David Mitchell’s fifth novel, an exotically situated romance of astounding vulgarity, has some things to be said for it. It will certainly entertain the simpler reader that lurks within all of us, the one that hungers for the chase and the mysterious Oriental maiden with a fascinating physical flaw, that enjoys the spurt of blood, thrills to the race against time and positively hankers after bald, inscrutable, mind-reading villains in blue silk robes; and to the reader who hardly cares how these things are put into prose.
It is undoubtedly an exciting book, but in any number of ways an unsophisticated one, with a technique that in some aspects borders on the rudimentary. In the past, I’ve greatly enjoyed and admired Mitchell’s books. This one seems exactly calculated to demonstrate his weaknesses as a writer, and the writerly temptations he too easily yields to.
His brilliant debut, Ghostwritten, and his third, justly admired, novel, Cloud Atlas, were both structurally innovative works about the end of the world. The characters, in sequences of shorter narratives, were linked together by remote and impressively random means, building to massive, somewhat inexplicable climaxes. In between came an ingenious thriller with a contemporary, Japanese setting, number9dream, almost universally regarded as a detailed homage to the great Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami, behind which any idiosyncratic style of Mitchell’s own could hardly be discerned. In Cloud Atlas, each chapter was a pastiche of a different novelistic manner, some obviously and enjoyably tawdry, one an evident and abject imitation of Russell Hoban’s famous created language in that great classic, Riddley Walker.
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