Book 73 - David Mitchell "Slade House"

[jazzy_dave]

David Mitchell "Slade House" (Sceptre)




Every nine years on the last Saturday of October a small, black, non-descript iron door without handle or lock, set into the wall of Slade Alley, opens and admits someone into the grounds of Slade House, but they will never leave.

Told in five interweaving instalments from five different points of view, with a time frame from 1979 to 2015, David Mitchell – a well-known word wizard – manages effortlessly to slip from character to character, giving each a distinct and discrete personality, and the few cultural references that help anchor each respective section in time are spot-on. There is a certain sense of inevitability once the speaker has identified themselves, making the reader complicit in the events surrounding the disappearance of a number of 'guests' of Slade House over the span of 36 years, yet the author also fiendishly gives the reader hope and inexorably and expertly draws the reader further into the narrative, like the inhabitants of Slade House do with their victims.

I wasn't sure after the first instalment whether there would be anything else to add to the story, but I should have had more confidence: while David Mitchell keeps to the same pattern each time, he also slowly moves the narrative forward, not only in time, but also to an inevitable denouement. I thought the last story was less successful than the others, but this is still a story by a master storyteller.

I now feel like re-reading "Cloud Atlas" or the other one i picked up recently , "Ghostwritten".

Comments

[thespian15.livejournal.com]

That sounds like an interesting story.
Hugs, Jon