Book Review: Wolfsangel by M. D. Lachlan

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"King Authun leads his men on a raid of an Anglo-Saxon village. Men and women are killed indiscriminately but the Viking demands that no child be touched. He is acting on prophecy... a prophecy that tells him that the Saxons have stolen a child from the Gods. If Authun, in turn, takes the child and raises him as an heir, the child will lead his people to glory.

"But Authun discovers not one child, but twin baby boys. Ensuring that his faithful warriors, witness to what has happened, die during the raid Authun takes the children and their mother home, back to the witches who live on the troll wall. And he places his destiny in their hands."

***

 

Wolfsangel begins with a small but perfectly formed novella-length narrative that serves to lift the curtain on the half-breed yet wholly involving species of hallucinatory fantasy and Norse mythology that is its starring attraction. In whispered, reverent tones, it is said that Authun, king of the Northern Vikings, is "descended from Odin, the chief of the Gods," who felt so threatened by his fierce offspring that he "cursed Authun to sire only female children. He could not risk him producing an even mightier son." But the old Viking will have his heir, and so he leads a troop of warriors to a village wherein - according to the witches of the Troll wall - such a creature of Godly lineage exists, there for the taking. And so he takes.

He takes Vali, and into the bargain, he takes Feilig, too; an unexpected twin. A sacrifice, he reasons, if the witches must have one. But the finely threaded destiny of the two raid-born babes intertwines far further than Authun's desperate obeisance. They are separated, one raised royal and the other of the wilds, and yet decades later, something, some powerful force immovable by mere mortal man - be it love, fate, magic or chance - brings Vali and Feilig together. Even then, the games of the Gods are only just beginning.

We have here, simply put, the fantasy debut of 2010. M. D. Lachlan has five novels to his other name, but Wolfsangel marks the author's first blush in terms of genre, and his is an unforgettable arrival. Lachlan weaves a remarkable tapestry of narrative in the first part of this multi-volume epic which, though it stands strong on its own merits, alludes to such great things that the chances are we have the next Peter V. Brett on our hands. In point of fact, one aspect of Wolfsangel - the relatively traditional quest Vali and Feilig join forces to undertake - very much puts one in mind of The Painted Man, though where Brett occasionally came across as amateurish, if utterly beguiling in his enthusiasm, Lachlan's voice and grasp of his novel's onion-skin of a narrative is authoritative, always.

The twins are an involving pair: alien and yet relatable, well differentiated despite their physical and aspirational similarities, Vali and Feilig each come into their own over the course of a journey pockmarked by hardships which twist both characters in interesting ways. Their quest to save Adisla would have made for a fine, if unexceptional fantasy novel in and of itself, but Lachlan has far grander designs, for this is tale of and indeed for the ages. It is but the beginning of a chronicle of "centuries and lives" which will "see the endless battle between the wolf, Odin and Loki - the eternal trickster - spill over into countless bloody conflicts throughout history," and while big ideas are ten-a-penny in genre fiction, Lachlan walks the talk.

Wolfsangel stands alone just fine as a straightforward, mythology-laden quest narrative set against a fascinating world, but what sets it apart as great, rather than merely good, is its ambition. Intermingled with the earthly concerns of Vali and Feilig are disturbing, otherworldly encounters with Gods and monsters alike which truly elevate the scope and imaginative prowess of Lachlan's outstanding first fantasy. In a genre which so often hopes to cater to all comers, and so rarely succeeds, Wolfsangel does the impossible: it is both the beginning of a saga that positively begs to be told and an accomplished and satisfying tale in its own right. Only time will tell what vulpine wonders await the lovelorn beast at the heart of this powerful narrative, but this much I can say for sure: Lachlan makes a fantastic first impression.

***

Wolfsangel

by M. D. Lachlan

May 2010, Gollancz

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Recommended and Related Reading

Anachronism

This little film, which - credit where it's due - I spotted over at Caitlin R. Kiernan's blog, Unfit for Mass Comsumption, just made my day. Anachronism is "an award-wining Steampunk short about two children who discover the wreck of a giant squid submarine on a beach near their home."

Take 15 minutes, guys and gals: this is a truly extraordinary little film. The effects aren't exactly top-notch, but on a shoestring budget, and done just for the love of it, there's nothing about Anachronism that I'd change.

I'd embed the HD version, but the resolution would explode my blog. Do click on through to Vimeo to watch the short in all its glory; thank me later.

Film Review: Kick-Ass

On one hand, you have Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn, respectively the writer and director of the pitch-perfect 2007 adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Stardust, reteaming for the first time since that fantastic film. On the other, there's Nicolas Cage, who hasn't been truly memorable in anything since Adaptation, and Mark Millar, the comic-book guru whose rampant egomania has come to overshadow what talent he has, as last evidenced in the Angelina Jolie vehicle Wanted. Suffice it to say, then, that going in, I didn't know what to think of Kick-Ass. I had my expectations for each of its component parts, certainly, but of the whole... nothing.

Aaron Johnson, acclaimed for his star-making role in the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, is Dave Lizewski, an unremarkable high school student who decides to become a super-hero. He has no powers. His only training is that which he performs in front of his bedroom mirror. Dave has no earthly reason to do what he does - which is to say, order some spandex off the internet and take to the streets to right the world's wrongs - except, well, why not? A false start nearly kills him, but Dave isn't discouraged, and soon enough his antics begin to attract attention from all the wrong places. The media go crazy over Kick-Ass, several more camera-shy vigilantes come out of the woodwork to warn Dave that his amateurishness could be the end of him, and a criminal kingpin - a real villain - blames him for the mysterious disappearance of copious quantities of cocaine.

 

 

What Kick-Ass does right, it does very, very right. Things kick off brilliantly with an enthusiastic and wonderfully witty opening that ascends in energy and tenacity until the anxious high of Dave's first encounter in his superhero garb with a couple of bullies. They pull a knife; it does not go well. There's real dramatic tension in the juxtaposition of Dave's dweebish dreams and the uncompromising brutality of the world he must realise them in, and that feeling of impending tragedy, of reality biting fanboy fantasy, is among the most remarkable aspects of Kick-Ass.

Sadly, Vaughn and Goldman take their tale in another direction entirely. While Dave is recuperating from his unfortunate run-in, we meet Hit Girl and Big Daddy, a father and daughter team bound together by blood and a shared interest in vengeance against Mark Strong's ruthless mafia man. In a return to the form of his 90s action persona with added quirk, Cage clearly relishes his role, and Chloe Moretz as his pint-sized assistant is a revelation; they make, in fact, for a substantially more charismatic and entertaining pair than Kick-Ass and his eventual sidekick-come-nemesis Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, not playing McLovin' for once), and yet they are characters steeped in utter fantasy, stand-outs in the real world landscape of Kick-Ass for all the wrong reasons: gun-toting, impossibly fast and apparently invincible, they simply do not belong in the same film as Dave's bumbling vigilante.

Ultimately, the most troubling thing about Kick-Ass is not the failure of any of its individual elements - the cast equip themselves very well, the script is sound, the humour hits home more often than not and Vaughn's direction is endlessly stylish and so slick as to the belie the movie's modest budget - but the unevenness of the whole. Tonally, Kick-Ass is a mess, wavering between earnestness and frivolity; bitingly satirical one moment and cartoonishly brutal the next. It hopes to set fantasy against reality, but instead it is either realistic or fantastic - rarely does the twain meet - and in its attempts to have it both ways, it sacrifices the most vital aspects of each in the balancing act.

Kick-Ass is a mess, then, yes, lacking in any semblance of self unless that self is in fact its utter lack thereof, but what a glorious mess it is: fun from end to end, funny too, and certainly more coherent than the Mark Millar comic book it's based on, Vaughn and Goldman's second joint effort falters in terms of its tone but in every other aspect it's a raucous, riotous romp that easily transcends its source material.

The BoSS for 16/05/10

Some mornings the postman will come lumbering up the little staircase to my front door with three or four packages rubber-banded together and I have to fight back the urge to tear them all apart at once, like a kid at Christmas. Getting proofs in the mail is always a treat, but I know that a surplus of books for review on one day means that there'll be something of a deficit for the rest of the week. This week, there was no one day whereupon all the packages sent for the speculative Scotsman's attention arrived, but rather a slow, steady trickle: one book a day, every day. A perfect pace, if you ask me.

Apropos of which, an odd memory: when I was little, I'd take the time to play with every present I got on Christmas day before opening the next one. Some years, Christmas could last all the way till New Year's. I'd still be working my way through the pile my Mum had put together for me when the bells tolled, while my friends had long since exhausted their gift reserves.

Anyway.

Click through to read Meet the BoSS for an introduction and an explanation as to why you should care about the Bag o' Speculative Swag.

Read on for a sneak peek at some of the books - past, present and future - you can expect to see coverage of here on The Speculative Scotsman in the coming weeks and months.

***

Sacred Treason
by James Forrester

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

05/08/10 by Headline Review

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "London, December 1563. England is a troubled nation. Catholic plots against the young Queen Elizabeth spring up all over the country. At his house in the parish of St Bride, the herald William Harley – known to everyone as Clarenceux - receives a book from his friend and fellow Catholic, Henry Machyn. But Machyn is in fear of his life, claiming that the book is deadly... What secret can it hold? And then Clarenceux is visited by the State in the form of Francis Walsingham and his ruthless enforcers, who will stop at nothing to gain possession of it. If Clarenceux and his family are to survive the terror of Walsingham, and to plead with the queen’s Secretary of State Sir William Cecil for their lives, Clarenceux must solve the clues contained in the book to unlock its dangerous secrets before it’s too late. And when he does, he realises that it's not only his life and the lives of those most dear to him that are at stake..."

Commentary: I talked about this in the inaugural Unbooking a few days ago. Sacred Treason is historical fiction, from the nom-de-plume of a non-fiction author: not usually my cup of tea, perhaps, but the effort the good folks at Headline had gone to to make James Forrester's novel stand out - brown paper and a wax seal - have ensured that despite my reservations, I'll at the very least be giving this one a go before it's release date.

Blonde Bombshell

by Tom Holt

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

06/05/10 by Orbit

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "The third planet out from the star was blue, with green splodges. Dirt. Oh, the bomb thought. And then its courage, determination and nobility-of-spirit subroutines cut in, overriding everything else, adrenalizing its command functions and bypassing its cyberphrenetic nodes. Here goes, said the bomb to itself. Calibrate navigational pod. Engage primary thrusters. Ready auxiliary drive. It knew, in that moment, that its own doom was near; because it was giving itself orders, and it wasn't putting in any 'the's. That was what you did, apparently, when the moment came. You could also turn on a flashing red beacon and a siren, but mercifully these were optional. Oh #/+*! thought the bomb, and surged on towards Dirt like an avenging angel."

Commentary: Science fiction and I have a relationship as changeable as the weather. Mark Chitty was good enough to post a little diatribe on that very subject on Walker of Worlds as part of SFAM last month, and I hate repeating myself, so do forgive me if I don't go into it again here. For all the sci-fi I've read, though, and all the reactions I've had to the genre - love, hate, indifference - I've never read whimsical sci-fi comedy before; truly, before now, I hadn't imagined it even existed. And so, though I haven't heard of Tom Holt, nor read anything too positive about his work in the past, Blonde Bombshell sounds interesting. Something a little different.

Far North
by Marcel Theroux

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

03/06/10 by Faber & Faber

Review Priority:

4 (Very High)

Plot Synopsis: "Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol this dingy city. Out on the far northern border of a failed state, Makepeace patrols the ruins of a dying city and tries to keep its unruly inhabitants in check. Into this cold, isolated world comes evidence that life is flourishing elsewhere — a refugee from the vast emptiness of forest, whose existence inspires Makepeace to take to the road to reconnect with human society. What Makepeace finds is a world unraveling, stockaded villages enforcing a rough and uncertain justice, mysterious slave camps labouring to harness the little understood technologies of a vanished civilization. But Makepeace’s journey also leads to unexpected human contact, tenderness, and the dark secrets behind this frozen world. FAR NORTH leads the reader on a quest through an unforgettable arctic landscape, from humanity’s origins to its likely end. Bleak, haunting, spare — and yet ultimately hopeful, the novel is suffused with an ecstatic awareness of the world’s fragility and beauty, and its unexpected ability to recover from our worst trespasses."

Commentary: Nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke award that China Mieville took home a few weeks ago, Faber & Faber are reissuing Far North in paperback in a few months - presumably to cotton onto all the acclaim before it dies down - so what better time to dig into a book that's been compared to Under the Skin and intrigued me from the moment I heard about it? It's not exactly timely coverage at this point, but I'm good and excited to get started on my first Marcel Theroux, so suck on that, new releases.

First Lord's Fury

by Jim Butcher

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

06/05/10 by Orbit

Review Priority:

2 (Fair)

Plot Synopsis: "The aging First Lord of Alera has fallen in battle. Yet his people must continue to resist an invading inhuman army. Desperate Alerans even pledge fealty to the Vord Queen to survive, turning the incredible power of Aleran furies back on their own people. And despite all efforts, the Alerans are being ground into dust and pushed to the farthest reaches of their own realm. However, Tavi has returned with vital insights from the Canim Blood Lands. He knows how to counter the Vord and, more importantly, believes human ingenuity can equal fury-born powers. Now events are rushing towards a last stand, where Tavi and the last Aleran legions must formulate a dangerous new strategy, together. For a civilisation is on the brink of extinction."

Commentary: I watched a bit of The Dresden Files when it was on telly a few years back. It was one of those shows that I enjoyed, I suppose, but whose cancellation seemed something of a relief compared to the out-and-out tragedy of before-their-time greats along the lines of Dollhouse and Invasion. Mind you, First Lord's Fury isn't The Dresden Files by any stretch - it's the latest installment in the The Codex Alera, apparently - but not having read any Jim Butcher before, that's the closest touchstone I have to judge it by. I hardly think book six is an appropriate point to start any series, but do let me know, readers, if I'm underestimating this author and this series. Should I be more excited for this one?

Stone Spring

by Stephen Baxter

Release Details:

Published in the UK on
03/06/10 by Gollancz

Review Priority:

4 (Very High)

Plot Synopsis: "8000 years ago Europe was a very different place. England was linked to Holland by a massive swathe of land. Where the North Sea is now lay the landmass of Northland. And then came a period of global warming, a shifting of continents and, over a few short years, the sea rushed in and our history was set. But what if the sea had been kept at bay? Brythony is a young girl who lives in Northland. Like all her people she is a hunter gatherer, her simple tools fashioned from flint cutting edges lodged in wood and animal bone. When the sea first encroaches on her land her people simply move. Brythony moves further travelling to Asia. Where she sees mankind's first walled cities. And gets an idea. What if you could build a wall to keep the sea out? And so begins a colossal engineering project that will take decades, a wall that stretches for hundreds of miles, a wall that becomes an act of defiance, and containing the bones of the dead, an act of devotion. A wall that will change the geography of the world. And its history.

"Stephen Baxter has become expert at embedding human stories into the grandest sweeps of history and the most mind-blowing of concepts. Stone Spring begins a trilogy that will tell the story of a changed world. It begins in 8,000 BC with an idea and ends in 1500 in a world that never saw the Roman Empire, Christianity or Islam. It is an eye-opening look at what history could so easily have been and an inspiring tale of how we control our future."

Commentary: Perhaps I just haven't been looking in the right places, but given the profile of Xeelee sequence mastermind Stephen Baxter and the impending release of his latest novel, I've heard surprisingly little about Stone Spring. The first in a new trilogy set in a typically imaginative and expansive time, hesitant though I am to lose myself in yet another series novel, this is shaping up to be my next read. Will it be the latest addition to the renaissance of science fiction I've experienced this year? Let's ask the magic 8-ball... which says: "All signs point to yes." I have it on good authority, then!

Tell-All

by Chuck Palahniuk

Release Details:

Published in the UK on
03/06/10 by Jonathan Cape

Review Priority:

4 (Very High)

Plot Synopsis: ""Tell-All" is many things: a Sunset Boulevard-inflected homage to Old Hollywood when grand dames like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford ruled the roost. It is a Douglas Sirk-inspired melodrama full of big gestures and muted psychic torment. It is a veritable Tourette's Syndrome of rat-tat-tat name-dropping, from the A-list to the Z-list. It is a merciless send-up of Lillian Hellman's habit of butchering the truth that will have Mary McCarthy cheering from the beyond. Our narrator is Hazie Coogan, who for decades has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine 'Miss Kathie' Kenton, a star of the wattage of Elizabeth Taylor and the emotional torments of Judy Garland. The survivor of multiple marriages, career comebacks and cosmetic surgeries, Miss Kathie lives the way legends should. But danger lurks when gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III arrives and worms his way into Miss Kathie's heart and boudoir. Hazie discovers that this bounder has already written his celebrity tell-all memoir and that it foretells her death in a forthcoming Lillian Hellman-penned World War II musical extravaganza "Unconditional Surrender", in which Miss Kathie portrays Lily defeating Japanese forces from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki. As the body count mounts, Hazie must execute a plan to save Katherine Kenton for her fans - and for posterity. A dark reimagining of "All About Eve" and an hilarious assault on celebrity, "Tell-All" is vintage Palahniuk."

Commentary: And so goes the blurb for the latest in Palahniuk's annual line of releases. What's most remarkable about Tell-All, however, is its idiosyncratic narration. Hazie recounts her faux celebrity expose in a pseudo-script format that I think it's safe to say you'll either love or utterly despise. I've read a little - tough not to when something so very different presents itself - and I'm in. Tell-All is a short one at less than 200 pages, so I expect I'll gobble it up one night and report back. I don't know that we're looking at Palahniuk's next Fight Club here, but his latest effort looks like a great deal of fun nonetheless. I'm hopeful.

Watch

by Robert J. Sawyer

Release Details:

Published in the UK on
20/05/10 by Gollancz

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "Caitlin Decter could never have anticipated what was coming when she first sensed a strange presence on the internet Webmind is an emerging consciousness that has befriended blind mathematics genius Caitlin Decter and has grown eager to learn about her world. But Webmind has also come to the attention of WATCH - the secret government agency that monitors the Internet for any threat to the United States-and they're fully aware of Caitlin's involvement in its awakening. WATCH is convinced that Webmind represents a risk to national security and wants it purged from cyberspace. But Caitlin believes in Webmind's capacity for compassion-and she will do anything and everything necessary to protect her friend."

Commentary: The concisely titled WWW trilogy begun last year continues in Watch. Which is all well and good, except that I haven't read Wake. In fact, as with the Jim Butcher above, my only experience of Robert J. Sawyer's fiction is at least third-hand, in the form of a few episodes of the recently cancelled FlashForward TV series, which I found to be both preposterous and un-fun. Of course, I shouldn't - and I won't - judge the man's writing ability based on some corporate ninny's reiteration of one of Sawyer's ideas, but again, I haven't had the pleasure of the first part of the WWW trilogy, so until I get my hands of a copy of Wake, I wouldn't expect to see anything more here on TSS about Watch. Anyone reading care to recommend the first book? It all sounds a bit hokey if you ask me...

How to Destroy Angels

Now I haven't covered music here on TSS at all to date, and I certainly don't mean to make a habit of it - is there such a thing as speculative sound, I wonder? - but between a bit of idle chatter on the great Twitter and a now-defunct poll on the excellent Genre Reader blog, it seems there's substantially more crossover between fans of speculative fiction and metal (classic, nu and alt) music than I'd initially thought. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool metalhead, I'll admit it gladly - I'd have mentioned it sooner except that I harboured some suspicion I was the black sheep of the family - and so it came as something of a surprise to me that so many of my blogging colleagues have similar taste in music.

If you listen closely, our own Amanda Rutter of Floor to Ceiling Books can often be heard singing the praises of one Biffy Clyro, while James Long of Speculative Horizons is an old-school Deftones fan; Werthead, meanwhile, will express an affinity to Nerf Herder given half a chance, Mark Chitty (what is the Walker of Worlds) balances out his Ice T appreciation with some Dragonforce on his iPod, and Adam Christopher, who mantains Stephen's Lot, likes him a bit of And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. Hope you guys and gal don't mind me outing you here!

All of which raises an interesting question... that I'll answer another time, perhaps. Because for the moment, now that my hands are untied, I simply have to share something I came across the other day entirely by chance:

That's right. It seems that reports of the death of Nine Inch Nails - one of my all-time favourite bands, without question - have been greatly exaggerated. Of course the powerhouse track embedded above isn't quite the NIN we all know and love, but make no mistake, that's Trent Reznor music right there, and Reznor has been the band's only mainstay in all the decades it's existed.

I'm pumped.

How to Destroy Angels are, apparently, a collaboration between Reznor himself, his wife - onetime West Indian Girl front-woman Mariqueen Maandig - and frequent team-mate Atticus Ross. "A Drowning" is their first song. An EP is on the books for release sometime this Summer, with a full-length album to follow in early 2011. Tentatively speaking of course.

I can hardly bloody wait.

Instrumentally, "A Drowning" sounds very similar to Reznor's efforts on The Fragile, a double-album that I love, despite most of the world despising, and though I've never had the pleasure of Maandig's vocals before, her lilting refrain makes for a perfect counterpoint to the swelling industrial underpinnings of this fantastic song. Currently, you can buy the song on Amazon or via iTunes; do so.

How in Hell this got by me, I don't know... but now that I know about it, so do you. Thus, my work here is done.

Book Review: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /

IndieBound / The Book Depository

"Japan, 1799; Jacob de Zoet arrives on Dejima in Nagasaki harbour. For over 150 years this artificial island, manned by the Dutch East India Company, has been the only point of contact between Japan and Europe. The foreign traders are forbidden to leave the island whilst the Japanese may not travel beyond their native land. Yet through the porthole of Dejima the new learning of the Enlightenment seeps into the Shogun's cloistered realm while tales of a mysterious land seep out.

"As a junior clerk, de Zoet's task is to uncover evidence of the previous Chief Resident's malpractice. Ostracised by his compatriots, he befriends a local interpreter and becomes drawn to one of the few women on the island, a midwife with a scarred face who is granted persmission to study under the Company physician. But in the battles for surpremacy on Dejima and the mainland, and between the Dutch and British on the high seas, trust is betrayed and loyalties are tested to breaking point."

***

 

Edo-era Japan does not want the world - a brush with preaching Portuguese missionaries hundreds of years before the events of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet has seen to that - and yet the world wants it. The country's copper reserves are at the turn of the 18th century a sun-flecked siren song to Enlightened nations all around the globe, but Japan, tribal and staunchly traditionalist to the end, tolerates only a single point of contact with the other. Dejima is "a high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island, some two hundred paces along its outer curve... by eighty paces deep," and it is in these claustrophobic confines that Jacob de Zoet must make a life for himself.

A junior clerk when David Mitchell's fifth book begins, de Zoet is a righteous Zeelander bullied by his prospective father-in-law into bettering his prospects on a five-year assignment with the Dutch traders who have arrived at an anxious accord with the Japanese. De Zoet is to spend his time on Dejima drafting an account of the corruption of the previous Chief Resident, but with his hands tied personally and politically, communication a chore and on an isolated island where he finds the selfsame corruption he has been tasked to investigate utterly pervasive, his orders seem impossible. The hands and slaves despise what their interlocutor stands for; Dejima's intellectuals keep their distance from de Zoet's feeble attempts at a dialogue; and those of the lowly clerk's superiors who are not immediately dismissive of him are perhaps as crooked as their court-martialed predecessor.

And then de Zoet goes and falls in love.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is, firstly, a beautiful book, with an evocative, ethereal title and - here in the UK, at least - a striking cover of burnished blues courtesy of Leicester-born artist Joe Wilson. Indeed, Mitchell's fifth full-length fiction is a thing of beauty through and through, from the strictly superficial, as above, through to the more considered. His descriptive prose, a rare pleasure though it is amid the cacophony of languages and chatter and perspectives that are among the defining features of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is wrought of the very finest stuff. "Silver birches shiver," the babe whose troubled birth begins this hypnotic narrative is "a boiled-pink despot" and a river "is a drunk, charging boulders and barging banks." What with all the other factors in play there's not often room for Mitchell's exquisite narration, but when the masterful voice of the oft-nominated though never yet triumphant Man Booker prize favourite at last comes through unadorned, it's near-enough impossible not to notice.

In terms of the Booker, at least, the odds are that this'll be Mitchell's year: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is 500 pages of unadulterated literary craftsmanship. The novel's narrative, though largely confined to a single location, is breathtakingly expansive, far-reaching and intimate all at once. Its characters run the gamut from religious to righteous to repulsive; each have their own wry or tragic tales to tell and their own distinct lilt to tell them in. And Dejima... wonderful, bounteous Dejima... why, I could devote an entire essay to the remarkable setting of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet alone. The island positively sings, and what we are allowed to see of its forbidden surrounding area - in particular the shrine of Shiranui, to whose halls of horror the object of poor lovelorn de Zoet's prohibited passion is spirited away - is no less extraordinary. But while Mitchell's latest is an easy book to admire - its beauty is unequivocal - it's a harder thing to truly love; though in the end, love it you will.

Let me explain. The early-going of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is tremendously promising: a belated birth which begets the presence of Orito Aibagawa on Dejima before the arrival of her awkward would-be suitor and the trial of the trading port's previous Chief Resident makes for an exciting and pleasantly confounding start. But the introductions to Dejima's residents come thick and fast thereafter, and though dodgy dealer Arie Grote, who "has a grin full of holes and a hat made of shark-hide," assures us that we need not remember every one of the island's myriad characters right off the bat, it's difficult not to feel little left behind as the revolving doors of de Zoet's hovel in Tall House go round and round again. Once the catch-up's over, the entertainment - and what rowdy entertainment it is - begins in earnest... only to come to an abrupt anti-climax at the end of the narrative's first act, whereupon de Zoet - the filter through which we have seen and begun an understanding Dejima and its alien environs, not to mention the who's-who of characters roaming about its seductive streets - de Zoet practically vanishes into the background, and Mitchell strands us with nary a word of explanation in a new place, with new people and no-one to make the necessary introductions.

The overwhelming feeling this turn of events leaves one with is of isolation; absolute isolation. And it's devastating. Of course, the sense of isolation serves a pivotal purpose, but reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet has been an exercise in intense concentration up to this point, its rewards self-evident and plentiful, but at the outset of book two, when the game changes and you need it more than ever, the boisterous pacing that has driven the demanding narrative so far rather stutters. Things pick up soon enough; gratefully, Mitchell doesn't leave you floundering too long, and from there on out the narrative only ups the stakes.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet starts brilliantly, then, and concludes with an equally memorable flourish, and though its middle third sags somewhat, it is to Mitchell's credit that he handily defends his narrative from any notion of meandering with a clarity of purpose that, obfuscated at first, reveals itself in time - and to great effect. Lively and lovely, powerfully intelligent, rich in character and practically obscene in the boundless generosity of its setting, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet might try your patience for a moment, but even at its lowest ebb, Mitchell's latest is never less than a remarkable read.

***

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

by David Mitchell

May 2010, Sceptre

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading