Slade House by David Mitchell - Oct 2015 LTER (sorry it's late!)
Talk Reviews of Early Reviewers Books
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1gendeg
David Mitchell’s dive into full-board fantasy tropes in The Bone Clocks and now Slade House has been a controversial move for the author since he earned a devoted following with Cloud Atlas. He’s certainly lost fans who see his interests in genre fiction cheapening in some way. I can already see how Mitchell’s latest foray into “spiritual cannibals” has divided readers even further. He may now be in that special camp of authors where readers either love him or hate him.
As a one-off, self-contained story, Slade House will probably disappoint. If you’ve never read Mitchell, I think you’re more likely to be disappointed than if you’ve followed him over many books. As Mitchell has claimed in numerous interviews, he’s been writing an Übernovel for years, constructing a whole universe since Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. Slade House, a novella that started on Twitter no less, is just one sliver of that universe, though it inherits most of its narrative framework from The Bone Clocks—and for that reason it should be a must-read.
Mitchell has always been a fusion artist. He leans toward mixing genres and voices—it’s been his strength. Reading him can feel like you’re reading different authors. Whatever you think of him, there’s no other author out there who can completely embody a voice and character, beating heart and viscera. And it’s the same with Slade House. He’s channeling horror and fantasy, sometimes earnestly, sometimes in an ironic self-aware way, and it’s all compressed in narrative span of 36 years, roughly 1979 to the present. The villains here are the Grayer twins, the immortal soul predators of the same ilk as the Anchorites from The Bone Clocks The game they play is a long one. Every nine years they lure a poor sucker down their alley and inside their clandestine, otherworldly London mansion called Slade House. The novella is episodic, each chapter save for the last one is told from the POV of a latest victim.
The first episode is told by Nathan Bishop, a teenage boy straight out of Mitchell’s Black Swan Green. He’s easy pickings for the twin villains. DI Gordon Edmonds tells the second episode. He’s an old school detective, hardened but lonely, with a weakness for damsels in distress. Norah Grayer easily seduces and dispatches him. Next is Sally Timms, a freshmen who’s on a jaunt with her college club, the Paranormal Society. She’s overweight, socially awkward. She’s the 80s horror movie naive young woman. Nine years later, Sally’s sister Freya is journalist who works for Spyglass (also featured in Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks). She’s on sleuthing mission to find out what happened to Sally. She’s contacted by Fred Pink, uncle of the someone in the Paranormal Society, who tells her as close to the truth as possible what might have happened to Sally. Naturally, Freya is a skeptic. She thinks Fred is off his rocker, a conspiracy theorist who has most likely succumbed to mental delusions (is Mitchell poking fun at some of his critical readers who have said the same of him after The Bone Clocks, I wonder?). She merely plays along before trying to beat a polite escape. Of course, in the end, it’s her skepticism that costs her her soul.
It’s only when we get to the fifth episode that we finally get a break in the Grayer killing spree. A beloved character from The Bone Clocks makes an appearance and opens a can of psychic whoop-ass. Mitchell might get a little heavy-handed on the supernatural jargon (“glyphing up a pyroblast”) during the confrontation, but if you pay attention and don’t take it too seriously, it works and is never hard to follow.
The repetitive structure of this novella is interesting. After the Grayer twins’ second victim, the pattern is established, and we know what will happen to each person who encounters them. Same events, every nine years, totally parallel. From a literary standpoint, it’s a kind of dive into the nature of time. Says one character: “There’s no such thing as ‘a long time ago.’” On the grandfather clock in Slade House are the words: “Time is, time was, time is not.” In previous interviews, Mitchell has suggested his foray into this fantastical world of soul eaters is an extension of his obsession with what happens to the ‘soul’ when we die. It might not be the Christian concept of the afterlife, but Mitchell has always been obsessed with the idea of consequences, how our actions in the present will affect others, how we were influenced by others before us, and how those decisions made out of love or hate ripple through time. (He did this particularly well in The Bone Clocks.)
Where Slade House really excels is that while it is heavily freighted with supernatural tropes, it still reinforces all those ‘weighty’ concerns we expect from psychological realism. Take that first chapter with Nathan—it perfectly channels the stream of consciousness writing style you see from the Modernists. We encounter in sensory real-time what Nathan is feeling and seeing in the moment. The writing is immediate and electric. And the great battle between realism and fantasy? It’s here too. The Grayer twins lure their victims with psychological-fantasy tricks. And they are successful each time. But it’s a material, physical object that becomes a weapon that ultimately takes down the male twin Jonah in the last chapter. As one critic put it: “The material takes its revenge on the immaterial.” The observation is made earlier by someone in the paranormal club: “All the supernatural yarns need a realist explanation and a supernatural one.” This is Mitchell’s many talents: to infuse the most otherworldly and mundane with the most deeply human and relevant ideas.
(The original review appeared here: http://www.librarything.com/work/15672980/reviews/115691393)
As a one-off, self-contained story, Slade House will probably disappoint. If you’ve never read Mitchell, I think you’re more likely to be disappointed than if you’ve followed him over many books. As Mitchell has claimed in numerous interviews, he’s been writing an Übernovel for years, constructing a whole universe since Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. Slade House, a novella that started on Twitter no less, is just one sliver of that universe, though it inherits most of its narrative framework from The Bone Clocks—and for that reason it should be a must-read.
Mitchell has always been a fusion artist. He leans toward mixing genres and voices—it’s been his strength. Reading him can feel like you’re reading different authors. Whatever you think of him, there’s no other author out there who can completely embody a voice and character, beating heart and viscera. And it’s the same with Slade House. He’s channeling horror and fantasy, sometimes earnestly, sometimes in an ironic self-aware way, and it’s all compressed in narrative span of 36 years, roughly 1979 to the present. The villains here are the Grayer twins, the immortal soul predators of the same ilk as the Anchorites from The Bone Clocks The game they play is a long one. Every nine years they lure a poor sucker down their alley and inside their clandestine, otherworldly London mansion called Slade House. The novella is episodic, each chapter save for the last one is told from the POV of a latest victim.
The first episode is told by Nathan Bishop, a teenage boy straight out of Mitchell’s Black Swan Green. He’s easy pickings for the twin villains. DI Gordon Edmonds tells the second episode. He’s an old school detective, hardened but lonely, with a weakness for damsels in distress. Norah Grayer easily seduces and dispatches him. Next is Sally Timms, a freshmen who’s on a jaunt with her college club, the Paranormal Society. She’s overweight, socially awkward. She’s the 80s horror movie naive young woman. Nine years later, Sally’s sister Freya is journalist who works for Spyglass (also featured in Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks). She’s on sleuthing mission to find out what happened to Sally. She’s contacted by Fred Pink, uncle of the someone in the Paranormal Society, who tells her as close to the truth as possible what might have happened to Sally. Naturally, Freya is a skeptic. She thinks Fred is off his rocker, a conspiracy theorist who has most likely succumbed to mental delusions (is Mitchell poking fun at some of his critical readers who have said the same of him after The Bone Clocks, I wonder?). She merely plays along before trying to beat a polite escape. Of course, in the end, it’s her skepticism that costs her her soul.
It’s only when we get to the fifth episode that we finally get a break in the Grayer killing spree. A beloved character from The Bone Clocks makes an appearance and opens a can of psychic whoop-ass. Mitchell might get a little heavy-handed on the supernatural jargon (“glyphing up a pyroblast”) during the confrontation, but if you pay attention and don’t take it too seriously, it works and is never hard to follow.
The repetitive structure of this novella is interesting. After the Grayer twins’ second victim, the pattern is established, and we know what will happen to each person who encounters them. Same events, every nine years, totally parallel. From a literary standpoint, it’s a kind of dive into the nature of time. Says one character: “There’s no such thing as ‘a long time ago.’” On the grandfather clock in Slade House are the words: “Time is, time was, time is not.” In previous interviews, Mitchell has suggested his foray into this fantastical world of soul eaters is an extension of his obsession with what happens to the ‘soul’ when we die. It might not be the Christian concept of the afterlife, but Mitchell has always been obsessed with the idea of consequences, how our actions in the present will affect others, how we were influenced by others before us, and how those decisions made out of love or hate ripple through time. (He did this particularly well in The Bone Clocks.)
Where Slade House really excels is that while it is heavily freighted with supernatural tropes, it still reinforces all those ‘weighty’ concerns we expect from psychological realism. Take that first chapter with Nathan—it perfectly channels the stream of consciousness writing style you see from the Modernists. We encounter in sensory real-time what Nathan is feeling and seeing in the moment. The writing is immediate and electric. And the great battle between realism and fantasy? It’s here too. The Grayer twins lure their victims with psychological-fantasy tricks. And they are successful each time. But it’s a material, physical object that becomes a weapon that ultimately takes down the male twin Jonah in the last chapter. As one critic put it: “The material takes its revenge on the immaterial.” The observation is made earlier by someone in the paranormal club: “All the supernatural yarns need a realist explanation and a supernatural one.” This is Mitchell’s many talents: to infuse the most otherworldly and mundane with the most deeply human and relevant ideas.
(The original review appeared here: http://www.librarything.com/work/15672980/reviews/115691393)
