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    James Wood on David Mitchell

    I'm a David Mitchell fan. I've enjoyed all of his novels. Cloud Atlas is wonderfully accomplished and the ending of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet I found very moving. I've come to think, though, that he doesn't have anything much to say. Imagine my self-congratulation when I came across an eminent critic who has the same view
    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/soul-cycle
    I'm not sure that having nothing to say should inhibit anyone from making art, but aren't Mitchell's works promoted as being quite profound?
    Anyway, whatever, The Bone Clocks is next up on my Kindle and I'm looking forward to reading it.

    #2
    James Wood on David Mitchell

    Yes, James Wood is dead on there isn't he. Mitchell's a product of 1980s 'postmodernist' hubris in fiction and academia, and the trouble with that stuff was that it was really, really stupid. He's probably the only writer I've noticed calling himself a postmodernist, actually; the bigger players who had the term thrown at them (Pynchon, Carter, Gaddis) rejected it, like goths.

    The word's pretty much meaningless in fiction, though, used to refer to storytelling techniques that were prevalent before, during and after modernism. It gave some people the confidence to write entertainments that act like they're deep but aren't (which is the kind of thing postmodernist disciples thought was really deep). That's Mitchell's style, which is a shame cause he's a brilliant prose storyteller. Cloud Atlas is a rattling good read until you get the sinking realisation there's nothing tying it together and think, "fuck off, David".

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      #3
      James Wood on David Mitchell

      I'm jumping on the bandwagon here as well. He writes well and his books are easy to read but Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten have amazing moments but don't hang together as a whole. I think the 1000 autumns is a step above other things he's written but I'm not too sure how it really compares to other historical fiction.

      On a side note, I find it weird that Hatchards splits their main fiction section into Fiction and Historical Fiction. Is it really a genre?

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        #4
        James Wood on David Mitchell

        There's certainly a lot of it about.

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          #5
          James Wood on David Mitchell

          I had similar reservations about Cloud Atlas to most here, but I was intrigued enough by early reviews and hype to give the Bone Clocks a go and rattled straight through it over the last couple of evenings. I really enjoyed it for the most part. I'll avoid any sort of spoilers for now but i thought it had some issues - when the plot unfolds and everything is laid on the table (you'll know this bit when you get to it), it does, frankly, get rather silly for a bit. There were other times where his exposition gets a bit clunky, or the voice of his characters falls a bit flat.

          That said, I thought the closing segment was particularly good (somewhat in the vein of McCarthy's The Road), and rescues the whole thing. And there was a great deal to enjoy along the way too.

          (possibly tedious side question - will it win the booker? i dunno, but it is current favourite and you can get 5-1 on it. which isnt huge but is still tempting me a little, which you can take to indicate that i do think it's a pretty good read)

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            #6
            James Wood on David Mitchell

            Shows what I know, didnt make the shortlist.

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              #7
              James Wood on David Mitchell

              I'm not sure that having nothing to say should inhibit anyone from making art, but aren't Mitchell's works promoted as being quite profound?
              I guess they may be by some people but profundity has nothing to do with why I loved Cloud Atlas. I loved its conscious echoes of Calvino in what was otherwise mainly a collection of short stories.

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                #8
                James Wood on David Mitchell

                Just finished The Bone Clocks. Ever wondered what would happen if Martin Amis were introduced as an unwitting agent in a fantasy adventure story about a centuries-spanning battle between good and evil semi-immortals? If the answer is yes, here's the book to satisfy that curiosity. That's only the middle section of the novel, though. You also get a surely deliberately ham-fisted pastiche of Young Adult fiction set in the early 80s and which includes way too many pop culture references, a Riot Club-like satire of the offspring of the super-rich at play, with nods to Dorian Gray, and then a portrait of a middle-aged war correspondent torn between duty to family and the thrills of reporting on the House that the Neo-Libs Built in Iraq. But that's only the build-up to a section that employs the tropes and settings of CGI fantasy films such as Underworld and a climactic John Wyndham pastiche.
                The first section apart, I enjoyed it a lot but it is bonkers. I can see that Mitchell is trying to inhabit the spirit of various genres in the same way his characters hop from body to body, but to what end I'm not sure.

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                  #9
                  James Wood on David Mitchell

                  Haddock wrote: Just finished The Bone Clocks...

                  The first section apart, I enjoyed it a lot but it is bonkers. I can see that Mitchell is trying to inhabit the spirit of various genres in the same way his characters hop from body to body, but to what end I'm not sure.
                  This, exactly. Really enjoyable and varied, interesting characters, humour, pathos and tension, but an overriding and unavoidable 'huh?' as to the overall point.

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                    #10
                    James Wood on David Mitchell

                    I've not read it yet, so probably shouldn't comment. And asking this might mark me as a cultural philistine...

                    But is there a real problem with the overall point of a book being an enjoyable and varied read with interesting characters, and humour, pathos and tension?

                    Does it need to be more than that?

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                      #11
                      James Wood on David Mitchell

                      La Lanterne Rouge wrote: I've not read it yet, so probably shouldn't comment. And asking this might mark me as a cultural philistine...

                      But is there a real problem with the overall point of a book being an enjoyable and varied read with interesting characters, and humour, pathos and tension?

                      Does it need to be more than that?
                      No, but how about the following from a profile in the New York Times:

                      Mitchell’s writing has been compared with that of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Twain, Sterne, Joyce, Nabokov, Pynchon, Salinger, Chandler, DeLillo, Murakami, William Gibson and Ursula K. LeGuin

                      I really do enjoy Mitchell's works but with the best will in the world, I can't see how he belongs in that company.

                      Ok, Gibson, maybe.

                      I see Murakami's missed out again today on the Nobel Prize for Literature. Graham Greene was probably the previous novelist who was so continually touted for the prize but who always failed to win it. In Greene's case, the rumour was that he'd had an affair with the wife of the prize committee chairman. Murakami's famously happily married so I wonder what their objection is. Too much of a bestseller?

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