David Mitchell’s new book, Slade House, is not quite a novel and not really a collection of short stories. It is, rather, a puzzle and an amusement. A member of the same family as last year’s The Bone Clocks, it also has a slight connection to his 2010 novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Mitchell has said in interviews that he thinks of his books being volumes in one mega work, or ‘übernovel’, and like his earlier fictions, Slade House meditates on varieties of predation, a theme explored to most moving effect in Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten.
The territory here is more straightforwardly supernatural, although the otherworldly high jinks are balanced by Mitchell’s generous touch with characters from Britain’s economic and social margins. In giving nuanced voice to an autistic teenager, Nathan, whose pianist mother seems not wholly to understand him, and to an obese student, Sally Timms, who despairs of being noticed by the handsomest boy in her university’s Paranormal Society, Mitchell provides enough ballast for the book to be more substantial, and more ‘literary’, than the usual run of genre fiction.
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