Number9Dream

It hasn't taken long for David Mitchell to establish himself as one of my all-time favorite authors. Heck, within a few minutes of starting Cloud Atlas, I knew I was reading something wholly unlike anything else I'd ever read, and within an hour, I knew this was one of the most astonishing pieces of writing I'd ever experience. And with each new book of his I read, I find myself more and more in awe of his talent. The world-building and history of Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the intricate plotting of The Bone Clocks, the clever narration swerves of Ghostwritten, and the surprisingly effective horror of Slade House - each one leaves me awed, and immersed in an incredible world, and reluctant to leave, and even more convinced of Mitchell's greatness.And now, I come to number9dream, convinced I'm finally starting to get a handle on Mitchell...only to be surprised and floored and moved and impressed all over again.At first glance, it would be easy to feel like this is less ambitious Mitchell. After all, there's only a single narrator this time, a single through plotline, and largely a single setting. This is the story of Eije Miyake, a young Japanese man who has ventured to Tokyo in an effort to discover who his father is. And as the book opens, we start with Eije, about to head into a business he's been watching to uncover the truth......and without warning, Mitchell starts letting this book evolve and transform in front of our very eyes. Before we know it, this theoretically simple tale of parentage has become part action movie, part storytelling exercise, part Yakuza gang war tale, part tender romance, part slice of life, part World War II saga, part fantasy saga...and that's not even part of it. And all while he's juggling all of these pieces, Mitchell keeps us moving, letting Eije's journey be the focus of the book, not only narratively but, more importantly, emotionally.In lesser hands, number9dream would be a mess. It's a picaresque, episodic novel taken to extremes, where every chapter could easily be from a different work entirely. One chapter constantly devolves into daydreams without us noticing, snaps back to reality, and then repeats the cycle; another turns into an insane, over-the-top Yakuza gore film. One chapter may be a painful childhood memory; another becomes a plunge into the world of computer hacking. Sometimes, we're immersed in the life in the back offices of a Tokyo rail station; other times, we see the nightlife that wanders in and out of a video store; still others, we find ourselves in imagined movie theaters, or reading books within our own book. In short, it's much of the metafictional, twisty work that Mitchell loves, but all filtered through a single perspective. But instead of being bewildering or exhausting, it all becomes a joy, giving us a book that's incredibly unpredictable, bursting with life and ideas, evolving in front of our eyes constantly, and all the while spinning a quietly moving saga out of all of these individual events that alone could be whole novels unto themselves.In short, number9dream is impossible to summarize, and to do so would be to rip away the joys of the book. As with all the best novels, the joy here is the journey, not the destination, and every time I picked back up number9dream, I lost myself in its intricate, rich, imaginative world, whether it was all real, daydreamed, written, imagined, or just observed. I found myself deeply moved and engaged by the sweet, subtle romance at the book's core, one that surprised me as it evolved and developed. I loved the ongoing revelations about Eije's father and mother, which were more grounded than I expected, but no less moving, and maybe even more so. I laughed at Mitchell's audacity as the book spiraled in wild directions, only to drop them later, and the sheer richness of his world, which is packed with more stories, voices, and ideas than some authors can manage in a lifetime, much less one book.Is it flawless? It's almost flawless - can that count? There's those final few paragraphs, which end the book in such an odd, discordant way, one that left me a bit disappointed at both its abruptness and the unsatisfying way to end it all...and yet, it's a choice Mitchell made, and one that's perhaps underlined by the book's final chapter, which implies nothing if not our own choice as to what happens next. And maybe that's better than anything he could ever write. Or maybe he'll catch up with Eije decades on down the road. Whatever the case, number9dream is a joy, and yet another masterpiece from an author whose works have yet to leave me anything but in awe.

The title of my review comes from May Pang's commentary on the "Number 9 Dream" by John Lennon that lends Mitchell's book its title, but the description seems appropriate for Mitchell's work as well. Like a dream, this work flutters and dips, blurs and comes into focus ... attempts to interpret it likely say as much about the reader as it does the author. Like Cloud Atlas, which I would contend remains Mitchell's masterpiece to this day, this is a highly imaginative, clever work that takes the reader on a wild and enjoyable ride. Unlike Cloud Atlas, the writing is not as tight and borders on the juvenile at times, the pace is inconsistent, and the characters are not as well developed or interesting. Similar to sections of Ghostwritten, swaths of Number9Dream feel derivative (his infatuation with Murakami Haruki is quite clear; there are many nods to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in particular, and Eiji himself is reminiscent of a Murakami "Boku" protagonist). Mitchell's choice of Japan as a setting is not surprising given his background there, but I've always thought that while he gets the details about Japan right (to the point that some parts might be frustrating and confusing for readers not familiar with Japan), he doesn't get the characters right ... Mitchell's Japanese people (both here and in other works like Thousand Autumns) just don't quite talk, act, or think like Japanese people ... or, to be fair, any people, really. One would like to call it quirky, but setting the tale in Japan just seems a bit indulgent ... considering how talented Mitchell is at creating the settings for his novels--I'd argue he's at his best in Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green--I've always found it odd that he's always slightly off when it comes to Japan. At best, his Japanese people come off as Englishmen masquerading as Japanese.That said, while it's easy to focus on the negatives, this is an oddly charming page-turner. The first part of the book was fast-paced, bordering on frenetic, but Mitchell settles down about a third of the way through and finds a more suitable pace and is better able to find his own voice as the novel progresses. Like a dream, at the end of the day, I don't know that there's anything necessarily profound here, but it still makes for an interesting story and some of his ruminations on the nature of dreams, loneliness, belonging, and love are interesting and provoke some thought. While I'd say the good parts of Number9Dream outweigh the bad, the gigantic leap that Mitchell is able to make from this novel to his next, Cloud Atlas, is striking. Mitchell is truly a talented and unique voice; having read his extant works, I look forward to seeing where he goes in the future.

This book held some quite profound life lessons, delivered in Mitchell's usual intricate style. The biggest was not to waste your life chasing an imagined idea but to see what's really there in front of you.I definitely enjoyed the Japanese setting, although the seemingly Anglicised colloquialisms and accents were a little jarring.As some other reviewers have noted, the interlude in the middle with Goatwriter was a little strange and didn't really seem to add anything of substance to the plot or the overall ambience, but it didn't particularly detract either.As usual, Mitchell manages to take disparate threads that don't seem connected but which are all compelling and at the end flip them into a beautiful pattern that you couldn't see during the story because you were concentrating on the details, not seeing the big picture. Like a magic-eye image, suddenly it pops into focus and you can see what you didn't realise you were looking for.

There are endless threads that come together by the end of this, many of them only hinted at and then when they’re tied off by Mitchell at the end it’s amazing. The misdirection and the trippy dream scenes are hard to get straight at first but when you settle in it gives the narrative a surreal feeling within a believable setting that’s hard to beat.

First off, David Mitchell is one of my most favorite authors. In the writing world in general, he is a master of his craft and a superior talent amongst the many others out there. Number9Dream however seems to be something he experimented on while high. I began reading it expecting more of the usual brilliance I have experienced in his previous works. The story began and not much was happening, didn't care, its David Mitchell and all will be fine. The story began to hint at the potential ahead, was delighted, David Mitchell is about to do his thing. Then the story dumped a vast surreal daydream on my lap and not much sense before finally returning to the protagonist and the story. Ok, I thought, not my cup of tea but I get it. Protagonist has an overactive imagination...lets continue. A couple more pages and I'm back in Surreal land for another weird day dream sequence. Now I'm getting annoyed. Finally back to the story, and oh wait, we're off again into LaLa land. At this point I flicked through the book and saw snippets of other far flung ideas and assumed these were more sequences. I stopped reading it at that point. I'm sure if I stuck with it, Mr. Mitchell would have dynamically swept something back that would have made it all make complete sense and pimp slapped me with a profound message, but to wade through all these surreal and out there scenarios to get there? No, sorry, just could not be arsed:(

I persevered with this novel but had to give up about halfway through because it was too pointless and annoying. The protagonist, a young adult in Tokyo, starts by raiding the secured offices of a lawyer to discover who his father was. That was fine. Then the story repeats but he is in a flood. Then it repeats again but differently. Ditto and ditto. But there seem to be no point to the repeats. Then we get his earlier childhood which is boringly set in an orange grove. There really is no narrative in this book. I skipped to the end in the hope of some resoultion but there did not seem to be one.Further to this, the first chapter and some other pages seem to be really poorly formatted. the result being that you get pages and pages of closely typed text with no spacing.

I was excited to read this because I usually love David Mitchells books but I found myself really struggling to get in to this one and it was an effort to finish it. Unhelpfully I can't really give a good reason why - the writing was good and the characters well drawn. It just didn't hold my interest. It was good in parts but other sections I found myself fighting through. I think I just didn't really care what the outcome was