I loved stories 3,4,5 and 6, the relatively recent and far flung future tales, but loathed the historical ones.
The next book of his I read was The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. This was an historical novel and it was dull, with the occasional Bon Mot. I got through it but it was a trudge. The next was Black swan Green (My book group do seem to like David Mitchell as all these have been book group reads) which is set in the 1980's and was one of the best books I read last year. It does seem as though I just don't get on with his historic fiction.
Luckily this book is set in modern times and beyond. It kicks off in the 1980s when young Holly Sykes decides to run away from home to live with her boyfriend. It doesn't work out and she runs much farther afield. On the way she is stopped by an old lady and asked for sanctuary, which she agrees to. This has much greater implications than she could ever have imagined. She has unwittingly wandered into a battle between strange psychic forces.
The book is split into 6 segments, spread across different timelines, starting with a week in Holly's life in the 80s, followed by a refugee from Black Swan Green and a few weeks in his life, including a brief romantic dalliance with Holly, before he too meets with agents of the forces that Holly encountered in the first part.
We then jump forwards again to meet Holly's life partner and father to her daughter. This segment plays out at a wedding reception with flashbacks to his recent traumatic times as a war correspendant in Iraq in Gulf war 2 and her pleading with him not to return. This had some amazing writing in, some of the most tense scenes in the book are contained here.
Section 4 follows a writer, Crispin, and his travels around the globe to various literary events, over a number of years from very recent past, to very near future, where he keeps crossing paths with and falling for Holly, who has become famous herself after writing a memoir of her troubles detailed in the first section. This section is brilliantly witty.
Section 5 brings the conclusion to the war she stumbled into all those years previously. Our narrator in this section is one of the beings of power, and we finally get the explanations for all the weird events that have cropped up here and there throughout the rest of the book. Some scenes in this section were almost cinematically written
Section 6 is an epilogue. set twenty years after the rest the book. And a very downbeat vision of the future it is too. A glimmer of hope at the end gives a very moving closing few pages.
In the section about the writer, Crispin has just published his latest novel which has been roundly slated by a prominent critic (and ex-friend of Hugo, our refugee from Black Swan Green) for mixing gritty reality with high fantasy. Which is of course, exactly what Mitchell has been doing for the entire book - and ironically, one of the main bones of contention in the reading group.
Personally I love the fact that this is a book about a psychic war that threatens our very existance, told from the points of view of characters only peripherally involved and who have no idea what's going on. Until the fifth section, the supernatural has popped in and out, leaving the characters dazed and confused if they're lucky. Holly has a larger part to play than she ever knew about but is blissfully unaware of her importance for most of the book.
The prose is stunning throughout - a quote which really stuck with me
"Power is crack cocaine for the ego, but battery acid for the soul"
This is a typical quote from the book. There are bon mots like this drizzled liberally throughout the story.
It's arguably overlong. There is a lot of irrelevant detail which doesn't move the stories on, but it's such exquisite detail for the most part that I didn't care. If I was to pick fault, some of the narrative voices are very similar. Crispin's section was the first that stood out as a truly different voice from the others.
Well worth reading. I'd give it an easy 8.5 out of 10
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