I recently started reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Fucking excellent. With every book - from Ghostwritten to Number9Dream to this one, he grows in stature and range (Number9Dream, being much more ambitions than Ghostwritten, lost a bit in cohesion. This book seems to combine the best of them both).
There are still bits in the book which feel contrived, inner voices which don’t quite ring true, but this can be excused on several levels: firstly because, in true Mitchellesque style, the book is a whole series of interlinked writings, not by the author of the book but by his main characters. Any inadequacies of language and thought are hence devolved to the characters. And secondly, because it’s such a cracking good tale (or rather a necklace of tales) that I really couldn’t give a shit if he slips up here and there.
Random quote from my current page (170):
Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.
Really looking forward to the rest of this and all his future novels. If this one doesn’t get the Booker (the last one was shortlisted) I’m sure he’ll clinch it within the next ten years.
I totally agree with you a worthy future Booker winner.
I read Mitchell’s works in the wrong order. First N9D then Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas as soon as it hit the shops. What I find so admirable about his work is that he finds the voices of his characters and then invents their own idiosyncracies, which come up time and time again.