Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Rating: WARTY!

This novel was written by the same guy who wrote Cloud Atlas. I read and favorably reviewed his Slade House back in October 2015, but this one I could not get into at all. it was bo-ring. I think part of the problem was the reader's voice. William Rycroft is not someone I can stand to listen to. His voice really grated and I could not take it seriously.

The blurb advises us that "A gallery attendant at the Hermitage. A young jazz buff in Tokyo. A crooked British lawyer in Hong Kong. A disc jockey in Manhattan. A physicist in Ireland. An elderly woman running a tea shack in rural China. A cult-controlled terrorist in Okinawa. A musician in London. A transmigrating spirit in Mongolia" and going to find their lives intertwined. I should have stopped right there. I listened in horror to the first of these, and not for the reason you might think.

This terrorist had just unleashed a bio-weapon or gas attack (I forget which) and was in hiding, and that's exactly how interesting it was: nothing happened. Literally nothing. It was first person, too, and this moron was a whiny-assed little snot who constantly spawned venomous thoughts over every-single-person-he-encountered. It was tedious to listen to. That was the horror of it. if we had followed him as he unleashed his attack that would have been something at least, but this crap? I started skipping tracks after the first two or three, and ended up skipping all the way to disk two, which featured the second character in the blurb list. He was as tedious as the first: another self-centered first person story about events that were so mundane I don't even notice them in my life, yet this jerk was going on and on about them as though they carried Earth-shattering import.

I said "No!" and returned this to the library on my way home, the same day I'd begun listening to it in the car. Ick! No more! I cannot recommend this based on what little I could stand of it. Life's too short to allow a train of whining people to blow through my station, even if they are fictional.

Slade House by David Mitchell

Rating: WORTHY!

I’ve not been having much luck with advance review copies of late so it was a joy to get this one. At first it felt like reading a book of short stories, but as soon as I began on the second one, I realized this related back to the first in interesting ways. I confess I had skimmed the first, not finding it very engrossing, but I went right back re-read it properly, and then proceeded without a problem. The first part still struck me as less than thrilling, but it did help to read it properly.

The stories are set exactly nine years apart (no matter what your watch or our calendar might be telling you…) and there’s a disturbing reason for this. The snapshots all center around Slade House, which was destroyed during a World War Two bombing attack on London, but still manages, somehow, to appear every nine years. The only entrance is through a tiny door set in a wall in the claustrophobic confines of Slade Alley. That’s how you get in. You don’t get out.

Norah and Jonah Grayer are twins who discovered that they had a psychic link. When one of their acquaintances discovered this, he took them under his wing and traveled with them around the world, overseeing their training, and the perfection of their skills until they no longer had use for him. The only other problem they had was their mortality, and they discovered they could offset this by sucking the souls from certain people who had a compatible soul type. They need to do this every nine years….

The story was generally well written, and although it bogged down in a little too much detail in some parts, and the beginning was a bit off-putting, it had genuinely creepy and scary parts to offset this. It was also technically well-written with few errors that I noticed. One of them was the use of a quote instead of an apostrophe in two phrases/words: 'that’s what religion does, doesn” t it' and 'can”t'? Also this is another author who doesn't know that we stanch a blood flow, not staunch it, although by dint of usage, the wrong word is being slowly shanghaied into use.

Aside from that my biggest issue was that each story, thought told by different people, is in first person PoV, which I hate. it’s a very weak and limiting voice and it generally makes for a poor if not downright irritating story. In this case it wasn’t told too badly, but it made no sense, because if these people were dead then they couldn’t very well be relating their stories in first person, right up to their moment of death, could they? So were they really dead? In this instance, it made for an interesting question and an interesting use of voice.

I understand that in many ways, this is a companion to David Mitchell’s Bone Clocks which I haven’t read, but which some reviewers have indicated offers a nod and a wink to the earlier story, in much the same way, I imagine, my own novels do. As I said, I haven’t read the earlier work, so I can’t comment on what kind of links or connections may or may not exist between the two.

Overall I recommend this as a very worthy read.