Book Review: Slade House, by David Mitchell (2015)

 


Our local library is a pleasure to visit, situated within a beautifully restored wooden barn. The kids like to go there and trawl through the shelves on the middle floor with great enthusiasm, coming away with an armful of books each, which they might or might not remember to read. On the top floor is a shelf dedicated to foreign-language books, offering a meagre selection of novels in English. Towards the end of these I found a slim story by the author of the previous book I’d read and enjoyed, and thus decided to add it to the top of my children’s bourgeoning pile.  

There is a real danger now that this blog will become a review of novels written by David Mitchell, taken as I am by his work. Slade House isn’t as wide reaching or epic as Cloud Atlas, but is more digestible, and at least as equally gripping. This is a paranormal horror story, but more fascinating and intriguing than frightening and disturbing. The perpetrators are telepathic brother and sister the Greyer twins, who had previously used their particular talents to discover a means of eternal life. For this, all they need to do is feast on the soul of a particular victim once every nine years. Thus, they must entice their prey through an ‘aperture’ and into their ‘orison.’ The aperture is a small, black metal door set in the high, bricked wall enclosing Slade Alley, and behind it lies the lavish garden and building of Slade House, which in the real world was razed to the ground in the blitz. A pattern emerges of missing persons, last seen in or around Slade Alley towards the end of October, with a regular interval between successive disappearances of exactly nine years. Thus, the book is organised into sections that tell the story and follow the fate of the poor individuals who become lured into Slade House. Each successive story provides new clues as to what’s going on, as the sinister mystery of Slade Alley becomes better known, amateurishly researched, and the latest visitors to Slade House slightly wiser to its potential dangers – making the twin’s elaborate stages increasingly fraught and perilous.

There are some similarities here with Cloud Atlas. Although the sweep of time is nowhere near as broad, the story of Slade House does take marked steps forward in time, finding a new first-person narrator at each footfall. I think this is Mitchell’s great strength as a writer – the ability to switch seamlessly into a completely new style of writing, shifting perspective, attitude and interpretation in the turn of a page. It makes his stories so multi-dimensional and convincing. Subtle points to how much and how little things can change within the frame of a decade are also masterfully provided here. I believe that David Mitchell is just as fascinated by the mechanisms and meanings of the simple passing of time as I am. I’ve also read that this author likes to reference characters, places or events from his other works within his stories. This has also appealed to me where I’ve encountered it elsewhere, and there were definite nods to Cloud Atlas here, no doubt along with various references to novels of his that I am yet to read. It’s a fun thing to imagine the worlds contained within different books existing on one vast canvass, but more than that, it allows a story to live beyond the confines of its own pages, and the possibility that even having read a book doesn’t mean that you are completely done with learning the story.

 

Favourite character: If I could rescue only one of the unlucky people who passed through the small, black, iron door, it would be Sally Timms – she somehow seemed least deserving of all to suffer such a fate.


((*** Google shows me that there are a handful of viewers of this blog, which is fantastic. Assuming the views are not from robots, it would be great if you could leave a comment, recommend a book perhaps, or even just say hi and where you are in this world! Thanks, Richard. ***))


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell (2014)

Image
  I bought this book in England during a visit home last Autumn, and read the last page here in Tromso, where we are enjoying a winter holiday in February. The snow outside has abated but the sky is dark, blotted with clouds, and the northern lights will probably not be dancing tonight. It’s taken me a while to complete this novel, but in my defence, it’s another long book and I am rather busy these days (hence the paucity of new posts here – sorry for that), and it’s certainly not an indication of a lack of enthusiasm for this latest Mitchell addition to my blog. At points through the middle of the story I thought The Bone Clocks might well end up my favourite work by this author, but in the end I think it comes in just behind Cloud Atlas . There are many familiar traits in Mitchell’s sixth novel, including its composition, divided into six stories, the first set back in the 1980s, and each subsequent instalment jumping forward about a decade in time. This means the fourth stor...
Read more

Book Review: Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (2004)

Image
  In a list I saw of the best books written this century (to date), Gilead was placed second. The brief blurb to justify its lofty position mentioned something deeply philosophical, and I thought I’d better look into it. The novel was also a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is perhaps unfair for a book to be quite so highly acclaimed. No doubt it does wonders for sales, but it does foster a fervent expectancy in the reader. ‘Fervent’ is probably not a word you will read in any other review of this work. ‘Electric’, ‘explosive’ or ‘exhilarating’ will be equally evasive. ‘Heart stopping’ might come up, but only in the context of the dwindling health of the Reverend John Ames, the main character of the novel. In fact, Gilead consists entirely of a letter or epistle written by the ageing Reverend for his young son to read one day, knowing that his memories of his father might be limited. The title of the book is the name of the small, sleepy town in Iowa where the Rever...
Read more

Book Review: Autumn, by Ali Smith (2016)

Image
  Hard to put my finger on this apparently rapidly written Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel. The themes are clear – it’s about the impacts of the aftermath of the Brexit vote on society, reflecting these impacts in a wholly negative light. It's also about relationships of various kinds – romantic, mother-daughter, and, most prominently, that between a young girl (Elisabeth, main character) and her much older next-door neighbour (Mr Gluck). The storyline also provides a narrative of the Profumo affair from the perspective of Christine Keeler, and focusses on the career and ill-fated life of the generally overlooked British pop artist, Pauline Boty. The book is also about time, jumping around as it does between now and then in a sometimes ill-defined manner, and the title – Autumn – provides a general focus for the descriptive passages. The narrative overall is subtle, there are no big bangs or twists here, there is little in the way of action, but the political critique is clea...
Read more