David Mitchell

jenks

thread death
I have just finished Cloud Atlas, now i'm trying to work out how it didn't win the booker (ok line of beauty may well be good but is it as inventive and so damn readable - i doubt it!)

it's been a while since i've been so enthusiastic about a contemporary novel (eugenides middlesex possibly) - range, scope, ambition it's got it all.

i'd read no9dream and kinda liked it but this is different level stuff. what's ghostwritten like, should i be hurrying to a bookshop?

i'd be interested to hear what others have made of Cloud Atlas and maybe i'll be a bit more cogent in my lit-critness in future posts - just so overwhelmed by the thing at present.
below a link to a whole bunch of reviews:
http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/cloud_atlas/
 

jed_

Well-known member
"ghostwritten" is probably his best book still. I think "Cloud Atlas" is wildly overrated even though i do think Mitchell is a very good writer. I didn't think the threads connecting the stories were strong enough and i just felt that i'd read this whole metafiction thing before. I know we know fiction is fictional (!) but it becomes problematic when a character you have invested time and interest in (Timothy Cavendish) turns out to be the main player in a movie and that the other section, concerning Luisa Rey, is not only a character in a crime novel but a fictional character in a crime novel which plays a bit part in a fictional movie about a fictional book publisher. After a while the whole thing - rather than building some significance from this accumulation of fictions - just crumbles away.

I do think he's good and i think he'll just keep getting better.

"The Line of Beauty" is incredibly good, much better than "Cloud Atlas"; Beautifully writtten - a classic, in fact.
 

Melmoth

Bruxist
'The Line of Beauty' is only the most glaring symptom of the hegemony of the dreaded Henry James over the parched tundra of contemporary British/Irish/ish novel. Interiority, free indirect speech and 'three-dimensional' characterisation do not a novel make. An utterly retrogressive attempt to re-install the bourgeois subject as sine qua non of literary fiction (whatever that is). See also McEwan's awful awful Saturday. I blame James Wood.

Cloud Atlas is a pale imitation of Calvino crossed with Russell Hoban plus user-friendly New Age bullshit thrown in (viz all that nonsense about birth-marks reappearing across time).

Not to mention Zadie Smith and Nick effin Laird.

John Berger, B.S. Johnson we need you. The novel is fucked.
 

jenks

thread death
melmoth - yeah he admits to the calvino influence but he is able to make the idea cohere in an interesting way. minor hoban moments too and i can live with novellistic synchronicity but i'm not quite sure what you want the novel to be - a box with chapters to be read in any order? a hagiography of working class/peasant life?

since when was there such a thing a novel sized hole? people always claim the novel is fucked but how? barthelme influenced work continues to spring out ofthe u.s - dfw, donald antrim, eugenides even. and it's not hard to think of other writed from all over the world who have tested the elasticity of what the novel can be.

so you don't like the lodge approved 'interiority' novel, the model of consciousness as displayed in 'thinks', there's other stuff being done. what i do know is that i'd rather read mitchell to dbc pierre or countless other booker winners in recent years.

in the end the novel is a machine for making stories and mitchell shows he can do that, now if you don't like the stories he tells...
 

jed_

Well-known member
Well said Jenks, the novel now doesn't have to be any particular way or toe any particular stylistic line. BS Johnson seems no more or less relevent to me now than Henry James, to use your examples. I read novels of any and all kind. Saying the novel is fucked is like saying music is fucked which it clearly isn't. Even if it were would you suggest people making music now ape the 2 or 3 people you admire in order to revive it?
 

Melmoth

Bruxist
Jenks and Jed, I wasn't being prescriptive, if you read my post you'll see I'm not advocating anyone 'apeing' anything, I just think that the contemporary (British/Irish) novel is shit.

Basically I want to be moved and I want ideas. And by ideas I don't mean Mitchel's rehashed Nietzscheanism: strong people exploit weak people. Really? thanks for letting us know that David. In fact Cloud Atlas (doncha just love that trippy title) dosn't even have the courage to pursue this idea to its end, it seems to counter the will-to-power with some sort of nonsensical, trangenerational, reincarnating element, presumably meant to symbolise the irrepressible human spirit. Excuse me while I retch.

If you think I'm just objecting to one sub-genre that derives from Lodge you've missed my point.
The only novels that receive any attention at all in these islands are those that painstakingly attempt to recreate character. The illusory recreation of empathy is seen as the be-all and end-all of fiction. As a result what you end up with are menus of emotion, recipes for identity. Consoling fictions to reinforce the sense of self. Cloud Atlas is full of this.

Jed, I don't know what you mean by 'relevant'. I was merely pointing out the undeniable fact that James is an enormous presence in English literary culture at the moment. Why is this? And also, if you take a minute to think about it, saying that the novel is fucked is not at all like saying that music is fucked. Its like saying that a particular genre, perhaps one that held a hegemonic sway and is now obviously past its prime, having utilised all its formal resources, is fucked. Like rock music, for example. Sometimes I think the novel is in that state now. Mitchell is a bit like a record-collection rocker in that sense. Stick him with the Hornbys.

If I'm wrong, what should I be reading? What has come out in the last 10 years in Britian or Ireland that can stand up against the best?
 

jenks

thread death
melmoth, thanks for the reply - i will reply in more detail - the problem with this format is the tendency to instantly respond without proper consideration.

i think what you say about the priveliging(sp) of character over all else may well be true, whether it is a peculiarity to uk/irish fiction that i do wonder.

i wasn't suggesting that you wanted one thing over another just what did you want - ideas and to be moved - don't we all?

what i have done is dug out my notebooks which contain evrything i have read for the past 15 years - i want to see if i can defend the english novel or not. i'm hoping i can but your post has planted a seed of doubt.

i'll get back to you on this - anyone else care to defend or bury the british novel? (or at least mitchell) :p
 

jenks

thread death
so, is the british novel fucked?

melmoth - so is it?

are we to be perpetually in thrall to Henry James and the need for obsessive investigation in/ simulation of character?

for you, melmoth, this equates with bourgeoise navel gazing, bloomsbury incarnate which seems to have reached its apotheosis in mcewan's saturday - the forensic quality which boils down in the end to the question 'what am i thinking? and how do i know?' it allows for the author to reveal his every little observation on how people act and react and if we let the character be a brain surgeon it allows for this arse aching analysis and also allows for a whole heap of (bravo) research.

yet i know loads of people that love this book for just those qualities that drive me mad about it and i suppose it'll garner all manner of awards

but surely that whole UEA/ bradbury school of writing is in decline, the big guns of the eighties - rushdie/amis/swift/barnes ahve all benn found wanting. they've spawned a host of watered down imitators - both here and abroad but the only one who seems to have swum free is Ishiguro and he had to write the unreadable Unconsoled first.

there are pockets of resistance but i think in the ned it's not so much that the novel is fucked but that quality contro has gone wonky - never has so much literary fiction been published and most of it is mush.

but is this whole question new? what survives from the past is a mere wisp - who reads Meredith now - huge seller back in the day. same for arnold bennett (and more fool those who don't read Riceyman Steps). and i wonder how much longer dh lawrence can hang on to his place on university syllabuses - he's already gone from the a level.

so what's good? well, if you discount my weakness for powell and waugh, you might agree with soem of this: nicola barker, sinclair, john mcgahern, byatt's recent quartet, gilbert adair, moorcock's mother london, andrew o'hagan, pat barker, shena mackay, robert irwin, michael bracewell, seamus deane, toby litt, alan warner, john banville, rupert thomson, tim parks, andrew miller and pullman.

i've got a feeling you'll have issues with many of them but i've given it a bash....

much like the long player the novel's death has long been anticipated and when you think of how modenism came along and cracked it like an egg eighty years ago you can see the problem. BUT i reall believe it's still vibrantly alive, anything that makes me cry on the tube is doing ok.

as wether it's worse here or elsewhere - a couple of years ago the granta best british writers collection came out at teh same time as a collection of u.s writers - burned children of america edited by yr mate zadie and in terms of quality there wasn't much in it - about 80% crap in both books.

i think it's interesting that we can get people fulminating over minute details of funk or mia or whatever but we can't string a serious literary discussion before the thread falls into disuse all too soon.

anyway, i'd be interseted to read your list of what's better and why. sorry this post kind of grew and grew :eek:
 

Melmoth

Bruxist
thanks for that reply jenks, thats an interesting list, can't say I've read all of them but I'd agree that theres some great stuff there: Deane's Reading in the Dark is a terrific novel, Sinclair I have problems with - the whole psychogeography thing seems a spent meme to me, and his prose style grates. McGahern is a superb writer, Banville's surfaces are almost pathologically polished and poised, all style and no substance.

Recent(ish) things that impressed me: Most of Sebald, Ballard's Millennium People, James Kelman, Berger's G.

I also have to admit that i did enjoy both Cloud Atlas and the Line of Beauty despite myself.
 

jenks

thread death
yeah sebald deserves his own thread - kept him off my list as a) he's german and b) he's dead! i kept the writers on my list to the living otherwise it'd be a lot of ford madox ford and stendhal!!

am eavesdropping in on an interview with barnes/ishiguro/coe which reinforces yr thesis!

must check out ballard - never quite been convinced by him but his seems to be an essential name for dissensus types to drop.
 

Melmoth

Bruxist
Adam Thirlwell's novel Politics is good. I forgot about that. And Eoin McNamee's books Resurrection Man and The Ultras are both very interesting, though flawed in a Sinclairish way.
 

jenks

thread death
just finished thirlwell's politics on the back of yr recommendation - much better than the reviews had suggested. liked the way he has used the basic kundera template to bear on sex and love - i had recently re-read two kunderas on holiday and was struck by just how relevant they ahve remanined despite the whole nov 89 stuff - i remember thinking at the time, is anyone reading this guy anymore, he was dead fashionable in the late eighties.
also i thought the sex ahs doen well - much better than houllebecq
 

Melmoth

Bruxist
Glad you liked it. Yeah its strange how Kundera has fallen beneath the radar now. Houellbecq seems to have replaced him as the honorary philosophical continental. In Prague on the other hand he never seems to have figured at all. I spent a few months there in the mid nineties and all the Czech people I met thought he was a poseur and an irrelevance. When I was in Mexico everyone said the same about Paz and Fuentes. Makes you think. Can't beat The Book of Laughter and Forgetting though...
 

jenks

thread death
yeah - Laughter and forgetting was one of the two i found on the shelf of the place i was staying in down in the south of france - i had forgotten a) how funny he was but b) how unflinchingly unsentinmental he was also. a skill thrilwell doesn't have.

i think the czechs don't really rate kundera for a number of reasons - many of them tied to his rather puritan attitude to everything/body (there's a great essay by roth about kundera, don't know who comes out most unsymapthetically) . also i think they just rate others more, in particular hrabal who has not been served well by translators - i served the king of england is a masterpiece. for example havel is revered as a man but when i was there, small mining town 6 hrs east of prague for a year, hardly anyone actually read his stuff.

skvorecky had a wider readership and klima was also being read but it was milos forman who was the true artistic hero!

still waiting an english edition of hrabal's poetry.
i will persist in keeping this limping thread alive :D
 

jed_

Well-known member
"Jed, I don't know what you mean by 'relevant'. I was merely pointing out the undeniable fact that James is an enormous presence in English literary culture at the moment. Why is this?"

i'm not really sure why he is such a huge presence. neither am i particularly sure what i meant by "relevant" - i was being flippant. apologies!

as it happens i've just started Coe's biography of Johnson which i'm enjoying hugely in spite of the fact i've only read one Johnson book ("Christie Malry..."). Coe makes quite a deal about Johnson's own "prescriptivism" when it comes to what the novel can and should be doing and takes issue with it. will say more when i've read more than 50 pages of it, however.
 

Rambler

Awanturnik
I'd recommend recent Kundera to anyone still - I read Ignorance (2002) last year and thought it absolutely stunning. All the usual Kundera ingredients there, but more so. It sort of pulls a similar trick to Goodbye Lenin, in that it uses 1989-and-after as a backdrop for exploring questions of memory, nostalgia, etc, but it's a very different story to that film. It's got that feather-light poignancy that I love in Kundera. One thing I would suggest about Kundera's fall from relevance in Czech(-oslavakia) and beyond is that his ideas of Mitteleuropa - shared by others such as Czeslaw Milosz in Poland - in the mid-1980s were rendered pretty much pointless by the events of 1989-90, joining of NATO, and the whole process of accession to the EU. In the mid-80s it may have looked attractive to forge a new central-European identity, but subsequent historical events (not least the collapse of the East and the complete victory of the West) made it an impossible, and irrelevant pipedream.

Back to the thread, and I'm halfway through Cloud Atlas at the moment, so my thoughts on that before long...
 

Rambler

Awanturnik
Just finished CA last night. My thoughts:

I'm desperate to read it again.

On the way 'up' the arch (ladder of civilisation) I thought, aye aye, I've read If On a Winter's Night, and this is just pulling the same trick, but forcing us to empathise with characters that are going to be snatched cruelly from us (see Jed above). At least Calvino whizzed through his jump cuts so that the story remained the form, and not the incidental detail.

But then as you get to the middle, it starts to cohere, and you begin to trust what Mitchell's doing. For one thing, the investment you've made in these characters begins to pay off - and it's notable that each of them is as keen as you to read what happens next. And the third quarter of the book is a triumph, as you start to see the view down unfolding before you. I don't really think it is Calvino in the end - sure there's an influence, but it's an influence Mitchell could equally get from any number of other sources.

I didn't like the birth mark/reincarnation thing either. Thought that was a bit naff, and actually unnecessary.

I appreciate that Ewing created an internal/external frame with Zachry, but his was the character I had least empathy with, so the final chapter was a bit of a damp squib. The second Cavendish-Rey-Frobisher sequence was so good and Ewing's journal just took all the energy out of it at the end for me, which left me a bit deflated.

Technically it's obviously brilliant - and brilliantly obvious. And it's rare to read a book that includes dystopian and post-dystopian futures. So it has its own merits in these respects alone.
 

jenks

thread death
BlackSwan Green

I have just finished the latest Mitchell last night.

It is not his usual brand of Calvino inspired linked narratives but instead a relatively straight forward story of growing up in the eighties. It is crammed full of 'topical' references - Findus Crispy pancakes and the Falklands, natch. I found the whole thing a bit dispiriting, as if the subject matter was beneath someone who is clearly better than this - a well worn narrative already colonised by people like Coe with The Rotter's Club and Litt with deadkidsongs.

he even makes sly allusions to Cloud Atlas but here it feels light and insubstantial.

It almost reeks of a certain kind of wish fulfillment, as if he wants to re-write his adolescence and com eout a bit of a hero. He also makes everything explicable, as if the holy hand of reason can be seen in all that appears to be beyond immediate comprehension.

What he is good at is different voices - the various characters our 'hero' meets (sometimes quite unbelievably) along the way are clearly distinguished by their verbal tropes and idiolects - he reminds me of Salinger nad his ability to nail a type with their voices.

Finally some of the conclusions we seem to be lead to are incredibly trite - Gypsies are actually quite nice, your parents are more complex than you thought... that kind of thing.

Anybody else read it? Not that it appears i am encouraging anybody to do so:rolleyes:
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I haven't read it. I probably will. Thing is, when I read what it was about it didn't appeal to me at all and I think that might be the case with other readers as well. My flatmate loves Mitchell (far more than I do) and was longing for a new one to come along - since it has I'm pretty sure that he hasn't read it either, presumably for the same reason.
For me, I've always enjoyed the tricks and liveliness of Mitchell's writing but I can see that some people (John Doe?) see this as overly flashy and tricksy. I thought that this book wasn't going to involve those tricks and was his attempt at a new kind of maturity and thought that I probably wouldn't love it even if he pulled it off. Sounds as though you reckon that he hasn't.
Will give it a go when I get a minute though.
 

matt b

Indexing all opinion
Anybody else read it? Not that it appears i am encouraging anybody to do so:rolleyes:

i've read it and enjoyed it- i mentioned before that it reminded me of mark haddon- its far less intellectual than his other books and in comparison to number9dream, far better for it (i've just read norwegian wood and now understand why people say mitchell rips murakami off in that book).

its far more 'english' than his other books and evocative of growing up in the early 80s in a semi-rural setting, first love etc.

i certainly don't think the subject matter is beneath him- its his attempt at a straight forward narrative. not as good as cloud atlas though.
 
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