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March 15, 2007

number9dream - David Mitchell

After the roller-coaster ride that was Cloud Atlas, I was really looking forward to pludering the small back catalog of Mitchell's work; this book and the previous one Ghostwritten.

From Mitchell's brief bio in the inside cover, it says he spent a few years living in Japan. He has made full use of what he learnt about the country and it's people in this book, as his hero is a 19 year old Japanese man and most of the action takes place in present day Tokyo. It's all very authentic sounding, with some small details thrown in to convince us he knows what he is talking about, like the Kanji symbols making up Eiji's Japanese name being unusual.

Eiji Miyake moves from his home in the countryside to try to find his father, who he has not ever met, in Tokyo. He does not even know his father's name, but has some leads. The narrative progresses fairly normally, except for some disconcerting daydream excursions. Eiji gets a dead-end job, rents a small room, desires a waitress in a cafe.

Not for the faint hearted - Eiji gets mixed up with the Japanese mafia - the Yakuza. There are some very violent scenes which come as a bit of a shock after the more sendentary opening chapters. I wasn't totally convinced by the plot here as well; Eiji risks life and limb for information on his father - information I'd probably not want to die for. However, this section is the most exciting and interesting part of the book.

The latter sections are a bit disappointing after all the Yakuza drama, and I didn't think the father story ended well. A subplot about Yakuza and computer viruses is also left hanging. Maybe we're supposed to extrapolate the future for ourselves, I just feel a bit let down by it.

Overall, it's a very accomplished novel. It's very clever and I enjoy some of the games he plays with us, though there are too many dream sequences (something I *hate* in novels). There are some very odd sections that I think I'm just not smart enough to see the significance of (Goatwriter), and some nautical history from the Second World War that is interesting, but just too long. If I was an editor I'd probably cut out a third of this book.

So I'd have to say I admired the writing, more than I enjoyed the book. I'm not sorry I read it, there are a lot worse books around. In the end, Eiji started to get on my nerves a bit, and I didn't care that much about his quest. I was hoping for a more emotional attachment, he proved he could do that with the characters in Cloud Atlas, but missed the mark a bit here.

Posted by se71 at March 15, 2007 10:26 AM

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