Whoa! What a totally mental freaky book. This is Mitchell's first novel published in 1999 and it's been on my shelf for over 10 years. Finally I got around to reading it and what a mad delight! It's taken me ages due to it being quite a dense read which needed lots of concentration and also because I have been spending more of my free time watching TV lately, as there has been such great stuff on the box!
This author has a huge imagination and a brilliant grasp of different writing styles used in the different chapters in this book. Each of these nine chapters were supposedly snapshots of random lives of different people around the planet but ultimately they all had little parts of their lives which interlinked or morphed into each other. I loved these stories just as separate tales. Especially the story about the 20 th century history of China as seen through the eyes of a woman tea seller and the disembodied soul of a Mongolian boy who jumps around from person to person like a virus trying to find a new host to exist in.
Every story has a link to ghost or spirit of some description and characters randomly affect each other's stories. I think this is to highlight the random chances and happenings which occur in all of our lives. This book was so clever and even more relevant today, 16 years later, in a world of global terror. Mitchell uses the first Iraq war and the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway as his reference points. What would he use today?! This book was even pre 9/11...weird.
Ultimately though this book was fantastic linguistically and Mitchell's dialogue could be extremely witty edgy and thought provoking but by the end I was just thinking WTF? This book in my opinion ended up trying to be so clever that it kind of failed to come to a satisfactory ending. i just didn't really get it and I think I need to read it again even slower. There is no real fun in reading a book that you suddenly realise is totally above your understanding. But, hey maybe Mitchell is having the last laugh, this book was awesome to read and that's all that matters. This book can be whatever you want it to be! For me the language, different dialogues and stories were fantastic and ultimately that is all that counts. I think it was all about how spirits and ghosts are around us and within us all the time and how these 'spirits' manifest is as varied and random as life itself. I didn't find this idea crazy or wacky at all, instead I kind of found it weirdly comforting. If you want a great read,which by the end will leave you both entertained and infuriated, I highly recommend this book!
Time to go I must catch the last episode of Fargo!
