There aren’t many authors as generous to their readers as David Mitchell. Ever since Ghostwritten in 1999, he’s specialised in big novels bursting with storytelling in all kinds of genres — most famously Cloud Atlas, where six very different novellas were immaculately intertwined. Not only that but, as he’s said, ‘each of my books is one chapter in a sort of sprawling macro-novel’, with many of the same characters and events being either updated or given fuller backstories.
At its best, this generosity has resulted in some of the most lavishly satisfying fiction of recent times. Occasionally, though, it can feel rather like the type shown by Mrs Doyle in Father Ted, with Mitchell refusing to take no for an answer as he forces more and more would-be treats on his already sated readers.
In 2014’s The Bone Clocks, for example, Mitchell’s strange fondness for the transmigration of souls as a narrative device was given a backstory of particularly punishing and increasingly silly thoroughness.
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