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."

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)