One hand clapping
Robert Edric
NUMBER9DREAM by David Mitchell
Sceptre, 110, pp.418, ISBN 0340739762 Clearly. the publishers of David Mitchell's novel are already all too well aware of what the reader is about to pay dearly for. The net they throw around it is a wide one. According to them, it is a Far Eastern, multi-textual, urban-pastoral, road-movie-of-the-mind, cyber-metaphysical, detective/family chronicle, coming-of-agelove-story genre of one.
All of which suggests that they are as confused and as uncertain — and perhaps as relieved — as the reader will be upon turning to the final chapter and finding only a single empty page.
Reviews of Ghostwritten. Mitchell's highly acclaimed and prize-winning first novel, refer to its stunning and accomplished mysticism, its ethereal surprises and zen-like lucidity. Nothing could be less ethereal, lucid or zen-like than the overwrought and overwritten prose on display here. Every event, it seems, is afforded the same intense inspection and description, whether 'actual', dreamed or imagined — the violent deaths of a dozen men, the simple descent of a stairway into a cinema. There is no selection, no paring away of excess, no attention to the single, telling detail, and the effect of this, over 400 pages, where all these supposedly interconnected narrative forms and styles are meant to combine into a seamless whole, is to leave the reader numbed and clamouring for less.
Here are a dozen 'stories', some of which meander aimlessly in their own direction, some of which loop and loop again in different formats, and some of which simply disappear at a chapter's end. We are asked to believe that the events and characters of all these divergent, flailing tales are interrelated, that the intent or substance of one has some significance regarding the characters and events of another, and that the whole is complete and self-sustaining; that however divergent and seemingly independent these tales are, the narrative drive is sustained by them. It is not. The centre does not hold.
The focus of the story — a man's search for his mother, or father, or grandfather — is neither mysterious nor intriguing. Connections are made, of course, but these are often so tenuous or unbelievable that the reader is left feeling, at best, cheated, and, at worst, that this self-indulgent novel is nothing more than an unedited concoction of earlier or hurried works put together to capitalise on the success of Ghostwritten with its zen-like lucidity (`The language of mountains is rain' anyone?).
Disappointingly, though intriguingly, those few parts of the novel which do create an impact — the narrator remembering the disappearance and death of his twin sister nine years earlier — are related in a prose that is both simple and beguiling, resonant and clear in its intent. Sadly, these pieces are all too few. Elsewhere form and content groan under the weight of the language heaped upon them. Endless wordplay — alliteration and onomatopoeic gimmickry — will leave the reader groaning, too. The novel is set in Tokyo, and Mitchell has written of his desire to create a work free of tired cliché and endlessly recycled images of modern Japan, to present a truer picture of the society he knows, but despite its endless references to the Tokyo landscape, the arcade game, close and active focus of the book, its `cyber-mystical' structure, means that it might just as easily be set in Cairo, say, or Sao Paolo.
It may be that Mitchell has deliberately chosen the most difficult of forms and the most unrewarding and off-putting array of devices to create this novel — I shall certainly now read Ghostwritten — and that this reading of it has missed the point completely. But a book demands the involvement and commitment of at least two people, and in Number9Dream there is room for only a single performer, one who endlessly demands his applause rather than one who accepts it with grace when it comes to him unbidden.
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