Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels": Audiobook Review

"Not the children's book you think"

Where does Gulliver's Travels: A Signature Performance by David Hyde Pierce rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Near top tier. Excellent choice of narrator. David Hyde Pierce is perfectly cast and poised.

What did you like best about this story?

The upending of the first part is familiar: big meets small. Then small meets big. But the latter parts, where the mind is inflated into the arbiter of all, and then the body prolonged beyond endurance, speak better to Swift's legacy, for these issues remain relevant today.

Which scene was your favorite?

The last section with the inversion of horses as dominating humans is coruscating. It's cutting satire and it stings deeply. All the same, Jonathan Swift's compassion mixed with his disgust for human cruelty and animal dignity resonates, in ways we may me recognize more than three hundred years ago for his audience, at least those tuned into sentient creatures.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I did snicker. While the Laputan third part was less interesting than I recall from high school (imagine this book being assigned in most places now, given its NSFW content and offending sensibilities couched in a courtly high style few perhaps can now appreciate), it held up despite this slow spot, for the novel from then on reaches its horrifying climaxes.

Any additional comments?

As above lauded, the pairing of Pierce and Swift is praised. The actor brings out the wit and the pain in the pages, and he renders the difficult registers of some of the high-flown rhetoric of which Swift's a master into entertaining adventure and instructive warnings of human follies. The messages of this often diminished (!) tale remain lively and surprisingly applicable, in life-extension and in animal rights as well as servitude and inequality, today. (Audible 11/7/16)

David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks: Audiobook Review

Overall

Performance

Story

""I've seen the future, and it's hungry""

Would you consider the audio edition of The Bone Clocks to be better than the print version?

Yes, having read the novel first. The characters come alive and the prose sharpens. The plot is clearer to understand, too.

Who was your favorite character and why?

I liked Hugo Lamb. Not to spoil anything, but he bore a difficult role in the storyline. Harder to cheer him on, but his choices are understandable and add depth to the impact overall.

Which scene was your favorite?

Hard to pick, but the last chapter with the Irish encounters appealed. The accents were a nice change from the predominantly English ones and the setting deepens as it's set where the author has chosen to make his home, away from his own island.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The scenes between Hugo and Holly are very human. Despite their differences in class and outlook, their attraction softens the harsher edges of the story, and we need to see these characters in a vulnerable predicament. This also sets up some key themes later on.

Any additional comments?

This book is imperfect, but hearing it, after you read it, is recommended. David Mitchell is a great storyteller and the performances of all six readers keep you engaged. Not a book to be heard in the background. I listened to this late each night, and this enabled full attention...

(Audible 11/21/16)

Geraldine Brooks' "Year of Wonders": Audiobook Review

Overall

Performance

Story

"Another Journal of the Plague Year"

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The epilogue could have been expanded into a sequel.

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

How a Derbyshire village (based on a real one) chose to quarantine itself in 1665-6. Certainly a fascinating idea, as Geraldine Brooks mentioned in her afterword. Full of dramatic potential. The herbal lore and midwifery showed her research come alive. But the plot failed too often to grip my attention. Characters did undergo change, but the daily elements were somehow less vivid despite the descriptions of the plague and the violence that ensued. It did not immerse me into the experiences as much as a better novelist could have achieved.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

Her soft voice for the protagonist was unable to convey in male characters the range of emotions and timbre necessary. While the tone grew on me for the main character, it could not capture the others in the village sufficiently, in a sing-song muted register throughout.

Could you see Year of Wonders being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

It could be a movie. Perhaps with Benedict Cumberbatch as the reverend, and Emma Stone as Anna Frith.

Any additional comments?

To her credit, Brooks summons the phrasing of mid-17c British diction well. The book does feel genuine in the rhetorical and tonal choices she makes. Maybe it'd work better on paper.

Jorge Luis Borges' "Professor Borges": Book Review

These 25 lectures from 1966, editors Martin Arias and Martin Hadis confess in their introduction, defied easy transcription. For they were taken from tapes (now erased) by students in Jorge Luis Borges' fortieth term of teaching English literature at the University of Buenos Aires. The garbled nature of the names and verses set down, especially in the Old English dominating the first half of the course, must have challenged both the Spanish-speaking audiences and the scholars searching sources. Borges, nearly blind, knew these texts intimately. Amazing to think that he lectured mostly from memory, and that quality, so memorialized in his fiction as well as his criticism, informs this.

The talks themselves vary in length, perhaps due to whomever wrote them down. The classes appear oddly tilted. For after half a dozen sessions with very in-depth coverage of the Anglo-Saxon era, we jump from the eleventh to the eighteenth century.  You get a look at Samuel Johnson, then it's off for Blake, Coleridge, Carlyle, Dickens, Browning, Rossetti, lots of William Morris, and R.L. Stevenson.

Therefore, the Argentine audience must have come away with an intimate if skewed examination of key authors. The idiosyncratic nature of the course, as in the latter lessons when students recite portions of Morris' poetry, must have made the presentations come alive. One wishes the tapes were extant, but this anthology compiles what Borges was like in the classroom, an aspect we lack otherwise much record of. Despite some typos, this is a useful compilation. The footnotes are extensive and helpful. And even experienced students of the literature may pick up some factoids.

For me, I forgot that Beowulf comes from the typical Norse phrasing for "bee+wolf," or bear. A simple reminder, but one many professors never mention. Learning how Dr. Johnson hoisted and threw a folio volume at a bookseller, with Borges' wry aside that such a tome was indeed difficult to toss, makes the lexicographer's orneriness come alive. And realizing that such disparate texts as Morris' "The Earthly Paradise" and Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" have in common the silence of respectively Chaucer and Shakespeare due to their eminence reminds us of Borges' vast knowledge. (Amazon US 12/3/16)

"The freedom to be left alone"

Reminded by my friend who found a typically endless rant by this addled pantheist during research at the Huntington, I pulled my copy of Porius: A Novel of the Dark Ages off my shelf and picked up somewhere near the two-hundred page mark I'd left off a while back. For this meandering narrative takes eight days in late October, the year 499, and stretches it into a reading experience demanding weeks, at least. John Cowper Powys remains as Morine Krissdottir's Descents of Memory (2008, reviewed by me) attests a difficult, elusive figure to grasp and not always an appealing one to like.

I suppose I was one of the few who checked that bio out of the library never having read the subject. I'd see at the old Bodhi Tree used bookstore on Melrose a big paperback of his earlier A Glastonbury Romance but the silly names within (a deal-breaker for me with Dickens as well as nearly all fantasy save that of the one linguist who knew of what he invented, J.R.R. Tolkien) discouraged me from it. (I have since learned that JCP changed names to protect himself against lawsuits by real Glastonburians.) The Grail and the Arthurian corpus never excited me in grad school, although I did like Excalibur. John Boorman considered filming this novel, fittingly. And, come to think of it, I did not mind Malory's realms at all. But I atavistically favor the Celt and the pagan, the resisters to Saxon rule and Catholic imposition, more than I do magic-kal conjuring, dodgy cant, fiery horses or swords.

At least in my fiction. But finding two years ago David Goodway's Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow (2006; reviewed by me) revealed what Krissdottir's study had not: the promise of Portius as a hold-all for a lot of my own pet pursuits. Anti-statist/ anti-capitalist libertarianism, Celtic lore, British origins, Welsh resistance, and Joycean immersion. Goodway had I think found some key connections. He compared what Kevin Birmingham has more recently credited as Joyce's "philosophical anarchism" to Powys' retreat from any political fray (which caused differences with his friend Emma Goldman). He assumed that inevitably that freer outlook would prevail--but not for a very long time.

And as for liberation, so far in my return to the 1951 tome, the restoration of a new Golden Age surfaced. The freedom to be left alone, Myrddin Wyllt surmises, is to be desired. No priests, no emperors, no governors, no druids even. This "pagan" yearning, as with Powys and so now, may be quixotic. Where would I be without a dentist (even if my plan fails to cover my teeth; don't get me started on my "vision plan;" Cal Grants and scholarships to cover college, or the ability to stay afloat post-"recession" if not for some nanny state)? Few of us grew up in the comfort afforded the gentrified class of Powys, a vicar's son and a Cantabrigian. Most of us coddled in this world, 1616 years after Merlin, need help to live, not in the glade, but in a toxic megapolis that consumes our soul.

Still, this odd fictional volume, standing by the voluminous epics of Glastonbury and its less-heralded successor Owen Glendower which I've ordered and half keep asking myself why, poses a nagging question that left-libertarians, cranks such as JCP, and misfits like me keep pursuing. Why are some of us born discontented by the system we labor for and live under? Given many of this contingent are soft intellectuals like me rather than hardy folk of the soil like I presume my drizzly Connacht kin, what realistic chance do we have of proclaiming any self-sufficiency when surrounded as JCP was not, of his privileged choosing, once he claimed to inherit his Welsh corner and make himself its returned ruler? I suppose this "lordship" was not entirely in jest. We all bear our own inconsistencies.

Therefore, I will press on. After all, Powys' notion however unverifiable of an "ichthyosaurus-brain" recoverable by concentration as a proto-Jungian mind-memory, a collective guide and individual vision, appeals to me in a VR-sort of literary way (not sure about a real one). Lawrence Millman in The Atlantic admits: "One doesn't read Powys so much as enlist in him." Of Porius (and he wrote in 2000): "it is, I think, Powys's masterpiece. It calls to mind novels as diverse as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Finnegans Wake, and Alice in Wonderland. At times it reads like an extended study of what Powys called 'the three incomprehensibles': sex, religion, and nature. At other times it reads like a magical mystery extravaganza." That promise will keep me plodding along, as Millman in his Arctic.

P.S. Amber Paulen blogged back in '08 about this novel: "It gives me great pleasure not to be finished yet." I wonder how long it took her? Andrea Thompson, in for her a mercifully allotted "briefly noted" slot in The New Yorker, reminds us that over five hundred pages were cut from the original, restored in this 2007 edition. (He preferred little editing, and less as he aged, which can bedevil the most patient of his cult following.) Margaret Drabble (whose surname JCP could have used) begins her review in The Guardian: "The realm of John Cowper Powys is dangerous. The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end. There is always another book to discover, another work to reread. Like Tolkien, Powys has invented another country, densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien's, but it is as compelling, and it has more air." In an undated online entry of what I assume is the original text, Kirkus Reviews sums it up: "Among those who enjoyed the author's previous novels in this historical sequence, there may be some who will find themselves at home in the midst of the tangled beliefs and superstitions of the Persians, the Romans, the Greeks, and the Druids with which these early Welshmen spiced their Christianity. But others will find the obscurities of both diction and dogma almost impenetrable." For the willing bold few, seek ye here .

Alan Moore's "Jerusalem": Book Review

Renowned for his graphic narratives, Alan Moore creates this massive work of prose fiction, rivaling War and Peace in length and Ulysses in ambition. While not his first novel, it continues themes begun two decades ago in Voice of the Fire. In twelve deft chapters, Fire dramatized the evolution, in dazzling linguistic and intricate historical terms, of Moore's native Northampton. Jerusalem inflates this setting even as it narrows it down to a few blocks of the once-bustling Boroughs, which exist in a "simultaneous eternity" as developers build and then tear down this English city's core. Its working class dwellers find not an afterlife so much as a recurring existence, within a "trans-temporal chess game."

Defying the span of a brief review or facile summation, Alan Moore's evocation of his hometown sustains the meticulous composition of his graphic excursions. Lacking the brevity of a speech bubble or the compact limits of a comic-book format, Jerusalem challenges any reader's attention. Heady passages unfurl, as many of those taken up into the elevated realm of Mansoul, towering over the Boroughs (yet less apparent to those below still living) enter under the influence of Bedlam Jennies or Puck's Hats, fungal concoctions inviting comparisons to "eating fairies," amid a paranormal panorama of undines, Salamanders, and an Ultraduct. Those in this vortex may travel, in one case surpassing H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, to witness beyond "the death of day." Moore's inventive powers accelerate here, but they might bewilder, especially in the middle sections of this triple-decker tale which is a Victorian trope renewed. Rather than faltering, pressing on unveils to one’s mind many wonders.

Facing this other-world, two intermarried families comprise the central characters which Mansoul invites or repels. The Warrens arrive first. Siblings artist Alma and laborer Mick introduce us, via the largely omniscient narrator's voice, to their scrappy surroundings, after demolition of its imperial-era landmarks. Jerusalem then ambles back a century and a half, when Ern worked on London's St. Paul's. Mick, Alma and Ern receive eerie revelations from angels and Builders. Moore gradually reveals the reason for these ancient architects, and he populates the story-line with more Warrens and Vernells, who also have their own close encounters with those who hover about Mansoul. Named after John Bunyan's {Pilgrim's Progress}, "it was the very seat of war." Here, clashes summon demons.

Mansoul, made of "congealed dreams and memories," stands for Moore's version of space-time itself. "Think of your life as being like a book, a solid thing where the last line's already written while you're starting the first page. Your consciousness progresses through the narrative from its beginning to its end, and you become caught up in the illusion of events unfolding and time going by as these things are experienced by the characters within the drama." This scene's shifty teller boasts a lineage back to the apocryphal Book of Tobit. He tells Mick, swept up on a memorable "Sam O'Day ride" through the dark and the light as "an astral toddler," how "life and death" work, with admirable if surprising clarity. 

Sam continues: "In reality, however, all the words that shape the tale are fixed upon the page, the pages bound in their unvarying order." In the mind of their reader, progress occurs, but this remains an illusion. Instead, the book of life can be read over and over. So, every day "and every deed's eternal." Sam urges on his transported charge a motto Moore shares: "Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally."  Jerusalem, for Moore, represents more than his fantastic plot. It stands for a credo, one that in our world refusing conventional belief may survive past piety or doubt.

For, as an eighth-century monk learns, when he tries to center Northampton at the exact crossroads of England, hauling a stone from the real Jerusalem all the way to St. Gregory's Church, mysticism can tempt earthly calculations and thwart clerical confidences. The uncanny interactions the Warrens and the Vernells endure closer to the present (having taken ten years for Moore to write, most of this action stops in 2006) echo. A freed slave from America, the son of immigrants from post-war Sierra Leone, Ern's demented son, Buffalo Bill, Oliver Cromwell, the author of "Amazing Grace" and the members of the band Bauhaus fill the parade of figures who pass through or set up home as mortals in Northampton. What connects them, surmises Moore, is a gothic, altered, visionary sense. 

Their exchanges upend conventions. Moore favors his own detached telling more than the chronologically faithful linguistic ventriloquism of dialects and vocabularies that kindled Voice of the Fire, but some chapters in this one-volume trilogy adapt their own styles. Notably, a play starring Bunyan, the mad poet of nature John Clare, James Joyce's daughter and psychiatric patient Lucia, her friend Samuel Beckett, St. Thomas Becket, a "half-caste woman" elsewhere appearing as Marla Stiles and a married couple stirring up the Warren-Vernell mix demonstrates Moore's knack. He creates a Beckettian drama even as he satirizes its content, improving on its form as he links it to local history. 

And, as with the analogy that other Sam shows, characters repeat and return throughout this unvarying book's order. It's not all gloom. Humor surfaces, whether poking fun at Alma's scarecrow appearance, the simply wrong name of Newlife granted a hideous corporate block, or an everyday night down the pub. Hapless Ben Parritt "looked round appraisingly at the establishment's half-dozen other clients, motionless upon their stools like ugly novelty-set chessmen, sidelined and morose."

Moore varies approaches, when he lets one character late on burst into rhyme, or earlier when Lucia's monologue descends into a verbal morass of Finnegans Wake, fifty daunting pages mirroring the opening of Fire, when Moore reduced the consciousness of a Neolithic boy to 4000 stunted words. Here, Moore opens up rather than contracts his expressions; that contrast will weary some while exciting many. A reader may wish to pause, and let this epic find its rhythms within oneself. 

Moore never seems to flag in this telling. One part begins with Bob Goldman's gumshoe parody before settling into a more Moore-ish pace. But this may be an inevitable capitulation to the weight of the imaginative universe built here that threatens to crush any single inhabitant's utterances or ego. 

In this gigantic production, Moore avoids cliché, he regales us with a local chronicle demanding immersion into its erudition and he plays fairly with expectations. How this new Jerusalem ends will be discovered by the dogged, but the conclusion, circling back to the invitation offered Mick by Alma, satisfies and stuns. Having announced retirement from the graphic arena, in this printed spectacle, Moore dazzles. (Amazon US 9-13-16)

David Mitchell's "Slade House": Book Review

The title gives it away. A narrow alley near the Fox and Hounds pub opens into Slade House. Here, the last Saturday of October, every nine years, a visitor is beckoned in. What a young violinist, a police inspector, a pudgy college student, and her journalist sister will find comprises a companion piece to the mysterious forces swirling around the humans gathered up into David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks.

Published a year ago, that ambitious novel set in the recent past and near future tracked supernatural entries into everyday British life. Desperate to sustain immortality, a cabal lured a few chosen mortals into what this sequel of sorts explains as "their life-support machine, but it's powered by souls". Akin to a bearers of a rare blood type, those selected enter a "Theatre of the Mind" where their "birth-bodies" encounter in Slade House their dreams come true.

Avoiding spoilers makes an extended review difficult. However, as I have read all of Mitchell's novels, I assure you that familiar elements return. In easygoing style, Mitchell catches the rhythms and diction of his English narrators engagingly. Drawn from 1979 to 2015, tellers speckle pop song titles, then-current events, and trends into their respective chapters. As with all of his fiction, Mitchell sprinkles references to his past work. Here, nearly all of them point to The Bone Clocks, logically.

That novel, as my PopMatters review "I've Seen the Future and It's Hungry"noted, constructed a complicated realm of spectral intervention. Familiarity, therefore, with the Shaded Way, Dusk and the Blank Sea, the Engifted, the Operandi, and Horologists will be necessary to fully follow action here. Additionally, Mitchell expands his concepts of the Lacuna and orisons in Slade House.

The orison, as defined, gives readers a notion of the mechanism Mitchell inserts into the tales. It is a "live, 3D, stage set, projected by the Lacuna in time". This makes more sense in context, but for readers of some of Mitchell's earlier novels, however spatially and chronologically sprawling they may be, the liminal goings-on in The Bone Clocks paled slightly compared to the intricate, apocalyptic adventures of Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, and Cloud Atlas. Rather than taking on a new genre, refining the matter-of-fact coming-of-age semi-autobiographical chronicle of Black Swan Green, or the historical epic of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Mitchell for the first time in his oeuvre gives us a story that connects directly, with allowance for a few tangents and loose ends, to its previous text.

Rumor has it that Mitchell began this novel as a series of tweets. By far the briefest of his novels, this takes only five chapters, building upon each other in his typical format, to build a narrative. The first-person narrators, in reliable fashion, speak to us in confidential terms, common to Mitchell’s strategy. They prove engaging, and their intimacy encourages readers to trust in them.

Their congenial voices, furthermore, gain their power over us as readers puzzle out the construction of their common situation. Some readers, like myself, may be slower to catch on, but this only enhances the enjoyment, and the emotional impact, of their paranormal predicaments. All the same, Mitchell here falls into his own small trap. He captures well the voices of his characters, but the stage upon which they are placed can overshadow their actions. 

That is, as with the predecessor to Slade House, the creaky construction of a novel that enters the well-trodden territory of the Gothic, the spirit-plagued, and the occult mystery can loom so high that the human fates become subsumed into a secondary world that requires its own explanations. As with much speculative fiction, the added effort Mitchell must take on as he tries to explain his blueprints beyond also blurs the sharpness of those he draws from among us, everyday people. He downplays why his narrators are chosen to enter the haunted House, and this disappoints. As the novel builds to its climax, the same slight letdown common now to audiences of many entertainments returns. We realize that this is part of a longer series to come.

Slade House races along, but on Bone Clocks' familiar ground. Mitchell grants more space to ghosts. This fits into that niche best. The author likes this genre, and his tone—as always in his previous fiction-- can win us over. There remains a steady delight in letting Mitchell’s imagination carry one along over hundreds of pages without us even noticing the time. I read Slade House with the same pleasure. Still, I ended it with the same frustration.

For it all stops too suddenly, with to me an obvious nod to its own sequel. While I enjoy Mitchell's novels, I keep having the nagging sense that, with his talent, he could do more with it to dazzle us than he has already. I feel this more strongly, after finishing Slade House. (Amazon US 10-27-15)

[Expanded for my PopMatters 10-28-15 review.]

George Eliot's "Middlemarch": Audiobook review

I am reviewing Juliet Stevenson's reading of the entire book, over thirty hours. She captures the nuances of expression in George Eliot's ruminating, satiric, painful, and idealistic visions as filtered through an omniscient narrator who creates a chronicle of this small English town's families. You get, this being a high-Victorian novel about the years just before the Queen ascended her throne, an immersion into the gentry. The poor tend to be backdrops, and the goings on of a doctor, a banker, a scholar, and their wives comprise the stories.

My favorite character is Causabon, who attracts Dorothea early on. Their relationship is fraught with sadness as well as dreams. Eliot pins down the lure of learned lore in an unforgettable way, even as she lets us see the folly of the grand scheme the couple follow.

This is one of the most famous novels in English, so the summaries of the plotlines and interspersed chapters examining the protagonists can be found easily. Stevenson captures the varied accents, male and female, deftly. A woman's voice open to emotion but steeled by intellect fits Eliot's own outlook well. This novel, true to triple-decker form does go on, and modern readers may need more patience than that of audiences long ago for such steady attention to the intricate observations Eliot conveys.

Hearing this, one gets caught up in the flow. The immense detail may or may not be lost on a listener rather than a reader. The various languages of the quotes opening each chapter are communicated faithfully and Stevenson and Eliot match each other in terms of the tone this novel takes, sometimes arch, sometimes sensitive, sometimes impassioned. It's a lot to follow.

Having studied this novel decades ago in college and then always meaning to return to it, I found this on audio a pleasant experience. No spoilers, but highlights are three deaths that play crucial roles here. All captured with wheezes, faltering voices, and growing weightiness well by Stevenson. Now, it is her voice I will hear in these pages if I see them again. (Amazon US 6-20-15 + Audible)

Keith Roberts' "Pavane": Book Review

Having listened to this in the Neil Gaiman Presents audiobook read by Steven Crossley, I liked the narrator's ability to convey the Dorset voices--Gaiman notes that the speaker himself hails from this corner of England. The regional focus of this around Purbeck heightens the intimacy of the stories, as they unfold in an alternative realm ca. 1968 to 1985, where the Reformation was defeated, and the Catholic Church holds sway in heavy-handed rule over a largely unchanged population still riding horses, but having rail, and limited electrical experiments, hidden from the masses.

The first story "Lady Margaret" depicts the rail, with details of the machinery, a steam-punk predecessor perhaps, this having been written in 1966. Keith Roberts integrates a tale of unrequited love, and then hooks this into later installments in the "stately dance" of the "pavane" as it unfolds leisurely over a few generations of the Strange family. I liked "The Signaller" the most, as this cohered, more or less, about the career of a boy who becomes a semaphore transmitter, the way that coded messages are sent all over the papal lands. A novel take on how without radio or telegraph, information might have been relayed from afar. That story includes a dreamlike sequence, and we start to learn about the sign of the crab. This is hinted at in "The White Boat," a girl's fascination with that vessel, and a enigmatic tale at least as heard in the audio. I found it mysterious, having only the spoken words to go on. If I had read it in print, it might have been clearer, but I favor the ambiguity.

Impending dangers clarify with "Brother John." This shows an inquisition, under "The Office of Spiritual Welfare," suppressing witches, pagans, and all who resist Rome. It starts off well, with appropriately sinister tones as the tortures crush many innocents. But this part ends as the cruelty drives that monk to revolt against this cruelty. This chapter takes a long time to evolve into what becomes a rebellion against Catholicism by the local nobility and peasants. It's a rousing martial set-up, but the narrative starts to ramble, and this tendency increases with "Lords and Ladies" and "Corfe Gate" where more machinations entangle the Purbeck Stranges and the anti-papists. I found myself drifting from these scenarios. Yet Lady Eleanor's peevishness and bravery complicate her and Crossley expresses this well. Also, battle scenes are well described and Roberts seems to relish them. The in-between revelations, on the other hand, began to move slower, making it gruff and moody.

Some critique the inclusion of pagan elements, and the replacement of Baldur and the old gods by Christ is frequently discussed by characters, if away from the ears of the clerics. But these underlying cultural foundations for me enriched the agrarian and sustained context. They add to "The Signallers" a haunting magical passage. So did one aspect I have not found many readers notice: Aqua Sulis is used for Bath, and old names like Londinium and Durnovaria. This conservatism slows progress too, even as I wondered how if Gaelic and Welsh survived on the island, (along with Latin, Norman French, Middle and Modern English) what "Celtic" was and where that persisted post-1500 or so. Roberts as in any alternative history needs not explain every bit to the nth degree, on the other hand.

The "Coda" as many observe is tacked on too rapidly, and it either needed more elaboration, or another way the information could have been conveyed, as a lot is packed into a few sentences about what happens in the aftermath of the revolts. It is lyrical and passionate, if briefly. Overall, this remains a memorable book. If I may come up with my own take, a "steam-monk" novel of invention. (1-10-15 to Amazon US)

The British Library's "London: A Literary Anthology": Book Review

Although the handsome cover and many familiar authors may tempt browsers to judge this compilation as a pleasant holiday gift or congenial night-table companion, the contents reveal a complex presentation. Some treat London as did Daniel Defoe, as "the greatest, the finest, the richest city in the world" but as many talented writers and artists gathered within concur, this megapolis has long stood for poverty, congestion, pollution, and degradation. From medieval poets John Lydgate and William Dunbar to current observers Benjamin Zephaniah and Zadie Smith, Londoners whether native or newcomers regard its vast crowds and tall towers with dread, dreariness, and delight.

Arranged thematically by Richard Fairman, thirteen chapters begin at dawn, moving into the reactions of those entering its sprawl for the first time, then exploring its mews and squares. "In dim-lit streets, war-tired people moved slowly/ like dark-coated bears in a snowy region." So recalls James Berry, as he views"Beginning in a City, 1948" from a Caribbean immigrant's perspective.

Although the weather requires both rich and poor to bundle up, beneath this comparison, differences endure. Contrasts between the high and low life have long fascinated visitors. Consider Charlotte Brontë's protagonist from her novel Villette: "I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and forever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?" This lure draws millions, over centuries, from all over. Amazing diversity endures, noted by William Blake as by Hanif Kureishi. London's narrow streets never seem to empty.

The febrile tension from crowds connects Hugh Walpole's story set on The Strand, Katherine Mansfield's depiction of "The Tiredness of Rosabel" as she comes home from work to climb four flights up to a humdrum night out of the rain, and Doris Lessing's excerpt from The Four-Gated City. This finds Martha out after dark, fearing exposure she risks passing through a red-light district on her way from Oxford Street to Bayswater Road, along Queensway towards Notting Hill. The drama of a pedestrian's passage from one district to another, subtle or dramatic, and the warren of diversions or temptations in dim side streets, recur in many of these sixty-six entries from nearly as many writers.

On first perusal, the lack of an introduction or any editorial context for the selections or authors puzzled me. It seemed a shortcoming. A small flaw is the near-absence of those who live away from the historic core of The City or the few miles near the north side of the Thames. Only Angela Carter's Wise Children speaks up for those beyond the south bank. But, the presentation of period illustrations and literary reflections, if attentively read, invites audiences to study dozens of reactions in pen and pastel to the domination of The City over one's own mental landscape. For those who have visited or who live in London, it will remind them of why many want to return there, or why some never will.

As Evelyn Waugh's satire sums it up: "all that succession and repetition of massed humanity...Those vile bodies..." A bitterness clouds many sights seen by those who record them honestly. Charles Dickens' Bleak House dramatizes a tale from a mother so poor she wishes her son had never survived his birth. Virginia Woolf's far-better off Mrs. Ambrose, in The Voyage Out, observes from Waterloo Bridge: "When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath."

Clad in rags or cradled in finery, people never stop arriving. Jewish, Australian, Scots, and Pakistani immigrants all find their voices in these pages. Israel Zangwill and Zadie Smith may have lived a century apart. But they agree in their stories that chaotic city streets spark tension. Classes must mix, and their failure to cope with relentless demands strains relationships, in passing or permanently.

Overcrowding and inequality, worsened by the weather and the conditions which made this city for many centuries one of the world's largest also generate disease and decay. Juxtaposed chapters on disgust, plagues and fires, wartime devastation, and apocalyptic depictions of the city's downfall remind readers of the reactions writers amass to London's perpetual pride, and how it tempts fate.

Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor brutally conveys how the plague dissolved family ties. Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Poison Belt" and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, as to doom, join Richard Jeffries' stoic description in his suitably titled portion from After London. Even less cataclysmic scenarios in The City show its force exacted upon nature. Dickens' Dombey and Son charts the immense digs that built the railroads, and if the holdouts of Stagg's Garden defy the iron horse, they may not last long.

On a thoroughfare half a century or more later, Amy Lowell at two in the morning imagines the results of a transformed London. "I stand in the window and watch the moon./ She is thin and lustreless,/ But I love her./ I know the moon,/ And this is an alien city." What has changed is constant light. Juxtaposed memorably, in the last chapter documenting London after dark, the photos and illustrations, many chosen well from the British Library's holdings, suggest a nuanced reaction to the coming of electricity. This transformed London from a few candlelit circles within foggy shadows.

"Electric lighting in the City" from The Graphic, April 1881, may cause you to beg to differ with Lowell from 1914. It shows walkers halted by the wonder of seeing what had long evaded sight. Complementing these engravings, another from the same publication evokes a supremely detailed "Bird's-eye view from a balloon" in May 1884. The attention to precision, over Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament next to the sweep of the Thames, astonishes the careful eye. The people and cabs are so far away they appear as dots, and this elevation, after all, removes one from the jostle, the smells, the unpredictability of whatever the streets bring the rich and the poor. Above, one sees only a city made beautiful, from so high up that clouds float down below, over the serpentine river.

The fact that these clouds emanate from factories does not detract, somehow, from their wonder. That too, may be what makes London a place that impels immigrants to remain as residents, and which fills those same streets and attractions as it has for hundreds of years, as a destination that compels.
(PopMatters + Amazon US 12-19-14)

John Gross (ed.) "The Oxford Book of Essays": Review

The range of these 140 inclusions by 120 authors is considerable, but the quality varies. Many precede the 19th century, so as a representation of the duration of this form, this is a useful compilation. John Gross confesses in his brief preface how he tried to keep this to complete selections, but the length of this format, especially for earlier writers, demanded some cutting. This editorial constraint also appears to have taken its toll on more recent essays, for many here are short, and one feels the potential of a particular essayist is not shown best by the essay chosen here.

That being said, a few hours browsing these contents reveals entertainment and instruction. William James' accurate fear of "The Ph.D. Octopus" in 1903 taking over higher education, Mark Twain's caustic challenge to divine providence in "Thoughts of God," Robert Graves' uneven and curiously assembled "The Case for Xanthippe," George Orwell's measured judgement as "Reflections on Gandhi," and H.L. Mencken's takedown of a Pennsylvania steel town in "The Libido for the Ugly" all kept my attention. There is a tilt against the mercies of the Almighty which can be discerned, but this appears within the context of modern critiques of God, if in the background. As some compensation, G.K. Chesterton gets two essays and Hilaire Belloc one, although none of these are on religion. Jeremy Taylor weighs in on God's charity, James Froude on Christianity, and Charles Dickens on the sad state of churches in the City of London, too, so any claims that these contents are biased against Christianity can be balanced accordingly.

Entries such as "Bad Poets" by Randall Jarrell, Jacques Barzun on English vs. German and French, and Maurice Richardson on pen nibs, indicative of the variety in this anthology, seem too brief to matter much. A musty air permeates much of this volume,  and more context on each author and the time the essay was written could have enlightened readers likely to be unfamiliar with many of the earlier writers. This is all rather Anglocentric, and as Gross is a literary historian specializing on the early modern period of British literature, this may be a natural bias. More Americans pop up later on, but one wonders if more international authors might have survived translation and merited inclusion. But ending this 1991 compilation with the Australian poet Clive James' review of Judith Krantz' "Princess Daisy" is a sly and surprising delight, easily one of the best in this collection. (Amazon US 12-18-14)

Patrick O'Donnell's "A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell": Review

While often classified as a postmodernist, David Mitchell's novels fit better into other categories. Patrick O'Donnell, in the first full-length study of all six of this English writer's innovative works to date, begins by considering cosmopolitan and anthropological contexts as better suited to this protean storyteller. His books tackle the complexity of how people approach mortality. These tales blur genres, leap across time and space, and dramatize disruption, individually and communally, as threat nears.

Mo Muntervary, an Irish nuclear engineer, observes in Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999): "Memories are their own descendants, masquerading as the ancestors of the present." Her comment reveals her creator's interest in quantum physics and relativity theory. Mitchell applies what O'Donnell labels as the tense of the "future anterior" as past events are linked to a possible future, "on which the past event depends for its significance".

This can be a difficult subject to explain. O'Donnell's study, aimed at an academic audience, focuses on temporal conditions to highlight Mitchell's contribution to current fiction. This critique, as with its sources, challenges easy explication.. Multiple perspectives and genres across the globe mix, while "both human connections and the brutal intransigency of events sporadically collide and conspire in time streaming toward what will have been". While the novels demand close attention, and while they often nonetheless prove more fluid and compelling than a scholarly representation of their contents may express, O'Donnell and Mitchell agree that the events they dramatize matter, far more than as entertainment. They articulate human predicaments, and they confront our planet's danger.

In the unpredictable island nation of monster quakes, sudden death, and mob reprisals, Number 9 Dream (2001) pays tribute to the Japan where Mitchell taught English for eight years in Hiroshima, and where he met his Japanese wife. He also pays homage to Haruki Murakami, for this unstable narrative layers disruptions across Tokyo, as encountered by a young man who may be at different moments or chapters in a James Bond-type of caper, an avatar's fantasy world, a manuscript, or a video game, to name only a few possibilities. As its title indicates, it floats about and jumps around.

Cloud Atlas (2004), Mitchell's best-known novel to date, wraps five dispersed stories, at first partially completed, around the core of a post-apocalyptic adventure set on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Then, Mitchell continues each interrupted account, concluding them in reverse order. O'Donnell relates the "character chains" which not only enrich the novel's formal innovation, but the 2012 film adaptation's own casting choices which tinker further, if fittingly, with Mitchell's fluid representations of characters who repeat in different guises over the centuries. Mitchell's subtexts of reincarnation and shape-shifting reoccur in nearly all of his novels. Pasts and futures shuffle. Narratives progress and regress. His human and post-human figures confront the depravities of capitalism, the constraints of conformity, and the notions of one's own society as the most civilized of all possible worlds.

While Black Swan Green (2006) certainly proves the most streamlined of his narrative models, it shares his scrutiny into the situations which oppress everyday people, nearer our own time. It is based loosely on some elements from Mitchell's own upbringing, for he and the protagonist were both aged thirteen in 1982, in suburban Worcestershire. Both stammer, both face divorce as their parents separate, both seek to fit into what appears an alien atmosphere, and both share a fascination with the onslaught of popular culture as experienced by ordinary men and women. Yet, this novel nonetheless resists any reduction to a straightforward coming-of-age saga or thinly disguised roman à clef.

Contrary to the treatment many give Mitchell's most accessible and apparently most ordinary novel, taking its events as a satisfying, straightforward recounting of a boy's jitters, O'Donnell finds elements recalling Austen, Dickens, and Joyce. Beneath a chronological depiction of thirteen months in a boy's maturation, the fairy-tale, initiation story, and the novel or manners appear. So do historical chronicle, fantasy touches, and hundreds of brand names, song titles, pop song lyrical snippets, books, and television programs from the early 1980s. O'Donnell places the adolescent narrator into this milieu, as his commodified and oppressive reality. Set as the Falklands War and late-Cold War NATO-Warsaw Pact tensions clouded even a lonely English schoolboy's perspective, this novel continues the pattern Mitchell has woven, one in which everyday people get tangled up in history.

As well as mystery, for as one young man had viewed "a row of screaming Russian dolls" in Tokyo, so another visitor to Japan finds himself, too, in another labyrinth, where possibilities overlap and crush. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob Van Zoet (2010) enlivens another familiar genre, that of the historical epic. O'Donnell moves beyond the critical reactions which place this long tale, set in 1799 in Nagasaki harbor as a Dutch trader tries to open up the mainland to trade, within a "stereoscopic" overlay of Asian and Western meetings, or as a post-feminist take on the Orientalist trope of an eager white man falling in love with a, coy, exotic woman. Instead, the personal and the political trip up progress. Translation garbles commercial and intimate exchanges. The lust for profit and the rush for conquest play off against confounding Japanese attempts to manipulate European delegations. Road trips, melodrama, gothic, science fiction, and romance all merge and drift apart in this vast story.

The same ingredients in The Bone Clocks (2014; see my review for PopMatters 16 Sept. 2014) swirl across six decades in the life of another English narrator from the 1980s on, as Holly Sykes finds surprises within mundane circumstances. O'Donnell again shows how Mitchell makes time elastic. In his latest novel, he dramatizes the difficulty of translating concepts, emotions, and points-of-view from one person's perspective into another. Mitchell adds a supernatural dimension. Here, he takes up religious debates, depictions of the sociology of power, late twentieth-century pop culture as trends come and go. He predicts how (a minor but relevant aspect which merited more detail in O'Donnell's critical analysis) reading audiences and literary recognition shift attentions in our own near-future.

Other critics, not cited by O'Donnell in his positive appraisal of Mitchell's fiction, regard some of the writer's efforts as not paying off in their conclusions. His novels all keep a reader turning their pages, they remain honest in their narrative sleight-of-hand, and they offer convincingly drawn protagonists. Yet, some readers and critics shut Mitchell's novels with a sensation of let-down, as if after all the dazzling legerdemain, the magical tricks fail to linger after the performance has ended. O'Donnell diligently finds in each novel the connections which link characters and events across them all (one of the best reasons to read them all in order, I advise) in subtle and playful ways. But if O'Donnell had addressed reader reception by those of us in Mitchell's audience who continue to open each of his works with hope but close them with a nagging feeling that an added effort could be made by their author, this consideration would have strengthened what is an understandable if telling weakness in this work of literary criticism. O'Donnell offers only praise for David Mitchell's diverse set of novels.

Granted, this is not to detract from a considerable achievement. Given he is only forty-five, Mitchell may likely better his present success as an author respected by critics and welcomed on the bestseller lists by readers worldwide. He continues as one of the most talented storytellers and most rewarding fabulists in contemporary fiction. The Bone Clocks handles a very intricate narrative with verve. Mitchell enlivens Holly, telling her life's story, one which for the first time in a Mitchell novel takes precedence throughout the narrative as a female presence. (Typically, this novel's cast of characters and settings overlaps, as we see Mo Muntervary reappear in her Irish home turf, fifteen years after her debut in Mitchell's fiction.) Colliding with what begins the novel (shortly after Black Swan Green) as Holly's daily routine, the clash of the Horologists and Anchorites as they wrestle over "decanting" immortality sharpens Mitchell's depiction of what may be our species' inability to match a utopian concept to a human set of weaknesses, given doubt, lust, temptation, and the profit motive.

Mitchell regards impermanence as the condition in which men and women must endure. He can present this with detachment, another reason some critics and readers get uneasy with his stance. Time, topography, and plot accumulate. They force readers to realize their implicated guilt along with that of characters like us, but as if a few decades later. The plight of the planet, weakened by ecological decay and predatory commercial, political, and social practices we encourage, implicates audiences into Mitchell's dire warnings. Crucial characters cannot be written off as escapist or as alarmist. They face an evil era. While it is close in time to ours, it is one we wish to fend off forever.

Summing up Mitchell's ambitions, O'Donnell charts patterns in six novels which may serve as models of how we can adapt to globalizing circumstances. Individually and collectively, the vexing question of how our lives may continue impels the risks Mitchell takes in each protean narrative. These demonstrate the "clearest sign of his imaginative investment in having a future" we want to create. 
(PopMatters 1-6-15; 1-8-15 Amazon US)

David Mitchell's "The Bone Clocks": Book Review

Gaining front-page coverage in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and the feature review in The New Yorker, this much-anticipated novel delivers a sprawling, exciting, otherworldly epic. However, to keep my own reactions fresh, I have not read any of these reviews before writing mine. I preferred to savor this novel myself, for over the past year I've enjoyed each of David Mitchell's five fictional tales to date. But immensely satisfying as they are, most nag me a little.

Given Mitchell's knack for inventive plots, appealing characters, engrossing lore, and fantastic adventures, at the end of all but one of his six novels so far, I wanted more. Is this a sign of satisfaction, then? Or a hint that a bit more push was needed by Mitchell --rather than me-- to break through from the ranks of a series of impressive tales told with abundant energy and delight, to get to that higher level, where we can agree that his novels will endure as dazzling classics, decades hence?

To begin with, how does The Bone Clocks compare with what's gone before? Eerie machinations of a global conspiracy that stretches past time and place from Ghostwritten (1999) return. So does Mo Muntervary, an MIT-trained physicist. Roughly fifteen years after her appearance in that novel, she lives in County Cork, where The Bone Clocks concludes. Similar to Ghostwritten and Mitchell's next work, Number 9 Dream (2001), shape-shifting scenarios entangle logic and reality, if not those novels' Asian settings. Some of best moments in The Bone Clocks come in exotic locations, but it settles down for most of its six-hundred-plus pages in England, North America, and finally, Ireland.

In Mitchell's semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in the early 1980s, Black Swan Green (2006), Jason Lamb told how he grew up in the shadow of the Falklands War and his parents' divorce in suburban Worcestershire. In The Bone Clocks, we meet his cousin, Hugo Lamb. This callow yet likeable "scholarship boy" studies at Cambridge. He learns of a magical offer. He finds out about the "psychosoterica of the Shaded Way". This quest comprises the backbone of this novel. The details of confrontations and "decanting" demand attention, but a careful reader will find that Mitchell embeds much of this key material early on, even if makes more sense many pages and many decades later. Atemporals seek to outwit mortality. These beings drain "psychovoltaic" charges from mortal souls. Humans live merely as "bone clocks". Our hearts tick away a few years in decaying bodies.  Anchorites disdain humans as Normals, who unwillingly and suddenly may feed the "syndicate of soul-thieves", the few who "under terms and conditions" strive to sustain a provisional immortality.

These sinister forces are countered by the league of even fewer immortals, Horologists who unselfishly seek to protect Normals. As Returnees or as Sojourners, these entities transmigrate into human bodies to continue "metalives". This faction fends off the Atemporals, who as Carnivores feed off of the living. The novel begins with teenaged runaway Holly Sykes. Leaving Gravesend on the Thames estuary, she crosses paths with this cosmic conspiracy one memorable "time-slip" day in 1984. Her predicament brings her into the company of Dr. Marinus, who featured in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (2010). Nearly two centuries after that saga of a Dutch trade mission at Nagasaki set around 1800, the doctor's back. He "returns" as an African Canadian psychologist.

Marinus seeks to penetrate the Swiss fastness where the Atemporals congregate to energize their "twisted version of resurrection" as the Shaded Way. They "consume the psychovoltaic souls of innocent people in order to fuel their own immortality". The battle between this company of Anchorites and the secret society of Horologists who for four centuries have sought to counter these soul-killing "animacides" leads to spirited displays of unpredictable alliances, betrayals, and mind-games at which Mitchell excels. As in episodes of Japanese combat, secret societies, natural wonders, dystopian breakdown, harried idealists, and teenaged desire in earlier novels, so here: Mitchell merges set-scenes of imaginative showdowns with intellectual reflection which will reward the keen and alert reader. Some exposition may seem slow at the time, but varied pace and tone build up suspense gradually. While arguably a few sections might have been trimmed, the experience Mitchell creates for the reader, to revel in the immediacy of unexpected events, benefits from leisure.

I have left out much of an extremely dense plot, so as to avoid spoilers. Much of what may seem baffling when first seen through Holly's teenaged perspective in part one begins to clarify, if gradually. Meanwhile, we learn through Hugo's tutelage in part two what the psychic campaign conducted on a different plane than the mundane means to those in this world who as "Engifted" during a period of their own psychological vulnerability find themselves open to suggestion by the Atemporals. They are lured to a Swiss fortress at Sidelhorn, rich in Templar tradition. "I'm looking through time's telescope at myself." So Hugo reflects as he visits an old pensioner, for frustrated Hugo seeks meaning in life. Shown by a Carnivore how to press "the pause button of time", he faces temptation. An Anchorite promises: "The impossible is negotiable. What is possible is malleable."

Part three, set a decade ago, shows a more mundane if more deadly conflict for millions. Mitchell portrays the Iraqi chaos from the perspective of Holly's partner, a driven journalist who calls himself a "war-zone junkie". This section introduces a Script followed by the Horologists. Later, we learn how "The Script loves foreshadowing." Most what Mitchell scatters will coalesce, if much delayed.

Part four, with my favorite character, the writer Crispin Hershey, delights. In Cloud Atlas (2004), the foibles of hapless author Timothy Cavendish regaled many as they showed Mitchell's satirical send-ups of literary self-promotion engagingly and imaginatively. Similarly, we view a reading at the book festival at Hay-on-Wye through Crispin's jaundiced narration. Doomed to rouse sales for his books, he must face "a contingent of securely pensioned metropolitans stuffed with artisanal fudge and organic cider". Using the conceit of successive literary conferences, junkets, or a professorship from 2015-2020, Hershey's progress and his grumbling maturation reveal Mitchell's sympathy for a middle-aged mid-list writer's plight. "Love may be blind, but cohabitation comes with all the latest x-ray gizmos." Plagued by divorce and driven by ego, through his journeys all over the world, we learn how redemption can be sought, even by a figure of fun. In this section, Mitchell's talent shines.

Marinus in part five deepens the confrontations as the Horologists square off against the Anchorites. We learn through Holly how this strife has continued for centuries. We get a glimpse of what Mitchell has promised in a 2010 interview. He intends Marinus to be the central figure (rather than one of five protagonists here) of yet his next novel. Still, this nimble glimpse late in The Bone Clocks of possible fates for him in other "metalives" makes his present fate less satisfying. Presumably Marinus'  temporal status and immortal shapes, vaguely hinted in Thousand Autumns, elucidated in The Bone Clocks, will gain from the clarity of Mitchell's novel to come. Meanwhile, one leaves this section, for all of its energy and excitement, with a sense that an escape clause has been left open for Marinus.

As lively and thought-provoking as the final chapter proves, there remains a further letdown. This comes amidst a very dramatic scenario. As a major character confesses: "I've seen the future and it's hungry." She speaks for us. In her mid-seventies, in 2043, she attests to our present folly: "my feckless generation trusted our memories to the Net, so the '39 Crash was a collective stroke". The costs of convenience, as skills were left to tablets and mental powers of recall to a Cloud, result in an apocalyptic payback. What we fuel every time we fill up our tank --the hastening of economic collapse and planetary chaos as the "law of the jungle" returns to plague the survivors on Earth-- shows how greed today leads to plagues tomorrow. As Mitchell shows for those struggling in the Irish West in a neo-colonial system where the yuan gives way to barter and banditry, not even the Chinese capitalists can keep the world together. At last, nature pays back humans for the greed we earlier in the century have indulged in. We're selling off our descendents' future, for present pleasure.

A deus-ex-machina arrives, clunkily. A novel of speculative fiction could be defended as saving such contrivances for retrieval by an author. Yet, I felt it was too facile. Still, many may welcome it, as it eases a harrowing chapter. This arrival promises faint hope, if for very few. For, the final section depicts a dismal dystopia of post-Endarkenment. By 2043, we watch in rural Ireland the breakdown of Western society without electricity, the Net, or transport as we know it. "Civilization's like the economy, or Tinkerbell: if people stop believing it's real, it dies." Global warming triggers a lapse into the first stages of Earth's collapsing culture in Cloud Atlas, three centuries on. Overall, despite those two places where I felt disappointed, Mitchell succeeds in spinning out his complex plot. In retrospect, The Bone Clocks fits together neatly. I anticipate its ambitious storyline may open up nicely into future novels. Then, more past characters, along with Marinus, may return to surprise us.

(In shorter fashion at Amazon US 9-13-14; revised as above to PopMatters 9-17-14. I recommend  Jill Owens' interview at the Powell's website with Mitchell about how and why he constructed this novel such; I did not read this or any other discussions of the new novel before I wrote my review.)

David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet": Book Review

Certainly, the ambitious tales David Mitchell tells, by this his fifth novel, involve dreams, culture clashes, and searches for immortality, creepy or seductive. As parts of "Ghostwritten" and "Cloud Atlas" took place in Asia, so "Number 9 Dream" emerged within Japan. As with "Cloud," a British adventurer and Low Countries contexts appear, and as with "Black Swan Green," a study of an empire at war hovers in the margins, and here these contexts become the center stage, 1800 Nagasaki.

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet" follows an ordinary Zeelander clerk in the employ of the Dutch East India Company to Japan, to clean up the books of Dejima, the trading outlet kept apart from the Japanese mainland, an outlet in the harbor, for the rulers strive to keep Christian impacts away, after the natives had eradicated the converts from well over a century earlier (Shusaku Endo's "Silence" (Amazon; see blog) powerfully conveys this era, when Portuguese Jesuits tried to colonize the proud islands.)

Mitchell opens this novel with one of two great set-pieces, a childbirth operation and then a removal of a bladder stone, with graphic imagery, tense medical action, and well-elaborated, gruesome details. His research, as with the many stories told by sailors pressed into Dutch service, adds verisimilitude. I admit the title does not seem to apply: "a thousand autumns" sounds nice, but it doesn't match the duration. The pace moves cleanly, and Mitchell as with his other novels does not show off his prose. He employs it diligently to elaborate characters in believable fashion, and he juggles a lot of factual knowledge that must be inserted into the narrative adroitly, although a few scenes find even garrulous sailors or conniving diplomats reciting lengthy explanations that seem to stretch credulity just a bit.

You get to know those on the ship gradually, and like Jacob, you are introduced step-by-step to the predicament faced by the Dutch traders as forces on the mainland and in Britain encircle their outpost. Mitchell keeps the pace of this sprawling historical narrative relatively brisk. The first parts alternate between Jacob and a Ogawa, a Japanese noble, for reasons that I cannot divulge, but which draw in Orito, a midwife, and a mysterious monastery with suitably eerie rituals and menacing presence. Mitchell enjoys the machinations that he sets in motion, and you will too, in a old-fashioned story full of longing, adventure, backstabbing, and court intrigue. While some parts slow down, the latter third, as one key character's fate is left dramatically hanging, opens up more perspectives, such as the slaves, and allows one to see more into both the Japanese setting often left at a distance from the Dutch and onboard the British vessel which enters to complicate matters far more.

It's always fun to trace character lineages from novel to novel in Mitchell. Here, I caught an ancestor of "Number 9" protagonist Eiyi Miyake, a housekeeper from the same island whom Orito knows. Also, Mo Muntervary of "Ghostwritten" finds a Co. Cork ancestor who roams very far from Ireland.

Suffice to say that this remained a lively, often tense, story. I might have trimmed a bit from the final chapter, which felt compressed and rushed, although Mitchell limns mortality well in more than one character's brave fate, and he hones a deft touch which expresses emotion and ethics insightfully. He does not preach, but he lets moral considerations come forward as the characters debate their fates, and he enriches an expansive story when in many parts you have no idea what happens next with a reflection on enduring themes of loyalty, fidelity, aspiration, and determination: always relevant ones.
(Amazon US 5-27-14)

David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas": Book Review

I'd been meaning to tackle this over the past decade; I wanted to see the adaptation by the Wachowski siblings released in late 2012. In of all places Park City, Utah (home of Sundance), in the off-season, Layne and I missed it and so opted for "Argo" (cheap ticket) in an exurb faux-Western mall. I tried that Christmas to rally my family after we bickered over Zero Dark Thirty and Django Unchained and I held down my paternal foot as I wasn't in the mood for either to celebrate the mythical birthdate of the purported Prince of Peace. We chose neither, settling on On the Road. Rarely do I venture into a theater these days, grousing as I do at people. prices, popcorn and promotion, but when I do, I want to see a spectacle enhanced by the big screen. I'd heard that ambitious adaptation of a sprawling narrative was met with bewilderment or annoyance; I'd reckoned the po-mo structure of the Booker Prize finalist (not for the first time for this 2004 entry) would baffle viewers as it did some readers. I left it unseen and still shelved.

Then, investigating "Buddhist Fiction," I found UU World nominated it for its shortlist. Dozens of copies (credit post-Matrix buzz!) were checked out of all L.A. and Pasadena libraries, but South Pasadena had it. I grabbed it. I took it along on too-brief an out-of-town trip, and I enjoyed it. Not sure if I loved it. The uphill climb for its first half is more rewarding: the challenge invigorates you to keep going. It accelerates into the curve, and through its central section. Out of that turn, it's downhill. The novel's easier to read, moves rapidly, but there's a sense of anti-climactic ennui. That may fit well the nature of David Mitchell's investigation of repetition and reincarnation, all the same.

This entry covers the passages explicating the themes I found most intriguing. It doesn't delve into the "Russian doll"-structure inspired by Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller (as I suspected long before learning Mitchell in 2010 via The Paris Review credited that novel I loved thirty years ago) for the 1-2-3-4-5-6 then reversed arrangement--as this is now common knowledge. 

"The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" features a Melville tone: Typee is mentioned later on. South Seas are visited by an American notary from the new city of San Francisco as the Gold Rush erupts. Afflicted by a worm entering his brain carrying a mysterious malady, Adam falls into the care of one Dr. Henry Goose on the voyage on the Prophetess. The style flows easier than much of (the later) Melville: "As Henry & I ate supper, a blizzard of purplish moths seemed to issue from the cracks in the moon, smothering lanterns, faces, food & every surface in a twitching sheet of wings." (39) We later find a typically casual recurrence of an image in the central story on the Big Island of Hawai'i: "Papery moths blowed thru her shimm'rin' eyes'n'mouth too, to'n'fro, yay, to'n'fro." (264)

"Letters from Zehelgem" might have been penned by John Banville or Julian Barnes. It's the type of contemporary novel that's shortlisted for a Booker Prize--as Mitchell a two-time nominee may know well. In the early 1930s, composer Robert Frobisher flees Cambridge, debtors, and justice by presenting himself in Belgium as an amanuensis to his elderly counterpart, and soon rival of sorts, Vyvyan Ayrs. Frobisher's flight from apprehension to Calais sums up his spirit: "Dover an utter fright staffed by Bolsheviks, versified cliffs as Romantic as my arse and a similar hue." (46) 

The tattered book he finds in Ayrs' manse, or half of it, is Ewing's journal, published by his son. In turn, "'Half-Lives': the First Luisa Rey Mystery" continues the saga as the recipient of Frobisher's letters back to England, Rufus Sixsmith, returns at the age of 66. He's a successful nuclear physicist in the late 1970s in California. But he's restless in Buenas Yerbas (a reversal of an early placename for S.F., by the way.) "West, the Pacific eternity. East, our denuded, pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, beserking American continent." (89) His career and his stance on this energy does not please a sinister (naturally) Seabrook corporation. Out of this, one "Hilary V. Hush" generates a pulp thriller, full of chases and conspiracies.

"The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" takes us to that middle-aged, put-upon middle man, in contemporary England, who runs a feeble "author partnership" press: in its slush pile lands the first Luisa Rey mystery. He deals with the aftermath of a cause celebre where the writer of Knuckle Sandwich meets sudden notoriety, and the attention generates fame and profits for Cavendish. Flush with the proceeds, all seems it will go well, until it doesn't.  Kingsley or Martin Amis might be at home here. Consider this look as Timothy must flee from London: "you sly toupeed quizmaster, you and your tenements of Somalians; viaducts of Kingdom Brunel; malls of casualized labor; strata of soot-blackened bricks and muddy bones of Doctors Dee, Crippen, et al.; hot glass buildings where the blooms of youth harden into aged cacti like my penny-pinching brother." (161) 

On his journey north, Cavendish raises a theme common to Mitchell's characters: "we cross, criscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters." (163) His story stops suddenly (as do others), and we leap into an indeterminate post-apocalyptic future where a Korean superstate dominates a blighted planet. "An Orison of Sonmi-451" in the fashion of Haruki Murakami or Philip K. Dick follows an engineered fabricant's entry into sentience. Escorted out of her climate controlled confines, she confides to her listener the strangeness of a natural reality: "Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, yes, and their greenness, still mesmerize me." (202) In such phrasing, the beauty of Mitchell's observations freshen the familiar. 

"Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After" occupies the core around which the other stories are mirrored in two, or tucked into. Zachry's telling recalls the altered language of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, as well as the dialect and the quest of Huck Finn as one society's fragility is shattered by the arrival of tension, disruption, and unsettling values and ideas. These, filtered via Meronym from an enclave beyond the insular Valleymen, force Zachry to come of age in a brutal clash of cultures and enemies. The Valleymen are visited by Meronym, and Zachry learns why they have ventured so far across the ocean. What has happened after the demise of Nea So Corpros as the Korean hegemony is little understood; Meronym and a few Prescients guard a few factual or mythic gleanings against predators and plague that roil the globe and the miniscule remnants who've survived Earth's collapse.

The Old 'Uns have died off, and ignorance is their legacy to the stragglers who struggle after the meltdown. "Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an’ made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o’humans, yay, a hunger for more.” (272) Civilization vs. savagery tears apart the survivors: it's as if delayed gratification eliminated the consumers and capitalists, the warlords and the masses unable to wait and think before rushing to buy, spend, fight, grab, grasp. "Old 'Uns got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall." (303)

The novel then proceeds to wrap up Zachry's chronicle and propel us back the same way we came in. Although Cavendish sniffs: "As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.'s in postmodernism and chaos theory." (150) Of course, such devices long predate what was my own long slog through this at just this time in grad school and my own collegiate reading in and out of class. Mitchell applies these through such images as the moths cited earlier. It's not that difficult a novel to follow as some grousing readers and critics lamented; anyone who can read Calvino's tale can handle this. The second half, however, moves rapidly and feels often somewhat less engaging as the puzzle-pieces neatly snap together in turn. 

One device that audiences apparently needed a visual guide and a screenplay reboot for in the (unseen as yet by me) film version was the comet-shaped birthmark used by Mitchell to suggest reincarnations or rebirths of protagonists.  On pg. 85, Frobisher introduces his; Luisa finds this
and matches it to her own despite "I just don't believe in this crap" (120) and she tries to talk herself out of it as a coincidence. (122)  Zachry sees on Meronym her "whoahsome wyrd" one just below her shoulder blade in the light of Lady Moon (303); Cavendish reasons such an image "will have to go" if the Luisa Rey "young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption-thriller" will succeed on its potential. "Far too hippie-druggy-New Age"--a sentiment I've found echoed by some resenting the storyline as a novel or a film. (357)

Given as the UU World site and its counterpart study include this on a list of "Buddhist fiction," and granted the Cambridge-trained, now County Cork resident writer married to a Japanese woman and immersed via his fiction in Asian settings, there's no escaping placement of this novel into this niche. Yet, it rests there lightly. 

In "Orison," Sonmi hears from an Abbess (this rank continues among the Valleyman's cult of ancestor worship by icons in barrows on the Big Island) from the ranks of "recidivists" in a cave hidden as a safe house for her and other "tapeworms" who huddle off the corporacratic grid. For "fifteen centuries," nuns have persisted there. A stone figure (resembling of all people Cavendish) named Siddhartha "is a dead man a living ideal." (330) Little is known of the man; his "names" tellingly as well as his doctrine have been forgotten, after the Abbess's elder mentors had been eliminated when "non-consumer religions were criminalized." (The prediction made by the Buddha that after 2500 years his own message would gradually fade comes to mind; the rule of the Corporation-State forming around us may presage "Maitreya" ending the next span of five thousand years as the Buddha's successor. But such speculation lies outside the margins of Mitchell's ambitious narrative.) Sonmi manages to wish for reincarnation in the "colony" and on departure, the Abbess promises to relay her wish to Siddhartha. Later, Zachry will unlock an orison brought by Meronym that reveals Sonmi, whose cult will spread until she has been elevated to a goddess status by the Valleymen.

Progress, these shifts in belief and power, and earthly fate concern others in this novel. Earlier, Frobisher remarks on an aquatint of a Siamese temple. He compares its lore as it's relentlessly ornamented and improved: it will one day be equal to "its counterpart in the Pure Land" (81). Then, humanity's purpose fulfilled, Time will conclude. Frobisher offers an alternative analogy. Like Ayrs, the edifice rises upon the backs of ignorant and anonymous labor, and civilization claims its resplendence through those statesmen and artists who take the credit for themselves, as "architects, masons, and priests."

In the fittingly titled "'Half-Lives': the First Luisa Rey Mystery" Isaac Sachs contemplates the actual vs. a virtual past. The Nietzschean will-to-power enters Vyvyan and Robert's verbal sparring, and by this later section, the Sixsmith Report of Frobisher's correspondent stands for the threat to this humanist resistance against the machine men and women build (like that Siamese temple?). Sachs proposes a virtual past (as in the legacy in story of the Titanic outlasting the memories of its "real-time" survivors) and wonders how corporations and governments will co-opt this. 

Sachs continues to sum up the greater novel he's part of unwittingly. "One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each "shell" (the present) encased inside a nest of "shells" (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual future." (393) Naturally, comparison of this structure to a Buddhist (or post-modern) conception of impermanence and instability within the stories we tell and which we tell of ourselves opens this up to a neat critique***.

A few pages later, Luisa and a boy, Javier, discuss what if one could see the future. Javier asks: would you want to? Luisa hesitates, wanting to know if the future so seen could be changed or not. (401) She ruminates that acting now in the expectation of what the future holds may trigger that future scenario. "What happens in a minute's time is made by what you do." She leaves the conversation wondering inside her head about this "great imponderable." "Maybe the answer is not one of metaphysics but one, simply, of power."

Necessarily inconclusive, this novel of ideas in its last segment, a reprise of "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" deals with civilized incursions across the globe, and how power forces change and alters presents and futures. "Ships bring disease dust here," Mr. Wagstaff observes to Ewing as they land at a Christian settlement on Rataoia in the newly named Society Islands. The natives die off, slaves are imported from other islands, and the natives decline in fertility as religious fervor does not inspire fecundity. "To kill what you cherish & cure," Wagstaff smiles, "that seems to be the way of things." (486)

Countering the missionary endeavor and its social Darwinism with humanist reasoning, Adam denies any rules in history. He affirms only outcomes. "Vicious acts and virtuous acts" spur results. (507) These acts emerge from belief. To fight "the 'natural' order of things," confidence in human qualities beyond selfishness impel idealists such as Ewing. He vows to become an Abolitionist (we glimpse this cadre in Sonmi's fearful realm), and he vows to become a force for change, even if but "one drop in a limitless ocean." (509) With that promise, we place back the novel's last nestled doll, or its first. 

(Amazon US 3-5-13 in shorter, depersonalized, slightly rewritten version. ***I've expanded the Buddhist and post-Buddhist, Marxian and anarchistic associations spun out of the encounter between Sonmi and the Abbess about Siddhartha in comment #2 replying to "A Spectre Is Haunting Buddhism: Give Marx Some Credit," by Glenn Wallis at Speculative Non-Buddhism on 3-7-13. I extended that into more countercultural contexts on 3-9-13 in comment #11 and virtual realm applications on 3-8-13 in comment #6,)