David Mitchell C/D

By the way, do you know about I Love Books?

Plus, he ties up all the loose ends. And I like Murakami because he doesn't.

black swan green was great, although the ending left me wanting...I suppose that's not a bad thing. I really loved his narrator though.

I am really enjoying new one, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet at the moment. The first bit is very Mason & Dixon, the second section is Margaret Attwood with Samurai.

Then again I love almost everything I've read by him, except Number9dream, which I only liked bits of.

i agree with that. i'm looking forward to the new one.

he also seems like such a lovely man in the interviews. i want to be his mate and hang out with him.

There's a little bit of chat about it here and here btw.

I ordered this from the UK and am reading it right now. It is exceptionally, superlatively, good. And he is a really nice man – I met him at a reading in L.A. back during the Black Swan Green signings.

I think I like Ghostwritten the best (haven't read the new one).

Ghostwritten > Cloud Atlas = Black Swan Green >>> Number9Dream in my opinion. I can't really separate Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, the former wins for ambition and scale but the latter wins for intimacy and plain loveliness.

Haven't noticed anyone from any of the other books cropping up yet, although I suppose Cloud Atlas is the only one it could realistically overlap with. Unless the old lady on the mountainside in Ghostwritten is very old indeed.

BSG > Ghostwritten > Cloud Atlas >>> N9D, for me

From a recent interview, on links between books - MAYBE SPOILERY??

This leaves me wondering about the links in this book, and he is happy to elucidate: ‘The Irish carpenter Twomey, whose real name is Muntervary, is a distant relative of the particle physicist in Ghostwritten. Then the boat is the same one that Adam Ewing is on in Cloud Atlas, on which the young midshipman here eventually becomes the captain then.’

BSG > Cloud Atlas >Ghostwritten > No. 9 Dream.

That said, there are some really thrilling bits of prose in even the leastest of the books. The sixth or seventh sentence of No. 9 dream is, already gorgeous:

A galaxy of cream unribbons in my coffee cup, and the background chatter pulls into focus. ... Steam bears coffee, seafood, rolls, detergent. I have a fine across-the-street view of PanOpticon's main entrance. Quite a sight, this zirconium gothic skyscraper. Its upper floors are hidden by cloud, and so is the real Akiko Kato.. City weather is a mystery. Under a tight lid, Tokyo swelters at 34 C in 86 percent humidity –– A big PANASONIC display says so. Tokyo is too close up to see, sometimes. There are no distances and everything is above your head -- dentists, kindergartens, dance studios. Even the roads and walkways are up on murky stilts. An evil-twin Venice with all the water drained away.

So, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

(SPOILERY IN A THEMATIC WAY - NO PLOT STUFF)

Not really sure how much I'm taken with this - but this is possibly partly because it is for the most part deliberately quite undynamic, for all sorts of reasons - people being trapped in various ways, the beggarly status of the half-caste, whether that be a person or language, a deliberate Japanese precision... wait, precision is trite/cliched (a western pocket watch is also precise)... the importance of precise detailed aesthetic observation... better (Wyndham Lewis wrote an good essay on drawing which in part praised the Japanese respect for line drawing, unparalleled in the West).

Then again I'm not sure how the quite dynamic, almost comic book central section works. Yes! Something's finally happening! was my immediate response, but the bridle of the overall tone rather curbs the spur of the action.

Then there are times when it can feel a bit The Thousand Backstories of Horatio Hornblower - the Hornblower part being the agonised politics of an honest man (don't mind this - always read the hell out of Hornblower as a child), the thousand backstories bit being... well every bloody character has got a backstory which you're going to find out about in the end (which only increases the static feel) usually delivered in an authorial tone. I like writerly writers, ones who like words, prolixity and verbal and phrasal dexterity, but those writers often seem to find it hard to control the habit - it always feels like a fault to me when characters sound like ventriloquist dolls. It rends the veil.

Then there's this huge over-arcing thing to do with children, actual, acquired, disowned, and to be honest I'm not really sure what that's all about - it's a concern, an obsession of the novel, but I'm not sure how it plays - something to do with preservation v change I guess, but it does sit there as a thing, neither bounded by the scope of the novel nor generalised out of it. It sort of says 'Look, children, eh. Makes you think.'

Then there's the TEFL exchanges between characters, OK that feels slightly unfair, as it's part of what the novel is concerned with and I'm not sure how else you can go about it. Slightly less enjoyable is the constant feeling of DM's research behind it all - gets a bit history lessony at times. It's clearly colossally well researched, but that's part of the problem; it's all too clear.

Picky, picky. I read it all, so that's not bad for a start. There's plenty of fun to be had with some eyewatering anatomy lessons, and the quick-witted conversations. I liked all the slightly hokey feeling 'heron above moonflower blossom of winter' description and philosophising (I mean this aesthetic meeting point twixt a construct of 18th/19th C Dutch and Japanese seems as much the meat of the novel as anything else). It's got a nice between worlds feel because of that, which extends to a hallucinatory death in life/life in death quality (and sometimes over extends into magic realism and dream stuff - always need to tread carefully with literary dreams imo, and ugh, an annoying cat).

But, you know, it's something different. And that's good.

Anyone going to see his opera? Only know bits from the (Dutch) composer Michael Van der Aa. Never read any Mitchell..

An Interview

Didn't hear about this! Unsurprised it's van der Aa

Ghostwritten is his best for me. Read it when it first came out and had never read anything like it before. Thousand Autumns has been burning a space on my bookshelf for about a year now.

I am tempted by the opera, but waiting to see the reviews before deciding whether to get tickets or not.

Yeah hadn't heard, friend of mine did though.

Sunken Garden is his third opera, and, like his last, After Life (based on the film of the same name by Hirokazu Koreeda)

Would have loved to have seen this.

Can't wait, really excited.

New one soon, think it sounds good:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Bone-Clocks-David-Mitchell/dp/0340921609

that is one hideous cover

http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/i/2014/04/22/The-Bone-Clocks_410x612.jpg

That better?

slightly...

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this as I do all his books. And I'm quite interested to see him using an Irish setting after living here so long

It sounds like it might have the most SF/fantasy framework of any of his novels.

the goatse clocks

Anyone following his Twitter short story (ties in to the Bone Clocks apparently)?

not really 'following', it's in my timeline, as a sort of persistent reminder that fiction on twitter would have to take a substantially different form from 'book narrative' to be at all effective - so ponderous. gliding over the snippets suggests something more Black Swan Green than Cloud Atlas.

What did you make of Marijuana Simpson as an attempt at a Twitter novel, Fizzles?

it's interesting. I think where it's successful is that it fits in with the tone of twitter - phatic rather than expository - and the action is moved along or encapsulated by individual tweets rather than straddling two or more. that's partly important for internal reasons of presentation, but mainly because tonally duff tweets just look odd and stilted in your wider timeline.

where it's less successful is, again, in narrative description (so and so does such and such a thing) and the slightly clunky feeling speaker identification.

the authorial account does really work for me. it still feels too sealed in bookish notions of fiction, having to deal with structural things too much.

i think something where a character tweets wd be good - I can envisage a modern Notes from the Underground for instance. more ambitiously a cast of tweeting characters could be managed (including taking advantage of some of the restrictions around not being able to see @ conversations unless you follow both.)

the social side of twitter could then also be utilised with characters responding to followers.

the formal challenges feel akin to the difference between writing a novel and a radio play or adaptation.

the bigger challenge is how an author generates enough signal to noise distinction to get at least some form of wider coherence. maybe that's my own hang up tho - again clinging to outmoded notions of how fictional works are consumed.

Thank you for a far more considered response than the question was worth.

it's something that sort of flits around the back of my head from time to time, so it was good to put some of those background thoughts down, oh, that should be 'authorial account *doesn't* really work for me' obv.

BONE CLOCKS

Pretty rough review from James Wood.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/soul-cycle

As the novel’s cultural centrality dims, so storytelling—J. K. Rowling’s magical Owl of Minerva, equipped for a thousand tricks and turns—flies up and fills the air. Meaning is a bit of a bore, but storytelling is alive. The novel form can be difficult, cumbrously serious; storytelling is all pleasure, fantastical in its fertility, its ceaseless inventiveness. Easy to consume, too, because it excites hunger while simultaneously satisfying it: we continuously want more. The novel now aspires to the regality of the boxed DVD set: the throne is a game of them.

I don't think I can go beyond this point..

the throne is a game of them.

Yuck.

I'm going to buy it but I checked the Chicago public library system and they only have one copy? It has 80 holds so far.

Ha, I was just going to post that I had a hard time getting past "the throne is a game of them". Also I've been trying to avoid reviews for this one.

Yeah that review gives away an awful lot fyi.

the throne is a game of them.

yeah this is terrible writing what does this even mean

I first heard of Mitchell when Wood praised him to death years ago

I'm curious to know if he doesn't approve of Mitchell's tone/style in general, as far as what he wants modern novels to do, or if he feels like this one slipped compared to the previous Mitchell books?

xp oh ok

Much contemporary writing fetishizes style, and the priority is felt as a constant anxiety. Prose has to sign itself, establish its showy authority in silvery cutlass swipes through the air: clever insights, brilliant metaphors, unusual words, sharp observation, perpetually buoyant dialogue.

Aren't "clever insights, brilliant metaphors, unusual words, sharp observation, perpetually buoyant dialogue" what we want out of fiction, period, whether it's by Mitchell or Henry Fielding?

what would Oscar Wilde say

"Bosie, you mustn't burp when you bottom."

lol

Aren't "clever insights, brilliant metaphors, unusual words, sharp observation, perpetually buoyant dialogue" what we want out of fiction, period, whether it's by Mitchell or Henry Fielding?

I think if I just read this kind of thing I'd find literature boring. No need to hard code. In a lot of my favourite fiction there is just...something wrong and out of place, something I didn't know I wanted or needed.

i.e. a sharp observation?

or do you mean a mistake? I think that about music, certainly

A mistake for sure, this is certainly v often the case for music - a lot of its developments were thought to be barbaric perversion of established rules.

Read this piece by Marina Warner today:

Creative writing is a controversial subject, and many who teach it don’t defend it as a proper discipline. I am not one of them, but I can see the problems. How would you mark Wuthering Heights? (‘Emily, I think you need to reorganise the chronology.’) Or assess Gertrude Stein? (‘Have you heard of commas?’)

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/02/the-bone-clocks-david-mitchell-review-novel Le Guin likes it.

le Guin does tend to like stuff tho. not necessarily a bad thing, but if I'm trying to evaluate a book in terms of its wider critical evaluation, she doesn't help a lot.

Yeah. I love Le Guin.

the james wood review is infuriating

trying hard not to open this until i go on vacation in a couple of weeks...

the james wood review is getting at something. i've only read cloud atlas, but i think it's a thrilling, well-crafted, but ultimately hollow book. i don't really feel this way about murakami, to whom mitchell's often compared, but many people disagree with me there.

no idea what you mean by "ultimately hollow" tbqh

that's the same james wood review as all the other james wood reviews of stuff even vaguely like this, from pynchon on. think he's an excellent critic of stuff he respects and share much of his skepticism of "brilliant invention" or whatever, but every review he writes of something not about the inner monologue of a sensibly-named person or two in a situation or three (doesn't have to be staid tho -- this morning read a v positive review by him of james kelman, w lots of generous quoting) is less worthwhile than the last. the one of against the day is an honorable dissent imo and after that he mostly just repeats himself while getting grumpier.

i did think the book as he described it sounded p lame, but i'm 100pp from the end of the first gravity's rainbow reread of my adulthood so my standards are pretty high atm.

Just read and really enjoyed this *but* I definitely don't think it's up there with (my memories from nearly 15 years ago of) Ghostwritten and number9dream. While there are some cringeworthy things in the James Wood review (and he seems a bit muddled about the plot at one point), I think he has some good points, particularly about the characters having very similar voices; and the whole thing just didn't add up to so much in the end, it felt like things were building towards something which never quite arrived.

It's presumably too early for spoilers in this thread (has anyone else read it yet?), but I found the last section quite a let down, in particular.

Some of the setup reminded me of Little, Big, which is a good thing.

the whole thing just didn't add up to so much in the end, it felt like things were building towards something which never quite arrived.

i felt this way about cloud atlas. it seemed like the connections between the narratives were supposed to connect to this consistent theme of exploitation, and that the whole novel was supposed to be on some level like a benjaminian commentary on redeeming the suffereing of the downtrodden by being mindful of the way it is embedded in the texts and artifacts that surround us, but i don't think the whole thing came off well at all.

basically, the political or moral elements of the book seemed tacked on and disingenuous, a way of legitimating the book in a way that would appeal to whomever gives out the man booker prize.

Cloud Atlas is, like most David Mitchell, hugely enjoyable but not really as profound or clever as the claims that are sometimes made for it. I'm about 50 pages into the new one and liking it but it's sort of a lesser Black Swan Green at this point. That'll change soon, I imagine.

I could have done without his contributions to the Kate Bush show, I think.

They were a bit prime time BBC comedy drama but I suppose they needed something in there to fill the gaps while scene changes were taking place.

Black Swan Green and the China bits of Ghostwritten are his best things.

bBlack Swan Green my favourite too. Cloud Atlas is remarkable though. its scope is part of its brilliance, and the central futuristic language a real achievement - claims of "hollowness" seem way off mark, treesh, only indicative of a lack of single emotional centre maybe.

it felt like a bomb at the time (or a year or so after, when I read it).

It's presumably too early for spoilers in this thread (has anyone else read it yet?), but I found the last section quite a let down, in particular.

just finished. i get what you mean here but... it's a coda, no?

and I appreciate the symmetry. to end as we began, with an older sister and a younger brother, a child taken unexpectedly, a sharp break between the world as it was and as it will be after this moment.

it's a solid piece of craft and not unlike the conclusions of cloud atlas or de zoet - in the midst of everything, something's gone right for once, even if true loves aren't reunited, or evil vanquished, or dearest hopes fulfilled etc etc. wrapping things up crisply isn't really mitchell's strongest suit but he does the way he do.

I enjoyed it but it got kind of Harry Potter at the climax.

Agreed. I liked the last section a lot, and it certainly has an element of making the Harry Potter duel seem low-stakes by comparison.

I'm not sure how I feel about the last chapter but I am glad the book didn't end with the MAGICK BATTLE.

the last section is some yellow panic bullshit

???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFax_F3vdrI

totally

adam fwiw i talked that in this thread: asians-are-smart-deal-with-it: asian-americans & affirmative action

its not a very good book also fwiw

it really is not. i liked thousand autumns reasonably well and thought maybe he was over his precious puzzle box novel thing but i walked away from this one with house of leaves vibes.

Just read and really enjoyed this *but* I definitely don't think it's up there with (my memories from nearly 15 years ago of) Ghostwritten and number9dream.

That's because both Ghostwritten and number9dream are both much better books than The Bone Clocks, and I don't even like number9dream that much.

Read this on holiday, and it was enjoyable enough (with reservations) for the first few sections and then just fell off a cliff at the point at which he tried to tie the whole thing together. The main problem is the war between the Horologists and the Anchorites is complete bollocks and doesn't resolve the rest of the narrative in even a remotely satisfying way. By the Marinus section, all these blank vessel characters are just exchanging dialogue for no reason other than to rush through the novel's torturous internal logic and you can just see Mitchell straining to make it all fit.

I hadn't read the James Wood review at the time but his point about the voices is absolutely spot on. The dialogue, throughout, is clunky - that scene in the Hugo Lamb section where all these characters are sitting around in the pub talking in these identically boorish and witlessly convoluted sentences. It may be that Cambridge undergrads do actually talk like this but there's very little variation between them at all, and when characters in other sections started doing the same thing it just felt like Mitchell shoehorning gag after gag in purely for the sake of it. Except that some time between Jacob De Zoet and now he stopped being funny.

The Iraq section was genuinely good, possibly because Mitchell was furthest out of his comfort zone, but the seaside resort stuff going on at the same time? When Brubeck is running around frantically looking for his daughter, why does his first-person-present-tense narrator then spend the best part of a page detailing every costume at some nerd conference? It felt like there were a load of fairly basic errors that would be pulled up by any creative writing class (teenage Holly doesn't know who "the Heron" is but 'Gil Scott-Heron' is written in its entirety in the dialogue just before).

It may be that Mitchell has already reached that Amis/McEwan stage where people around him stop pointing out when he's being a bit crap, but the whole book could have benefited from a far more brutal editor.

Actually quite liked the final section fwiw, way better than the nonsense that immediately preceded it.

i did not like this very much

The main problem is the war between the Horologists and the Anchorites is complete bollocks and doesn't resolve the rest of the narrative in even a remotely satisfying way. By the Marinus section, all these blank vessel characters are just exchanging dialogue for no reason other than to rush through the novel's torturous internal logic and you can just see Mitchell straining to make it all fit.

otm. the actual fantasy elements of the novel are its absolute weakest--mitchell should have spent a lot more time developing his world. what a boring supernatural suprabattle! the moment when holly first meets rhimes and he's tossing around all these names and terms is terrific--and then it turns out that every mysterious word means exactly what you would have guessed. everything that should be underexplained is overexplained; everything that should be better explained is underexplained.

lots and lots of weird errors or embarrassing moments like the gil scott-heron/heron thing: the moment when marinus' last host is described as having "east asian features, african lips, caucasian skin, native american hair." way too many puns that don't land or don't quite make sense. at one point the band is written bonny prince billy rather that bonnie "prince" billy which is a minor but kind of obvious error. "justin bieber's fifth divorce." he has the novelist's tone-deafness for contemporary pop culture.

the bright spots for me were holly's section and marinus' account of coming up in russian society in the 1800s. the last section is probably the most interesting but is also weirdly reactionary, sino-obsessed.

wood's review veers from absolutely right to bizarrely wrong several times

I feel like trying to explain the whole fantasy element in one section like that just wrecked the whole book, especially when there were characters like Jacko or Hugo who could have given us an eye into that world in a much less clumsy way. I would happily have exchanged the Crispin Hershey section (which worked well enough in its own right) for a bit more balance elsewhere.

The Russian stuff was great as well but by that point it had become apparent that the book was overreaching itself, let's just stick a few pages of 19th century Russian novel in there as well just because we can. The whole thing was like Cloud Atlas but without the discipline and structural elegance that kept everything together.

While I was away I also read Steve Erickson's Amnesiascope, which is not his best book, but did get me thinking about how he's able to pull off so many overlapping narratives and ludicrous leaps across centuries because he resists the temptation to try and explain everything, his early books work because they don't quite fit together. A bit more mystery would have done wonders for the Bone Clocks.

last several posts super-otm imo

"enjoyable enough holiday read, like Cloud Atlas without the discipline" pretty much covers it

every one of the sore thumbs max notes really does stick out in a kind of embarrassing way. same for the overpromise/underdeliiver supernatural element, maybe extra-disappointing if you enjoyed Ghostwritten.

still, plenty of good stuff. last section well-imagined. would it have been easier to swallow with India or Brazil as our colonial power?

maybe! the china stuff just feels already dated, in some way

toward the end lots of this felt like a visit from the goon squad, which i didnt like very much

Last 30 Minutes of Six Feet Under, the genre

and yes, this feels of a piece with goon squad in that it turns out to be more about the passage of time than about anyone's personal story. we're subject to historical and generational forces, things we we think matter won't in 10 years, children are our previous future...

I had mixed feelings about goon squad. felt like many vignettes and characters didn't really work but the whole kinda did but never need to read it again.

Throne of games notwithstanding, Wood's review nails everything that bothers me about Mitchell so I'm not sure I'll bother with this one. I'm a Black Swan Green guy. Individual chapters of Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas are spectacular but the "everything's connected do you see?" vibe never seems to add up to much. I can tell that DM loves telling stories but I'm often not sure why else he writes - what he's trying to explore or say (basically what Wood said but minus the pompous application of a Ford Madox Ford line). I think Michael Chabon went down a similar path after The Wonder Boys and Kavalier and Klay. Clever, witty, page-turning genre-flipping that leaves me vaguely dissatisfied.

I like stories.

So I finished the Bone Clocks a while back and it felt like a slog to get through, it wasn't uninteresting, it just took me forever for some reason. With Mitchell books I always feel like I'm missing something by forgetting or overlooking the interconnectedness with his other works; I didn't realize until this morning how many of these were in previous novels, all of which I'd read, but not for some years (well except for 1000 Autumns, which I still haven't read).

also, this mainly made me want to go read the Invisibles (Grant Morrison) which the supernatural/fantasy elements reminded me of a lot, frankly.

Haven't read Bone Clocks but I never felt the interconnections between the various novels were that big of a deal. They're basically just easter eggs

also, this mainly made me want to go read the Invisibles (Grant Morrison) which the supernatural/fantasy elements reminded me of a lot, frankly.

reading this now (not finished yet, on the Cripsin Hershey section) but ^^^^ this is so otm

I found Slade House to be more enjoyable than The Bone Clocks. Maybe because I'd gotten over my embarrassment at all the talk of "scansioning", "psychoesoterica", etc. (and I say that as someone who's read their fair share of stupid fantasy novels. There's just something gauche about the way Mitchell uses the overt fantasy elements.) or maybe because it's only a couple of hundred pages long. Anyway it's a pretty fun little ghost story.

there are definitely elements of Morrison in The Bone Clocks, but it reminded me of Neil Gaiman more than anyone. And not in a good way.

It also reminded me of some of Clive Barker's stuff, though with a different focus. Got Slade House, but got other stuff to read first.

it reminded me of Neil Gaiman more than anyone. And not in a good way

haha yeah I can totally see this too

is there a good way?

I'm not done with this yet (just got to the Marinus Russian backstory bit and am getting kinda tired of the War of Immortals nonsense) and am starting to feel like his recurring trope of immortal characters is something of a narrative crutch. It enables him to explore a wide variety of characters and locales and voices (to varying degrees of success) and also impart some grand, epic sweep to things. But the more he does it the more it just feels lazy. I can't say I actually care about the ostensible central conflict in The Bone Clocks in any way, and it lacks the trashy flash and psychedelic insanity of something like the Invisibles.

p much agree. bone clocks is still mitchell and has some tremendously powerful moments but the more fully they're elaborated out the less interesting the fantasy/thriller elements become. of course the same is kind of true of The Invisibles...

Invisibles was both more freewheeling and less invested in "realism", which worked in its favor. The kaleidoscope of references - every conspiracy theory is true! - and the constant barrage of ideas made it just much more of a fun vehicle, a rollercoaster.

Obviously comics and fiction do different things. Mitchell's strength is his prose and his characters, and those are really the only reason I'm still reading Bone Clocks at this point.

I had mixed feelings about goon squad. felt like many vignettes and characters didn't really work but the whole kinda did but never need to read it again.

― resulting post (rogermexico.), Monday, 29 September 2014 18:43 (1 year ago) Permalink

yep

Still really bugs me that Cloud Atlas was the one they made a film of and not Black Swan Green.

god the climactic battle bits of this are getting very Highlander/Young Adult blech

yup

this is the saddest wiki i've ever seen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slade_House

Slade House is the seventh novel by British novelist David Mitchell.[1] The novel received mixed reviews.[2][1]

*sad trombone*

Finished this btw - felt like the final Testament/Riddley Walker sequence washed the bad taste of the *cosmic battle* nonsense out of my mouth a bit, but was hobbled by the cheap cynicism and deus ex machina "the children are rescued!" resolution. Like how did Marinus survive, exactly? After all that stupid sub-Inception exposition about apertures and the Dusk and whatever and then oh yeah here's a thing that happened with no explanation why cuz I need a happy ending. He is bad with resolving climactic conflicts, it seems (he did a similar thing in De Zoet where a big battle is set up and then the bad guys just... turn around and sail away? okay)

nothing in this world is sub-Inception imo but generally agreed. the last section has a lot going for it and takes us back to what Mitchell does well. feels like it raises the overall likelihood to recommend from "ugh don't bother" to "eh, worth your time if you like Mitchell but don't start here"

"sub-Inception" reference was just to the amount of exposition about "how things work" in this netherworld of mystical immortal vampires etc. The stream of arbitrary terminology, the pointless detail

It feels like his novels used to be more realist with occasional bursts of genre thrills, where I would think "whoa, are we really doing this?" And now the balance has tilted closer to that being the norm. Some of the best sections of the Bone Clocks were the non-supernatural parts.

Still really bugs me that Cloud Atlas was the one they made a film of and not Black Swan Green.
--Matt DC

i haven't read BSG but isn't it about a kid coming of age in a small town in England?? why is that better movie material than centuries-spanning epic with chase scenes? Ghostwritten would be a great movie too

the nested narrative structure of Cloud Atlas is a stupid thing to try to translate into a film. It's like "Watchmen", this thing that makes marvelous use of its medium and in many ways has its medium as its subject - you put the story in a different medium and it just doesn't work.

BSG has a linear bildungsroman thing, a natural fit for the narrative strengths of film

i'm scared to read his newest stuff bc of neg reviews in these threads :-/ so im reading his other stuff first

but when i bought nber9dream the other day the girl who worked there asked me if i'd read bone clocks and I said no and she mimed her head exploding. so I'm cautiously optimistic

i think cloud atlas could have been a great film, it just wasn't. lots of good films have nonlinear plot structures

uh the book is linear, that's not the problem

idk how you would make a decent movie out of Cloud Atlas and retain what makes the source material work so well

ok fine go make movie about a British kid learning the hard lessons of adulthood that's sure to slay on the big screen

http://www.hoylakejunction.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/kes.jpg

every part of cloud atlas would make a good movie... it's kind of a miracle the watchowsks fucked it up. pacific explorer, musician dude beating people off when he's strapped for cash, luisa rey, Timothy cavendish (everything in that chapter is plotted like finest musical comedy--the escape scene!), crazy ass chase scenes with the oracle and the future primitive guy... idgi

the problem is that's six movies

Cloud Atlas could make an extremely good 12 part TV series, I don't think it's a very good book though. BSG is an excellent one.

it's kind of a miracle the watchowsks fucked it up

It's the watchowskis, they made a Speed Racer movie ffs, they'd fuck up anything

the Speed Racer movie is great gtfo

they've never made a good movie imo

first matrix is legit obv but also i feel like i was impressed by what they accomplished on a shoestring with Bound at the time. might be v embarrassing now idk.

tbf i don't really feel like they "fucked up" cloud atlas. they tried to pull it off and failed, but it was obv a labor of love and they could have done a lot worse.

fuck this https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/30/david-mitchell-buries-latest-manuscript-for-a-hundred-years

lol

I thought Slade House was pretty fun tbh

It was pretty much just an extra chapter for The Bone Clocks, which was mediocre.

On Atwood's current form, she should be burying everything she writes these days

bone clocks just went on and on and on

it was kind of cool but it took me forever to finish

Slade House, however, I ripped through in a day and a half. It's great.

I read Slade House on holiday and... David Mitchell is just not good at writing books any more. It starts so well and then falls apart in exactly the same way as the Bone Clocks, in fact the conceit is almost identical.

Is there a good one to start with? I tried (and failed) on cloud atlas about ten years ago

Slade House was pretty obviously just a chapter of Bone Clocks that got taken out for length and published separately. I didn't like either of them very much but I don't think that means he can't write any more.

Given it jumps through multiple eras it feels like an early sketch for the Bone Clocks rather than a specific outtake.

For a good starting place I'd suggest either Ghostwritten or Black Swan Green.

I quite liked slade house - I thought it was better than bone clocks, but I liked that too. They were kind of a mess, tonally,
But they had some good stuff in them. If I didn't have any expectations I would say they were good - but they were kind of clumsily 'pop' compared to his older stuff. But I didn't hate reading them, they were kind of fun.

Slade House was ok because it was short

next book feels kind of make or break for him

His next one was the one he buried in Scandinavia for 100 years, so i guess it was break.

I was impressed by SLADE HOUSE and scared !!

I still need to read BONE CLOCKS but I hope it doesn't scare me too much!

I think he is brilliant.

To put it another way, it was another excellent and creepy conceit undone by torturous exposition and clunky dialogue. Up until the scene where the students go missing at the party I was entirely on board but then there's this huge information dump of back story and it deteriorates into two more characters crabbily zinging each other while trying to explain everything through saying things like 'orison' and Marinus.

Is it not enough for the story just to be creepy? Do we really need to see Mitchell standing there holding the strings for the closing sections? The Bone Clocks did almost exactly the same thing. It suggests that Mitchell's already in that Ian McEwan phase where editors aren't prepared to say "this doesn't work, you need to go back and rewrite it".

I haven't read anything of his since Black Swan Green, but I picked up Slade House last week and, at the half-way point, I'm absolutely loving it. I'm also finding it genuinely creepy, perhaps even scary when circumstances are right. I was reading the whole student party portion with Sally Timms late last night and couldn't put it down despite extreme tiredness. Hoping the latter portions live up to the promise of the opening half.

Stop reading now then.

I'll consider myself warned!

i liked slade house better overall than bone clocks, but the beginning of bone clocks is some of my favorite writing by dm. but i agree with matt, both books fall apart.

also i finally read number9dream for the first time a few months ago and it might be my least favorite of his books. ghostwritten is my #1.

Yeah it's weird how both of them fall apart in exactly the same way. I still think Mitchell writes some fantastic setpieces but his ability to tie them all together in any kind of satisfactory way has completely deserted him.

anyone read his new one Utopia Avenue yet? novels about rock bands are a difficult area but I’ll give it a shot

I haven't and am a mix of excited and very apprehensive to do so. Apart from Slade House (I guess largely because it was so short) I've failed to manage any of his books since Black Swan Green.

I also had such an intense love for Iain Banks' Espedair Street as a teenager that I can't help but keep thinking about that novel whenever I hear about this one.

I've only heard bad things, but I'm going to read it anyway, even his less-than-great later books are still readable. The New Yorker review that focused on the real musician cameos (Bowie, etc) was a bummer though.

Yeah, there are passages in all his books which make them worth reading, imo.

From the Guardian review:

The book is most alive and most compelling when Mitchell slips the surly bonds of the realist premise and lands in his own extraordinary imagined worlds. This is particularly the case in his handling of Jasper de Zoet (evidently descended from Jacob of the thousand autumns), who passes the novel fending off a kind of madness which arrived during a game of cricket when he was 16 years old, in the form of a disembodied “knock, knock”. There is a tenderly depicted and entirely persuasive friendship between young Jasper and his schoolfriend Heinz Formaggio, who attempts to unravel the meaning of the knock; and later, when Jasper attends (or appears to attend) a bizarre “psychosurgical” clinic, the reader is in the realm of The Bone Clocks – of the Horologists and the Oil of Souls. Here Jasper is attached by Dr Marinus to a “mnemo-parallax”, revisits his memories in reverse, and is coaxed towards sanity; I suspect it is for the reader to determine whether the novel has turned absolutely to the fantastical, or whether Jasper entered a deep psychosis and emerged more or less healed.

This stuff is dire whenever it appears in his books and unfortunately he seems very attached to it.

Black Swan Green is my favourite of his books and the one I want to re-read. I like to joke that number9dream is my favourite Murakami novel. I enjoyed Jacob de Zoet more than most, I guess. I haven't read any of his books since then. I have a couple of mutual friends with the author and I'm trying to solicit an introduction because I think he'd write a great libretto for opera.

NY Times review was kind of 'and he drills connections to his other novels in all directions and it used to be fun but now it's bad' and IDK know what to make of it. Got it cued on Kindle for after I finish NK Jemisin's new one.

He did a libretto!

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/mar/25/sunken-garden-david-mitchell-michel-van-der-aa

Yeahhhhhh but you know

;)

I'm gonna try this David Mitchell trivia thing tonight (mostly because a friend of mine is helping the publisher promote it, I definitely won't remember enough details from the books):
http://onegrandbooks.com/david-mitchell-has-written-a-rock-n-roll-novel-and-weve-partnered-with-random-house-to-celebrate/

sounds like a kindle acquisition to me. I was pretty bummed out by how unsatisfying the Bone Clocks was despite the idea being really compelling.

same. still appreciate him as a writer and even that had some good bits but the trip he’s on right now isn’t really working for me. will obv still read the shit out of this when it arrives.

The kindle pre-order arrived overnight and I’d love to be able to take the day off work to get started and engrossed in it. The frustration !

My expectation is likewise for some great set pieces rather than a successful whole text - but happy to be proved wrong.

the bone clocks in the end seemed like a really good idea for a BBC series that would ultimately disappoint

SPOILERS FOR UTOPIA AVENUE BELOW

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i enjoyed reading utopia avenue. mitchell is a good writer and knows how to keep a story compelling. if you enjoyed his other books, you'll likely enjoy this one too. this one is even a little more "fun" than his other novels.

on the other hand, this is a very silly book. all of stuff about being in a band and writing songs seemed cribbed from "behind the music" and bad rock star biopics and general rock band fantasies. it didn't feel real or lived, and this was exacerbated by the very silly real-life musician cameos. hey look it's keith moon! over there, it's leonard cohen! etc etc

i also thought the connections to mitchell's previous novels were silly. i didn't mind the more tangential connections that i noticed, though i have a terrible memory for this kind of stuff so i had no memory of who most of the connected characters were even when i realized that's what was going on. i was frustrated by a major part of the climax being tied to the bone clocks/slade house world. i was a not a fan of those books bc they seemed like a stab at big fantasy world-building, which i don't generally enjoy. and dropping that into what is theoretically the "real world" in utopia avenue was annoying and essentially a deus ex machina

it was funny that the drummer got the short shrift of character development compared to all the other band members. oh you don't write songs? guess what, no dedicated chapter for you!

maybe i'll reread jacob de zoet to remind myself of those connections

This stuff is dire whenever it appears in his books and unfortunately he seems very attached to it.

IIrc Ghostwritten was more realistic and even there some of the scientific passages were just wrong. I'm very much looking forward to reading this though mostly because I'm getting desperate for something new to read.

(I also thought book discussion was limited to ILB, glad to see some activity here. I should check back in there...)

Utopia Avenue is a Kindle Daily Deal (UK) today but the reviews are all 5s or 2s suggesting something is off. Comments?

Yes, Espedair Street comes to mind and that's something I've not dared reread since the 90s.

Well, on one hand, I'd never recommend it to someone as a great book, and I was constantly rolling my eyes at all of the celebrity cameos, the Mitchell-verse cameos, the descriptions of music being recorded and played, and the wish fulfillment feeling of the band's swift rise to success.

On the other hand, he's still the best writer I can think of who works with such trashy material, and I enjoyed reading it the whole way through. There are some realist sections that don't have anything to do with the band or non-corporeal beings that I found very affecting. So if you if you've enjoyed his work in the past, I would definitely read it.

my comments are above but i overall agree with jordan. it's a goofy book but if you've enjoyed his other books you'll probably enjoy this one too

yeah, reading Slade House and it's the first book in a while where i've avoided reading it before bed.

I read Utopia Avenue this week and as someone who enjoyed the off-the-rails aspects of The Bone Clocks more than most people, this drove me up the wall. The celebrity cameos just became unbearable - everyone from Brian Jones to Leonard Cohen talks in the same David Mitchelly way, give or take an accent, and has vaguely profound things to say that also contain a reference to a song or a future event. They got so overwhelming that I was wondering if it was supposed to add up to some larger point about the mythological nature of 60s icons, but it all just seemed like fanfic. The actual plot about the band is readable but it's barely there, most of the characters seem like retreads - talented young man balanced between decency and selfishness, hard-done-by, tougher-than-she-looks young woman, etc. The only particularly interesting character has all his problems solved by Marinus ex machina, which, didn't that also happen in the last couple books?

Kind of wish I could read Alan Moore's version of this, probably would be just as, if not more, self-indulgent, but there would almost certainly be a point.

it took me all year to finish Utopia Avenue and I just did last night, finally. It is terrible.

(for all the reasons everyone mentioned above, but particularly the celebrity cameos)