number9dream by David Mitchell

[knivesout]

number9dream - David Mitchell


I'm not able to decide if Mitchell is a really good novelist who hasn't yet found anything to say that is as special as the ways in which he says it, or a dead good verbal trickster, period. Be that as it may, I've found all his novels compulsively readable, and I love the fact that a book like number9dream is set in *my* world, this world, the one you'll glimpse all around you the moment you stop reading this post and take a breather, and is still as fantastic and weird as any of the worlds of the imagination we seem to spend so much time trying to read ourselves into.

The narrative in number9dream sticks to a single protagonist - a young man named Eiji Miyake who travels to Tokyo to find his long-estranged father for reasons unclear to him - but Mitchell complicates and decorates things by interspersing segments from Eiji's dreams and fantasies, twisting and re-twisting the 'reality' thread until, at the end of it all, you aren't sure which bits were real and which were just happening in Eiji's head. And yet there's nothing unsatisfying about the book as a whole - it's a superbly paced, incredibly varied and downright entertaining romp from beginning to end. I actually felt that the limited viewpoint here, as opposed to the panoramic head-hopping in his other two novels, made for a bigger book in many ways.

The problem is, like some 80s guitar virtuoso which more chops than songwriting sense, Mitchell finds it hard to stop showing off, and he does have a voluminous bag of tricks to play. You could argue that his fractally complicated narratives and open-ending are directly descriptive of the world we live in today, a world that's a strange combination of Neuromancer, 1984 and Gibbon's Decline and Fall. You could also argue that Mitchell lost the plot somewhere in this book.

Mitchell could be on his way to becoming an important, fringe-speculative literary voice, somewhere in the space occupied by the likes of Jonathan Lethem, if he can find something important to say. In the meantime, his works continue to be light entertainment, but a light entertainment that is far more inventive and challenging than many weightier tomes.

[Circus Cranium]

Interesting. I love fantasy that's set in 'this world', because as you said, it's certainly reached the point of strangeness from the vantage point of a 1950's scifi novel. Sounds like this author needs to put more into the actual story and less into the frills of his writing?

[knivesout]

That's a fair take. I think what he actually has to say is outweighed by the sheer technical bravado with which he constructs his novels, but he is a relatively new author, and I look forward to watching his progress in time.