→ December 16, 2022
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The Bone Clocks.

I love David Mitchell’s prose, and I love his characters, but now that I’ve read all of his novels, I think I don’t really love his books as much as I should. The last one on my list was The Bone Clocks, which I tore through, as I have with every novel he’s written, but which once again left me kind of cold when it came to the story. Of his eight published novels, I think I’d say I truly liked only four, and even Cloud Atlas was probably more a respect and appreciation sort of ‘like.’

The Bone Clocks is a two-layered novel that brings back the body-snatching spirits who appear at least in passing in every one of Mitchell’s novels except for Black Swan Green. It turns out that there are two sorts, the Horologists and the Anchorites, and they’re waging a war across all of time because they differ in how they view humans – as hosts, or as food, to put it in the simplest terms. Rather than just follow these disembodied entities, however, The Bone Clocks instead follows a number of characters, notably Holly Sykes, across decades and around the world as they live their own complicated lives while often serving as unknowing vessels for Horologists. Holly is the closest thing to a central character here, as she appears at the start of the book as a rebellious teenager who finds out her boyfriend of a few weeks is actually sleeping with her best friend, which leads to a series of unfortunate events that put her on the path of the spirits, coincide with the disappearance of her younger brother (who appears to be autistic), and give her what she thinks are visions for much of the rest of her life. We also meet a group of obnoxious upper-class twits at a college that’s supposed to be like Cambridge and a bad-boy author named Crispin Hershey who’s on the downswing of his career, before eventually getting to the heart of the book, the battle for all things between the two disembodied groups, before concluding in a grim post-apocalyptic section that recalls the middle section of Cloud Atlas in setting and tone.

I just can’t get into the Horologists stuff, and Mitchell is fully invested in it, bringing them into almost every book of his, often shoehorning them in somewhere they don’t belong (Utopia Avenue). I enjoy the way he reuses characters and places, or inserts other references to his previous works into new ones, but for someone who writes such lovely, evocative prose about reality, he spends too much time in this unreal milieu. Mitchell captures much of the human experience as well as any contemporary writer, especially grief and sadness, so jerking the reader out of whatever emotions he’s created to go spend time with Marinus or Esther Little or the Mongolian or whoever does the work no favors. There’s a good novel here in The Bone Clocks that just follows Holly Sykes through her highly eventful life, but he’s written her a story that’s inextricable from the Horologists’ narrative.

Slade House is the ultimate Horologists/Anchorites novel for me – it’s a horror story and a thriller and at its heart it is just about those beings. There’s one focus there, so you’re not divided between a very real world and Mitchell’s fantasy environment. And Black Swan Green works the other way; with no mystical mumbo-jumbo, you just get a beautiful coming-of-age story, rendered in fine detail by Mitchell’s eye and pen. Even Utopia Avenue got most of the way there, as the spirits appear just once, in a brief section that you could probably skip and not miss at all. Since that’s his most recent novel, I’d like to think that it’s a sign that he’s getting away from the Horologists & Anchorites and might just continue to write straightforward novels – with lots of callbacks and other references, sure, but perhaps grounded in a single plane of existence instead.

Next up: John O’Hara’s Ten North Frederick, winner of the 1956 National Book Award for Fiction. O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra is one of my favorite novels of all time.

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→ April 13, 2022
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Black Swan Green.

My reading of the entire David Mitchell catalogue continued during the offseason, as I read but never reviewed The Thousand Autumns of Jasper de Zoet (which I loved – brilliant prose and a compelling story), and now brings me to Black Swan Green, an autobiographical memoir set in Ireland in 1982. It’s the most straightforward of Mitchell’s novels that I’ve read, with relatively few references to people and events in his other novels, and a lovely, bittersweet coming-of-age story that reads like a way better Belfast.

Jason Taylor is Mitchell’s stand-in, a 13-year-old boy who lives with his parents and his older sister Julia, attending a boys-only school where he’s one of the less popular kids, due in part to his stammer. He’s friends with Dean Moran, one of the few kids less popular than he is; gets bullied by a few of the street toughs from the town; and harbors a quiet crush on Dawn Madden, who ends up dating one of the worst bullies in Black Swan Green, Ross Wilcox. Jason’s misadventures nearly always start in mundane ways – he’s at school, on the bus, at a carnival, at home, or just playing in the woods – but end up touching on one or more of the major themes: his parents’ fractious marriage, his difficulty in almost every social situation due to his stammer, and the difficulty of fitting in that teenage boys everywhere face. So much of Jason’s inner monologue revolves around trying to be cool enough that he’ll be accepted – or at least not bothered – by the town’s bullies, but not to attract undue attention and thus becomes a target for them for an entirely new reason.

Jason is a fantastic character, one I wish we’d see come back again in another novel – although I suppose he’d be a successful writer as an adult. I certainly saw enough of myself in him, despite the outward dissimilarities between us (I never had a stammer, and Jason is more comfortable fighting & playing sports than I was), to feel like both he and his story were realistic. Mitchell gives him everything a protagonist should have, building out Jason’s moral compass and personality through a series of normal events that many kids would face, from finding a lost wallet to standing up to bullies to coping with the conflict between loving your parents and recognizing that it’s not cool to be seen with them. It’s a more modern interpretation, but you can interpret Black Swan Green as the protagonist’s struggle against a world where toxic masculinity is the norm, a world into which he does not fit.

That does mean that the other characters are less fleshed-out, especially Jason’s dad, who is just kind of a dud as a person – although I would guess most of us know a Michael Taylor who talks a good game but doesn’t post when it’s his turn to be a good father or husband, and it’s hardly surprising when he eventually fails at all of his roles. Julia doesn’t get enough time on the pages, as she heads off to college partway through the book, but she’s the most interesting secondary character, as she softens towards her younger brother as both her time at home comes to a close and she better foresees the storm brewing in their parents’ marriage.

Black Swan Green – which has put the Charlatans’ “Sproston Green” in my head for the last week – doesn’t have the mystical elements that appear in most of Mitchell’s books, and other than a mention of Robert Frobisher, none of the major names who pop up in the Mitchell Literary Universe appear here. (Some characters here show up in minor roles in other books, especially Cloud Atlas, but none rang a bell for me so long after I read that work.) That’s for the better, as it would have been jarring to have that stuff show up in a roman à clef, unless the Horologists really did show up in Mitchell’s childhood. One warning: There’s a fair bit of homophobic language here, although I’m sure this is accurate to the time period and setting – I was 9 in 1982, in New York rather than Ireland, but this was the vernacular of teenaged boys in the 1980s – and it’s hardly glorified. It’s unsurprising to see Mitchell do straight fiction this well, and as much as I enjoy his broader and more inventive plots, this is among the best coming-of-age novels I’ve ever read.

Next up: Ellen Hendriksen’s How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety.

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→ March 12, 2021
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number9dream.

David Mitchell’s second novel, number9dream, is beautifully written but the most derivative of the five novels of his that I’ve read so far. Mitchell is an unabashed fan of the works of Haruki Murakami, but here he picks all of the wrong parts of Murakami’s works to mimic, with a story that never comes together and ends on a note that would make even less sense if you haven’t read his first novel, Ghostwritten.

number9dream is ostensibly the story of Eiji Miyake, a 20-year-old student who was raised by his mother and later his grandparents, and who sets out from his rural island home to Tokyo to try to track down his father’s identity. Along the way, he has a series of improbable encounters with yakuza, hackers, detectives, and, of course, a beautiful woman in whom he takes an interest. Mitchell divides the book into eight chapters – the ninth is the ending – each of which roughly comprises one of those adventures in Eiji’s quest to figure out who his father is and force some sort of meeting with him.

I enjoyed Murakami’s two big novels, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, tremendously, even acknowledging some of Murakami’s flaws as a writer (such as his inability or unwillingness to write compelling female characters). His use of magical realism and creation of immersive dreamscapes make for incredibly compelling reads that I find I can’t put down – but when he hasn’t been able to cast that spell, as in Killing Commendatore, it becomes tedious, like you’ve seen behind the magician’s curtain and realized how every trick is done.

number9dream feels more like the latter kind of Murakami novel, probably because Mitchell is trying too hard to emulate another writer, when, as would be clear in some of his later novels, he’s best when he’s just being David Mitchell. The series of events that befall Eiji are so improbable, often with over-the-top violence that borrows from Murakami’s worst instincts in that department – even those two Murakami novels I most enjoyed have one scene of horrifying violence apiece – that I couldn’t get caught up in any parts of the story or, most importantly, the major mystery of who Eiji’s father is or whether he’ll find him.

Mitchell’s use of dream/fantasy sequences early in the novel is also offputting, and he just drops that gimmick well before the halfway point. Eiji’s crush on Ai, a server at the coffee shop he visits at the start of the novel while following a lead on his father through the lawyer who has coordinated payments from his father for his care and upbringing, is fine, but the way she reciprocates doesn’t feel realistic at all to the character or women in general, falling into white-knight fantasy territory as well. There isn’t a well-written woman in this book, in fact, which I don’t think is typical of Mitchell – but it is typical of Murakami and the latter’s worst trait as an author.

I’ve read five of Mitchell’s eight novels so far, and this is easily his worst. It’s derivative, but worse, Eiji and his quest are just not compelling storylines – more so once it becomes clear early in the novel that if he finds his father at all, it’s not likely to be a satisfying resolution for him or for the reader. Eiji looking for his father is a good start on narrative greed, but Mitchell doesn’t keep it going, because ultimately Eiji’s reason for trying to find his father’s identity appears to be nothing more than curiosity – it’s not money, it’s not a strong emotional need, it’s just a mystery this goofy kid wants to solve. Maybe that’s uncharitable to Eiji or Mitchell, but I know the author can craft more gripping plots than this one, yet the most interesting parts here are the non sequiturs that hint at his other books (such as the Voorman Problem). I’ve got three Mitchell novels left to read and I imagine this will end up at the bottom of my rankings once I’m through.

Next up: I’m many books behind in reviews, but right now I’m reading both Barack Obama’s A Promised Land and Tim Grierson’s This is How You Make a Movie.

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→ December 16, 2020
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Ghostwritten.

After reading Utopia Avenue this summer, I realized, with some help from readers, that I was missing out on quite a bit of the context because I hadn’t read enough of David Mitchell’s previous work. His first novel, Ghostwritten, introduces several people who’ll pop up again in his later books, while also introducing what I assume is the first appearance of one of his noncorporeal Horologists.

Ghostwritten is more of a short story novel, with each story connected in some small way with at least one of the previous ones – sometimes just by the detail of a character appearing in the background of one and becoming the protagonist of the next, sometimes more significantly. That made it feel much more like a tuneup for Cloud Atlas, where he weaves six separate novellas together but is more effective at making them all feel like parts of the same tome. That’s not to say Ghostwritten doesn’t work, but I definitely had more of a sense that I was reading a short story collection than a cohesive single work.

That story where we meet what I assume is a Horologist is probably the book’s best-written and most interesting, as the narrator is a spirit who can take over a person’s brain and can jump to another person with a touch. The spirit is in Mongolia, and ends up in someone who’s on the run from the secret police, so the whole chapter has a spy-story vibe that isn’t present elsewhere – the same way the Luisa del Rey chapter in Cloud Atlas read like a detective story within the larger novel.

One other oddly compelling story in the book is set on a tea shack on Mount Emei, one of the four sacred mountains in Chinese Buddhism, in a tale that spans almost the entire life of its main character. Beginning when the shack owner is just a young girl, the narrative follows her through regime changes, social upheaval, and multiple razings of the shack that require her to rebuild. There’s a powerful undercurrent of perseverance and acceptance, consistent with the tenets of that religion, demonstrated by her resilience in the face of what could have become crippling defeats.

The first and the penultimate stories in Ghostwritten revolve around a doomsday cult that launches a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, very much like the actual 1995 attack by the cult Aum Shinrikyo that killed 12 people, which was chronicled by one of Mitchell’s stated influences, Haruki Murakami. While the events, and ultimate confusion over what’s real in the depiction, make a useful framing device for the other stories within the novel, the translation of a real-world terrorist attack in such stark terms felt almost exploitative, especially given the extent of Mitchell’s imagination on display elsewhere in the book.

Perhaps reading Ghostwritten out of order, after reading what is widely considered his best book (Cloud Atlas) and two more written after that one (Slade House and Utopia Avenue), takes away some of its power, as I was left with the impression that I’d read a strong debut that hinted at better things to come but also felt uneven and in some ways unfinished. The concluding two chapters are especially unsatisfying, one because it’s an unsuccessful attempt at an experimental style, the second because it blows up (pun semi-intended) most of what came before. Had I read this first, I probably would have compared it to the rookie season of a player I thought would become a star but hadn’t shown it all in year one – say, George Springer in 2014. Now I’m biased because I know Mitchell can do so much better, and already has.

Next up: I just finished David Wondrich’s Imbibe!, a history of the American cocktail, and am almost halfway through Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police.

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→ August 4, 2020
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Utopia Avenue.

David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue is, by his standards, almost a weirdly straight story, riveting and clever but mostly grounded in the realistic and the mundane. Following the rise and fall of a fictional English rock band in the late 1960s, featuring copious cameos by real-life rock figures from the British and American scenes of the time and more than a few references to Mitchell’s other works, the novel runs 570 pages and somehow feels like it’s still insufficient.

Utopia Avenue is also the name of the band in the novel, formed by an ambitious if not-very-successful producer Levon Frankland who assembles the band from the ashes of other London groups. Singer and keyboardist Elf Holloway is the most established, while guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet seems to have come from nowhere, bassist Dean Moss is about to hit rock bottom when Levon grabs him, and drummer Griff is looking for a new band. The four seem like they shouldn’t get on, let alone create music that will resonate with critics and fans, but it does happen in credible fashion. Mitchell chronicles their ascent from obscurity to moderate success in such detail that even mundane events and conversations become compelling.

The band’s story, at least their rise, is somehow that of every real band of the time but of no band at all. Each band member has some off-field drama, mostly drawn from the annals of rock history but deconstructed and recombined in Mitchell’s hands so that most of the parallels are obscured to the point that you won’t particularly care. Jasper’s trouble with mental illness derives from Syd Barrett’s, but Syd shows up in the pages of Utopia Avenue and Jasper’s story goes in a different direction than Syd’s did. Dean probably gets more than his share of the plot that happens away from studio and stage, although much of that is of his own making, and it’s not as if any of what he provokes or endures is unrealistic anyway. Perhaps there’s a bit too much of the Yoko Ono myth here, a bit too much sex-and-drugs there, but the current of the stream here is strong enough to keep the story moving despite those liberties.

The only misstep comes with the lyrics – granted, many rock bands’ lyrics are less than scintillating, but Mitchell’s strength in prose does not translate well to verse, and it doesn’t quite fit the praise the band members receive from critics and other musicians for their lyrics. Each chapter in Utopia Avenue is also the name of a song from the band, which one band member wrote in reaction to a real-life event described therein. It’s a clever conceit for the plot, but translating those ideas into lyrics doesn’t read well on the page.

I’ve only read two of Mitchell’s previous works, Cloud Atlas and Slade House, so I caught many of the references to characters from the former but also know I missed copious allusions to some of his other novels, notably Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I loved Utopia Avenue, but I almost certainly didn’t get the full experience because I haven’t read all of his prior works; it has convinced me to go read the other five, starting from his first, Ghostwritten. Luisa Rey, my favorite character from Cloud Atlas, appears as a secondary character. Robert Frobisher gets a mention. You can see Jasper’s surname appears in one of his earlier books, and if you know what Horology is – I only barely knew, by way of Slade House – that ends up playing a role in one of the characters’ stories. The universe across Mitchell’s books is intricate and I assume rewards deep reading, leaving what I presume was a layer below the surface of this novel that I couldn’t appreciate.

Utopia Avenue’s fictional stay at the top doesn’t last, of course, but even with the detailed description of their gradual rise, it’s still somehow too short. All four band members are wonderfully three-dimensional; the three men are all emotionally complex and flawed, while Mitchell gives Elf a different sort of complexity without imbuing her character with as many negative traits. Even Levon, who gets quite a bit less screen time, has his moments and at least gives the sense that Mitchell drew him more completely even if it didn’t all appear on the page. How well Mitchell handles the various cameos by real people is probably a question beyond my capacity to answer, given how little I know about what these men and women were like in real life, but I’d like to know if any of their contemporaries weigh in on the topic.

Mitchell has been shortlisted for the Booker twice, and my sense of that award is that, like so many awards in the arts and in sports, the more you’re considered for it, the more likely you are to get it at some point. I’ll be curious to see if Utopia Avenue at least gets him on the shortlist again, as it feels less ambitious than, say, the nested six-novel structure of Cloud Atlas, yet in the perspective of his entire oeuvre it’s clearly a more progressive work than it might first appear. At worst, it should grace many best-of-2020 lists this December.

Next up: I’ll be interviewing Dr. Angela Duckworth for my next podcast, so I’m reading her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

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→ April 16, 2015
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Cloud Atlas.

Klawchat today at 1 pm ET. My list of the most prospect-laden minor league rosters is up for Insiders.

David Mitchell told the Guardian in a 2010 book club post that he was inspired to write Cloud Atlas by one of my all-time favorite novels, Italo Calvino’s metafiction masterpiece If on a winter’s night a traveler, in which Calvino alternates between chapters of author-reader “dialogue” and opening chapters to stories he never completes. Mitchell takes that idea in a different direction in Cloud Atlas, giving us the openings to five novellas, followed by a sixth complete story and then the second halves to the initial five. All of his stories are linked through explicit and implicit relationships among characters and archetypes, even while Mitchell dances across genres from the picaresque to the dystopian to the modern detective thriller.

The six stories move forward through time, beginning with the journal of an American notary on a merchant ship traveling the Pacific in the 1850s, with the fifth and sixth stories taking place after our present day in a dystopian world on the brink of environmental disaster and a postapocalyptic Hawai’i that is one of the last bastions of humanity. Mitchell shifts deftly across the various narrative voices required for the task, nailing the tones of the dissolute composer/amanuensis Robert Frobisher and the third-person narrator of the “first” Luisa Rey mystery with equal precision. The two stories set in the future were the least effective narratives, especially the one set in a world where North Korea has become one of the few remaining powers on a planet increasingly covered by “deadlands;” Mitchell tells this story via an interview between a graduate student and a clone sentenced to death for attempting to incite a revolution, a dry method made harder to accept by his use of one of the world’s least sustainable regimes as the last man standing. Yet the Luisa Rey mystery, a conspiracy-theory thriller where the eponymous reporter stumbles on a massive corporate cover-up of safety risks at a nuclear power plant – with executives willing to kill to keep those violations secret – reads like a James M. Cain noir classic, but with the pacing of a Hammett novel because Mitchell has to wrap up the story in about 100 pages. It’s remarkable that Mitchell can do that voice so effectively while also mimicking Dickens or Smollett (or even John Barth, who himself imitated the picaresque in The Sot-Weed Factor) in the opening passage, and then switching to the pansexual Frobisher’s egotistical, anguished tone in letters to his friend Sixsmith (who appears directly in the Luisa Rey mystery) as if these were the works of different authors entirely. Even Timothy Cavendish, the vanity publisher who inadvertently (and rather comically) ends up with a bestseller on his hands, jumps off the page as a three-dimensional character who struggles to stay out of trouble only to end up in more of it.

That characterization is what elevates Cloud Atlas beyond the mere storycraft evident in the half-dozen novellas that constitute the book. The shorter the story, the harder it becomes for the author to gain the reader’s investment in its outcome by creating compelling characters. Mitchell varies his techniques across each section; we know Luisa Rey is going to come out all right, since it’s titled the “first” Luisa Rey mystery and protagonists in such books always win in the end, but we have no reason to expect any specific outcome for Frobisher or Cavendish, and the clone at the heart of the fifth story is already doomed, just for reasons we don’t understand until her story is over. Only the middle story, the one of the six told without interruption, dragged, but that was more a function of Mitchell’s use of a pidgin English that was intended to show regression in the language and reflect the race’s loss of knowledge through catastrophe and isolation.

My struggle with Cloud Atlas comes from my search for a unifying theme; Mitchell indicates in that Guardian interview that he tried to depict some fundamental aspects of human nature on both the individual and the global levels, but beyond, perhaps, a pessimistic worldview that mankind is so driven by myopic greed that we are bent on self-destruction, I didn’t get that sense of thematic unity across the various stories. The shared or related details across stories, often tucked away like Easter Eggs, were more effective at forging connections across the different settings, although I was looking for a stronger link in the common birthmark that Mitchell used for a character in each story than the explanation he ultimately gave – each character is the literary reincarnation of the same ‘soul.’ Mitchell even hints at spiritual underpinnings with the ends of several stories, including the augury that saves the savage and the humanist in the sixth story – the pivot in the novel – but never fully explores that themes either. The resulting novel is clever and compelling, but only intermittently insightful, a tremendous work of invention yet a bit short of a literary masterpiece.

–

I also recently finished Silent House, from Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. The Turkish author takes Tolstoy’s aphorism about every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way to heart, presenting three generations of a Turkish family rent by alcoholism, infidelity, and death into a split structure where a 90-year-old widow employs her late husband’s illegitimate little-person son as a servant, who then ends up also waiting on her three grandchildren when they make their annual visit. The characters themselves, including the widow’s late husband, all come across as two-dimensional representations of various aspects of a broader cultural battle within Turkey, a country that is split in both geographical and metaphorical senses between west and east, humanism and religion, history and modernity. The narrative technique, with five different characters alternating their turn at the microphone, adds perspective, but the story itself seemed stale and predictable. I assume this wasn’t the best choice for someone looking for a single example of Pamuk’s work.

Next up: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, which was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, a prize Adichie won in 2007 for Half of a Yellow Sun, her amazing saga of five people trying to survive the Nigerian-Biafran civil war.

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