David Mitchell is in a genre of his own

David Mitchell’s new book, Slade House, is not quite a novel and not really a collection of short stories. It is, rather, a puzzle and an amusement. A member of the same family as last year’s The Bone Clocks, it also has a slight connection to his 2010 novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Mitchell has said in interviews that he thinks of his books being volumes in one mega work, or ‘übernovel’, and like his earlier fictions, Slade House meditates on varieties of predation, a theme explored to most moving effect in Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten.

The territory here is more straightforwardly supernatural, although the otherworldly high jinks are balanced by Mitchell’s generous touch with characters from Britain’s economic and social margins. In giving nuanced voice to an autistic teenager, Nathan, whose pianist mother seems not wholly to understand him, and to an obese student, Sally Timms, who despairs of being noticed by the handsomest boy in her university’s Paranormal Society, Mitchell provides enough ballast for the book to be more substantial, and more ‘literary’, than the usual run of genre fiction.

And to what genre might Slade House belong, in any case? The ghost story? Not quite, although there are certainly ghosts. Fantasy? Not entirely, since Mitchell’s handling of the paranormal remains grounded in a gritty realism of the present. ‘Slipstream’ is the literary quarter where some have sought to ghettoise him, but Mitchell appears determined to thwart attempts at strict classification of his novels. Increasingly, his work functions as its own genre, one whose constituent books are never dull and that often surprise with the depth of their insights into the psychology of quite ordinary people who find themselves trapped in fantastic situations.

As with most of Mitchell’s novels, the architecture of Slade House is both elegant and episodic.