into the company of a caddish young talented penniless composer on the make in interwar Belgium. Next we find ourselves in a 1970s Californian pulp crime story before we meet a very English publisher imprisoned against his will in a "ghastly" old people's home. It is important to pay attention and keep up. Soon we are among clones serving burgers in a diner in the dystopian future. Finally we return to the Pacific islands to hear Zachry tell his story of scavenging about after 'The Fall' of civilization as we know it. Then we start to go backwards and revisit everyone again.

Cloud Atlas is much more serious than his previous work. While there are still thrills and spills aplenty, the new book also contains a Message. Mitchell has recently settled in Clonakilty with his new wife and baby girl and now he has something to say. Which is that we are all in big trouble unless we stop being such selfish bastards.

Or as he more eloquently puts it: "I wanted to show the mechanics of predation and predacity; of picking on others I suppose, and everything up from that." A theme that links the chapters is the constant plundering of the weak by the stronger in the modern world. Mitchell thinks the form of fundamentalist missionary capitalism that is currently all the rage with the leaders of the free world is just unsustainable, and has one of his characters warn that "for the human being, selfishness is extinction."

He isn't the first writer to consider a totalitarian future and echoes of Huxley and Orwell are clangingly loud at some points. Mitchell hasn't given up hope though: "If I can somehow I don't know just show why the world hasn't got to be as grim as the worst moments of the news all the time then I feel I have a responsibility to have a go at doing so in the same sense that we all have a responsibility or it all goes to pot." He means you too.

Mitchell is a better writer than preacher and eventually his verbal dexterity outshines his message. In fact his wordplay is so brilliant even his own characters notice it. Cavendish the publisher snidely complains that a manuscript he is sent to consider [which is the preceding chapter of the book] would be better if it weren't "so artsily-fartsily clever". Some reviewers have seen this as the author innoculating himself against criticism and he accepts this. When I accuse him of being confident he shrugs. "I write the best I can, I am always sure of that, but I also know that in writing, as in most arts it takes a lifetime before you should risk calling yourself any good." Well he's doing alright so far.

first published on oxygen.ie