Neil Powell Jun 04, 2010

did not like it 's review

Several short stories, that on their own are relatively weak. The author has linked them together tenuously with some mistakenly profound pseudo-religious nonsense and a tattoo. An interesting idea, let down by the poor quality of the writing. Pretentious twaddle of the highest order



This book seems to be one of those hoaxes to call out hack reviewers. I'm slightly puzzled by the fact that Mitchell hasn't come forward yet six years after publication.

He hits all the usual clichés that are the hallmark of the "great" modern novel. The whole thing is a pretentious construction of six separate stories, with the protagonists in each being incarnations of each other, and ending up in possession of the story of the previous one in some way.



The first one is the story of some American lawyer on a ship in the Pacific some time in the 1850s. It's supposed to be a journal, but it's a hideously unconvincing one. If it wasn't intentional, I don't know why these pretentious cockpouches never seem to be able to manage a decent pastiche; it's as if actually reading anything they didn't write themselves is beneath them. Replacing every instance of "and" with "&", trying to use outdated vocabulary (incorrectly, most of the time; in the four pages where he repeatedly uses the word "kerchief" (before forgetting it exists again; some word-of-the-day calendar is probably responsible for that one), he inexplicably seems to be under the impression it's short for "handkerchief", and spells it with a prepended apostrophe), and just sprinkling racism over everything isn't good enough.

The fact that it's rife with anachronisms doesn't help.



The second story takes the form of letters written by an English twat in the 1930s, who moved to Belgium to escape debt. It's probably completely forgettable to non-Belgians, but a special kind of annoying to me. Mitchell managed to spell "Zedelgem" as "Zedelghem", which was indeed the correct spelling before the spelling reform of 1946, but uses the modern spelling for everything else. I don't know enough about the spelling reforms of French in the 20th century to say if he made the same mistake there, but I'm guessing he did.

Somewhere along the way this English twat finds the diary of the American twat for no good narrative reason, because that's what passes for plot coherence.



The third story is an attempt at an action spy thriller type novel set in 1975, the link with the previous one being the addressee of the letters, who passes them on to the protagonist of this one. It's as forgettable as the fourth one, which is something about some old guy who's sent the manuscript of this novel in the mail. Somewhere along the way a writer throws a reviewer off a balcony, I don't know.



The fifth is where he really shines: it's set in the unspecified future, and the world has turned into the tritest, most derivative dystopia imaginable. It has everything! Corporate overlords, genetically engineered slaves, cannibalism, giant totalitarian conspiracies, cutesy spelling gimmicks and neologisms, anything you could want! It's so horrifically transparent it makes Snow Crash look like a masterpiece. It's even set in Corea.



The final one is obviously the obligatory post-apocalyptic one, where the protagonist of the last one is worshipped like a goddess. It would be merely tedious if not for the ridiculous and completely unnecessary apostrophes everywhere, which render it actively obnoxious and pretty much unreadable. Initially, at least, because Mitchell doesn't have the attention span needed to keep it up for a whole chapter.



After that he goes through the entire list in reverse order again (because he *hates* you), and then at the very end he tries to make the obligatory vapid point (I forget what it was; something about drops in the ocean), slaps a suitably pretentious title onto the whole thing, and ships it off to his publishers and watches the money roll in.



So yes, if this isn't a deliberate hoax, it's a violently shit novel and a new low in post-modern self-indulgence. I'm not at all surprised at the reviews it's received either way.