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. 
...
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). 
...
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.
...
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.
...
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.  
...
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.

The City And The City

China Mieville's The City And The City may be the most original crime novel I've read since Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool or possibly all the way back to James Ellroy's American Tabloid. It won the 2010 Hugo Award in a tie with Paolo Bacigalupi's excellent The Windup Girl. It also won the Arthur C. Clarke award and was nominated for the Nebula. It was ignored by the all mainstream crime awards, which is a bit odd (and embarrassingly provincial of them) because at heart the book is basically a noir detective story. I was impressed by The City And The City's technical prowess and literary ambitions; Mieville has done a great job taking a new slant on a rather staid and somewhat moribund genre.  
...
The book is set in Eastern Europe in the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which are actually adjoining city states somewhere close to Romania and Hungary. A different language is spoken in each city and they are culturally and economically distinct. Fracture lines run through the cities and initially one thinks of East and West Berlin or possibly Buda and Pest; but what makes Beszel and Ul Qoma so interesting is that they actually share much of the same topography. Streets that exist Ul Qoma exist also in Beszel, but travel from one city to the other is utterly forbidden. From a very young age children are trained to "unsee" vehicles and people who are living in the other city. This sounds weird and it takes a while to completely buy into it, but Mieville does convince you that this bizarre state of affairs could work. Mieville has been inspired by the work of Kafka and especially Bruno Schulz and that's no bad thing in a noir. 
...
The novel begins when Inspector Borlu is called upon to investigate the murder of a young woman in Beszel. He quickly discovers that her body has been transported to the crime scene from the neighbouring city of Ul Qoma and this raises all kinds of difficulties. Crossing the "border" from one city to city is the most serious crime of all in the two cities and once proof of an encroachment becomes manifest the mysterious entity Breach spirits the breachee away to God knows where. The investigation takes Borlu into the forbidden world of Ul Qoma and there the fun really begins as we begin to see conspiracies within conspiracies and the possibility of a mythical third hidden city know as Ocriny. Borlu remains a bit of a cipher throughout but this fits squarely into an old school noir trope and I didn't mind that at all. I loved the scenes with Borlu in Ul Qoma looking across to his home city of Beszel, trying to unsee familiar shops and people and realising just how strange this all was. I won't reveal any more of the plot, suffice to say that although there are no real surprises the third act of the novel is still satisfying within the predictable Kafkaesque conventions of such a narrative. 
...
China Mieville is very much the new Iain Banks, comfortable writing in various genres but with a background in science fiction. Like Banks he is prolific. I've read four of his books, two of them very good (Perdido Street Station, The City And The City) and two of them not so brilliant. It probably would have been better for Banks if he had slowed down a little and this might be a good idea for Mieville too. He shouldn't listen to his editors at Macmillan who are only interested in volume, instead he should take his foot off the gas and really relax into one project for the next year or two - I think it would be worth it as I believe he has the potential to join Zadie Smith and David Mitchell as one of the finest of the new generation of English novelists. 

I'm in a Transitional Period and I Don't Want to Kill You

Transition by Iain Banks

The fun of an Iain Banks novel is largely in its plot which makes it hard to review this book without giving away spoilers. I read none of the literature which came with the galley kindly sent to me by Little Brown so that I could ride the twists and turns of the narrative with genuine surprise. Perhaps then read this paragraph as one long SPOILER ALERT. (I am however only going to give the basic premise below so with that in mind read on or not as you wish).
...
Whew, ok, if you're still with me and you don't know who Iain Banks is that means you're probably living in North America because most of the rest of the world has been on the Iain Banks express for a couple of decades now. Let me briefly catch you up. Banks is Scottish and lives in Fife well outside the orbit of the London literary set which largely inoculates him from their solipsistic bad habits and allows him free reign to give us stories and characters without a lot of lit-crit baggage. In other words he produces page turners. Banks writes contemporary fiction often with a political or conspiratorial thrust under his own name, but he also writes science fiction novels under the name of Iain M. Banks.
...
To slightly confuse matters his new book Transition is available as an Iain Banks novel (the edition I got) and as an Iain M Banks book. I think the reason Banks isn't just calling it straight sci-fi is because his science fiction novels are mostly space operas set in a high tech universe whereas Transition takes place on contemporary Earth - actually, as we'll see, Earths. I've been a fan of Banks since I read the first two of his Culture books in high school and I slightly prefer the sci-fi stories to the contemporary ones which made it all the more exciting to find myself in the middle of an Iain Banks novel (no M.) which was a cross dimensional romp across alternate universes.
...

The premise of Transition is the logical extension of Hugh Everett's Many Worlds hypothesis in which every quantum reaction creates an entire new universe. This idea was concocted to explain some aspects of the collapse of the quantum wave form and it's one that I've never really bought into, although the device has been used as a staple in science fiction for decades. It means that are an infinite number of alternate Earths existing in a multi-verse: there's the Earth where Napoleon won Waterloo, the Earth where dinosaurs didn't go extinct, the Earth where Nazis won the war (a depressingly popular place for writers) and so on. Banks however only uses this idea as the geography and his book is about a group of agents who jump between the multiverses using a synthetic drug, which frees their minds to float across the dimensional barriers. They jump to fix things, killing potential Nazis, rigging elections etc. so that the bad guys lose a little ground in the universe and the good guys make incremental gains.
...
Banks builds his story polyphonically showing us several different points of view, including those of an assassin, a torturer, an agent controller and a mysterious patient in a hospital bed. The book takes place in 2009 and was evidently written last autumn which gives it a breathless quality I very much enjoyed. Transition in fact is vintage Banks: fast, exciting, funny and every enjoyable. There's a bit more sex than usual and this being Banks it's sex with an interdimensional twist. Banks juggles the characters well and keeps the story ticking along nicely. In terms of pace, diversity of voice and Big Ideas Transition reminded me of his underrated Feersum Endjinn which I think is the best of his non Culture science fiction novels.
...
A few minor quibbles: Banks does not explain the hard science of the jumps between worlds (just as he never explains the hard science of the hyperdrives in his Culture novels) and this will either be a relief or an irritation depending how far up the geekdom Y axis you happen to be. Banks's politics too can sometimes be a little intrusive and although in Transition he mostly keeps his views on the back burner his swipes at libertarianism would be a bit more sophisticated after a look at, say, Robert Nozick. And I'll admit that I groaned as soon one particular character said that "Mrs Thatcher was a Saint" and that "Scotland was a miserable land full of midges and Scots," - from that moment on I knew the poor fellow was as doomed as a random red shirt on a new planet. But these are minor issues. Transition is a taut, assured novel from a writer at the top of his game; for my money it is Banks's best book in a decade and is far and away the most original thriller of the year.