David Mitchell's Influences

This is not a review of David Mitchell's new novel, The Bone Clocks, which I finished yesterday. I'm reviewing The Bone Clocks for the newspaper in September and I'll reread it & write a comprehensive review then. No, this is a blog post about what I think are main influences on the book. I will say in parenthesis that I thought the novel was very good and quite the change of pace from his last work, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which was a historical romance set in eighteenth century Japan. 
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Like Thousand Autumns, The Bone Clocks takes place in a world the reader initially thinks is our own but which isn't quite our Earth because of the existence of magic. In brief The Bones Clocks is about a cult of immortals with magical powers who provide the link between a series of long sections told from the perspective of different characters. Temporally the novel runs from the mid 1980's to the middle of the twenty first century. In Latin America these types of novels are known as magical realism but David Mitchell's writing is very dry, sceptical and English and not really anything like the works of the magical realist bigwigs such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende (but it does owe a debt to the intellectual and speculative ideas of Jorge Luis Borges). 
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Mitchell was born in 1969 so he's a little bit younger than me, but he grew up in 70's Britain and now lives in rural Ireland so we've got something of the same cultural background. Where Mitchell leaves me behind however is the 15 years he spent living in Japan which has had a profound influence on his style. Much of Mitchell's recent writing reminds me of the work of the Japanese master Haruki Murakami with the strong visual influence of manga and the cinema of Hayao Miyazaki.
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Other influences that I can sniff out in The Bone Clocks are Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Thomas Pynchon, Kinglsey and Martin Amis (The Alteration & Time's Arrow) Michael Moorcock, Iain Banks, Philip K Dick and of course JG Ballard.
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Like I say I'm not allowed to review The Bone Clocks here but if all this sounds like an interesting and heady mix to you you can pre-order The Bone Clocks now at all good bookshops or at the usual online outlets.  
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One more thing, if you don't mind a slight spoiler and you really enjoyed 1000 Autumns of Jacob De Zoet highlight the following hidden text: Dr Marinus from Jacob is a character in Bone Clocks...dont ask me how - that wd be telling.

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

Is there any point reviewing a ten year old novel that's been a massive popular best seller from a critically acclaimed author and is soon to be turned into a blockbuster movie? Well when you put it like it there probably isn't: American Gods has been praised to the skies and its sold in the millions and Neil Gaiman is an intelligent, charming and personable fellow. I met the chap once and I liked him. I've enjoyed other Neil Gaiman novels and of course I'm a fan of his classic comic, The Sandman. My copy of American Gods is covered with reviews and there's even a Q&A section at the back of the book for use in book groups. By any standards this is a successful book. And yet?

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And yet I didn't like it very much at all. The central premise was good and some of the scenes were executed beautifully, but in general I thought American Gods was pretty poor. The main idea is this: as immigrants arrived in America from Europe they brought their gods with them - these gods became manifested through the immigrants' belief in them and the more people believed in the gods the more powerful they became. We follow a character called Shadow as he is released from prison and gets a job working for a down at heel Odin who isnt very popular anymore. I like this notion but unfortunately the novel spirals out of control pretty quickly after that. Shadow's wife is killed and comes back as a ghost, a leprechaun character is introduced and is only interested in drinking and fighting, Television has become a god and is somehow manifested through Lucille Ball who in a yucky scene attempts to flash Shadow on a motel room TV. The book just gets sillier after that until I was skipping pages and wanting the whole thing to end. There was a bit of a Terry Gilliam vibe working here - bad bloated indulgent Terry Gilliam not dangerous, funny inventive TG. And it made me wistful for the book Gaiman wrote with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens; I wished he'd written this one with Pratchett too as we would have had Gaiman's enjoyable premise enlivened with some good comedy.
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The tone of American Gods is uncertain, neither gothic nor comedic nor naturalistic and it is not brilliant enough to have become sui generis. Gaiman's aesthetic role model for his big American novel seems to have been Stephen King but I really wish he'd stayed closer to his English roots and chanelled Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and PG Wodehouse instead.
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And yeah I appreciate that this is a minority view but thats why you come to this blog isn't it?