I know that reading is very much a personal thing, but has anyone got any thoughts on the books of David Mitchell?
Cloud Atlas has been sitting on one of my shelves for years, unread, as has (I think) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but I am preparing (mentally) to go through a (physical) clear-out of books and I’m not sure that I can bring myself to even make a start on either to find out if I might like them, preferring instead to go by the fact that “if you haven’t picked them up in the last five years, ….”.
Based on the review of Utopia Avenue in today’s Guardian, I am not tempted by what the reviewer calls Mitchell’s ongoing “metanovel” or by the following lines from the review:
“… the frustrating, elusive magic of wresting melody out of four strings and a pick-up is vividly evoked, as Jasper “slams into an amp-blowing, bent-string howl and fires off a scale of triads, sliding from high E, all the way down”.”
I am not sure what I find most remarkable about that: the possibility that Jasper (a lead guitarist) might find it a little less frustrating on the melody front if he used all six strings on his guitar, or the Spinal Tap image I get from the description of the amp-blowing, howling triads. I assume that the reference to four strings is the reviewer’s rather than Mitchell’s.
If it helps, I like Dickens, Waugh, Orwell, Barnes, Le Carre, but I do not like Sci-Fi or Magic Realism.
I heard Utopia Avenue being discussed on Radio 4 and my ears pricked up, as I’m in the market for holiday reading material. They finished with thanking David Mitchell. I thought “Oh bugger, he’s a bit highbrow for me”.
I bought Vinyl Countdown (based upon comments on here), Alan Johnson’s In My Life (based upon his episode of AlbumToAlbum), This Is Memorial Device, and Daisy Jones & The Six (based upon discussions on R4’s A Good Read).
This doesn’t really answer your question, does it, although I’m a thicko and I know the difference between a guitar and a bass.
difference between a guitar and a bass.
One’s a musical instrument the other’s a fish.
I’ve just started cloud atlas, I’m three pages in, I’ll let you know.
Ha ha.
Thanks. I look forward to your review.
Replying to @fentonsteve
I heard the review on R4 too and, a bit like the article in the Guardian, it rather put me off.
I commented on Vinyl Countdown which I quite liked but enjoyed the Tim Burgess record buying book more.
I just bought Daisy Jones and the Six for my holiday reading but might not wait until end of August as I am intrigued.
I read Tim Burgess’ Telling Stories (I picked it up cheap in Fopp) and it was obvious to me he’s enthusiastic music lover but a better singer/haircut* than writer. It put me off reading any more of his, tbh. Mind you, the “cocainus” story is genius.
(*) that’s not saying much.
It was Tim book Two that I read about his record buying exploits – I enjoyed it.
I also got Telling Stories cheap in Fopp but haven’t read it yet.
I just finished it this afternoon in the garden.
I really enjoyed it – some of the cameos were a little on the nose, but I had so much fun that nitpicking or attempting an objective review would be pointless.
Not his greatest, but for fans, far more than ‘just good enough‘.
I’ve read all his novels. I thoroughly enjoyed them all. Those two you have are among the best. They are highly readable, just good stories for the most part. Sometimes there is some playing around with time, complex narratives, a touch of the Murakamis you could say. Modern fiction, ambitious, not terribly experimental really, above all highly entertaining, unlike some contemporary literature. As for the new one, I am a little wary. Depictions of rock bands can be a bit poor, especially when, like us, you know quite a bit about the subject, but I have a lot of faith in the author. The Thousand Autumns would be the one to for first, as a relatively straight story.
I’ve read them all too apart from the new one. They’re all at least good, and some of them are excellent.
I think The Bone Clocks is the one I most out-and-out enjoyed. Rollicking, high-concept fantasy. Loved it.
See Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet for another in the sub genre of crap novels by major novelists about rock bands.
Read them all, loved them all.
Start with ‘Cloud Atlas’. You will know pretty quickly if it’s for you.
I have the new one on pre-order, I take Diddley’s point about depictions of rock bands and I am a little wary, but it can’t be worse than Daisy Jones & The Six which I really wanted to like, but just couldn’t get into.
I only know his input to Kate Bush’s Before The Dawn, was not overly impressed with his bits to be honest.
They were the worst part of the show…”the badger’s nadgers”, FFS!
I’ve ordered Utopia Avenue and can’t wait to read it on my summer hols. The only disappointing one for me is Number 9 Dream. I’d say Cloud Atlas is his greatest – give it a go, but give it time as well. It takes a bit of work but it’s worth it.
Thanks to all for the above. It looks like David Mitchell has got himself a reprieve.
I have just started Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning Of Spring, a book I kept hearing good things about but as soon as I have finished that, I will give one of the Mitchell’s a go.
Oh good cos I’m still on page 3.
Very glad to have seen this post as I’ve been hoping for a new David Mitchell for some time.
The first of his I read was ‘The Thousand Winters of JDZ’ a few years back on the recommendation of a pal. I was blown away & have essentially been a fan ever since & have read them all except the ghost story one ( I have an aversion to that genre which is a prejudice I should address).
He’s in that little group of writers who I’ll buy the new one sight unseen, so I’ve made my order & am looking forward to it immensely.
I’m reading Antony Beevor’s ‘The Second World War’ at the moment, so it’ll be nice to have some pleasurable fiction to counteract all that grinding attrition!
Thanks @junglejim I didn’t mention it in the OP, but I read the first dozen or so pages of the ghost one, Slade House, and put it aside. I am no fan of ghost stories either and those initial pages did nothing to spur my interest in David Mitchell’s books.
I do like Anthony Beevor’s books, Stalingrad and Berlin especially. I started Crete but it didn’t seem to be as readable as S and B, so – like the Allies – I withdrew. I have just finshed Liddle Hart’s History Of The Second World War, which is a great overview, if a little dense in places with details of what divsion went where so on. Having interviewed many captured German generals post-war, Liddell Hart has quite a lot to say about, for example, German military response to particular Allied initiatives. It is a long book and, as you said, good to get back to fiction after all the attrition.
I confess I haven’t read any Liddell Hart, though I’ve hacked my way through most of Beevor & Hastings (who wasn’t quite as gung ho & blood crazed as I’d been led to believe).
My pal bought the new Beevor to have a topic for discussion with his Dad, so we decided to read it in parallel (a new exercise for me).
I’ve never read an attempt to cover the whole conflict before, so I’m intrigued as to if & when fatigue kicks in(!).
Liddle Hart is interesting because he writes as a military tactician as well as historian – between the wars he worked on tactics for tanks as a fast moving spearhead in front of infantry. The code name for it was Lighting. The German observers apparently took a lot of notes. Needless to say the British Army brass poo pooed it as a daft idea. He talks about it in his book.
I spent quite a while in Crete so I really enjoyed it. All his books are good. I’ve read most of them.
Has anyone mentioned Mitchell’s novel “Black Swan Green” yet?
It doesn’t seem to get as much love as his other books, but I really liked it.
BSG is a gorgeous book. I think it’s where I’d recommend anybody new to Mitchell to start.
A friend who read it, who grew up in a small village said it conjured up his own sense of childhood so uncannily, it was alarming & he had to take frequent breaks to ‘catch his breath’.
That’s quite a testament to good writing!
Black Swan Green is excellent, and probably the “easiest” read of all Mitchell’s books – though to be honest, his style is always highly readable, and never self-consciously “literary”. It’s a terrific coming-of-age / childhood novel, vividly evocative and with really engaging characters. A great place to start. Put it this way: after the great Iain Banks died, I was sorely in need of a new favourite writer. I warily tried “Cloud Atlas”, loved it, and now he’s one of my small list of writers whose books I pre-order in hardback as soon as I hear they’re forthcoming.
Sounds interesting. I’ll get one for the hols pile (already 3 feet high, Kindle not included). Where to start?
See above. And lockdown has played havoc with my Kindle backlog, as I only use it when I’m away from home (no more suitcase half-filled with books for holiday reading!) last time I looked, my Kindle “to read” “pile” consisted of 235 books. And rising. *sigh*
I think he’s great, quite possibly my favourite living British author. I wouldn’t be put off by ideas of him being too highbrow – he is extremely readable. Some of his books have a few mild experiments with structure, but you’re a long way away from chapter long stream of consciousness sentences or chopped up paragraphs of random words. And the whole “metanovel” thing is just a fancy way of saying that a minor character in one book might reappear in a larger role in another. I am guessing from the surname, for example, that one of the band members in the new one is in some way a descendant of the title character from The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet. I don’t suppose that Guardian writer would call the Marvel films a “metamovie” but it’s essentially the same thing.
I think the two you have are amongst his best, but I’m conscious of your parting shot that you don’t like SF or magic realism. He doesn’t operate in exactly those genres, but there is certainly a shared sense of…. imaginative freedom, especially in Cloud Atlas. A better starting point for you might be the very down to earth Black Swan Green mentioned above. If you get on with his prose and storytelling there you might be less likely to be turned off by the more fantastic elements (and they are only elements) of the other books.
On the wider topic of novels about rock bands, yeah, I had a little internal wince when I saw the subject of Utopia Avenue, especially as British music from the Sixties is maybe my least favourite genre of all (I’ll hand in my Afterword membership card on the way out). It’s not necessarily a lost cause though. There are genuinely good rock band novels out there – I especially recommend The Thrill Of It All by Joseph O’Connor, and Espedair Street by Iain Banks.
A few years ago I picked up “The Bone Clocks” on a whim. At the time it was potential holiday reading. I didn’t read it on that holiday but I did get round to it eventually and very much enjoyed it. I found that I was making time to read it which is a very good indicator. I recently came by a copy of “The Cloud Atlas” and fully intend to get on to that before too long.
Since you enjoyed The Bone Clocks, I think you’d enjoy Slade House, too – it’s effectively a side-shoot of The Bone Clocks. A terrific short self-contained novel, too.
I am very glad that you hung on to Cloud Atlas. It is one of the most enjoyable reads I have had in the past 20 years. I’ve enjoyed many of his books.
The Bone Clocks is a good point of comparison. It has a reputation for being “difficult” so I have approached It with the caution of a cat faced with a bowl of hot porridge.
David Mitchell is one of my favourite authors and I have read all his books, his best three being Cloud Atlas, JDZ, and The Bone Clocks.
What an imagination this man has, truly mind blowing.
I love the way he interlinks his books, with characters and descendants from previous novels. An exceptional writer.
I have read most of his books and recommend them all. Cloud Atlas is the best.
The film of Cloud Atlas has a bad rep but if you have read the book it is marvellous. If you haven’t read the novel it would be tough to follow. Much like the recent film of The Goldfinch.
When I heard that they were going to make a film of “Cloud Atlas”, I thought “That brilliant book is unfilmable. This is going to be a complete turkey. This is going to be ‘Ishtar’ or ‘Sex Lives of the Potato Men”.
And eventually I saw the film, and it was actually pretty good. So hats off to the Wachowski siblings – they filmed the unfilmable!
Thanks again for all the responses. It looks like Cloud Atlas is the next into the starting gates Chez Pajp.
I got the Bone Clocks as a birthday present a couple of years ago and I didn’t know anything about him. It is brilliant, I got completely absorbed in it, re-reading lines and chapters over again. Have since read Cloud Atlas which is amazing and mind boggling how he put it together. Slade House is much shorter but very eerie, sad and moving. There is a bit of supernature/ Sci Fi in the books but don’t let that put you off. He’s a big music fan and that really comes through as well.
A positive review from The Quietus, here https://thequietus.com/articles/28604-utopia-avenue-david-mitchell-review