How on earth did David Mitchell’s third-rate fantasy make the Man Booker longlist?

Reincarnation has hovered over David Mitchell’s novels since the birth of his remarkable career. His haunting debut novel, Ghostwritten (1999), featured a disembodied spirit that wandered around making itself at home in other people’s souls. Transmigration spread throughout that book — the lives of its characters intertwined in brilliantly intricate ways — and has continued to throughout Mitchell’s fiction. When his characters aren’t being reborn as new people in one book, they’re turning up alive and well for a second outing in another.

His latest, The Bone Clocks, continues the cycle of endless rebirth. Like four out of five of his earlier works, this supernatural, intertwining epic has made it onto the Man Booker longlist. Whatever he got up to in a former existence, Mitchell is clearly possessed of good karma.

Reincarnation is so central to him, in fact, that in The Bone Clocks he hasn’t just brought back a handful of previously seen characters; he has even resurrected the structure of his biggest commercial success, Cloud Atlas (2004).