Book reviews: new fiction by David Mitchell, Erica Jong and Tess Gerritsen
Mitchell creates another phantasmagoric vision, Jong rages against mortality, and Gerritsen composes the sound of possession
by David Mitchell (read by Thomas Judd and Tania Rodrigues)
Sceptre (audiobook)
Last year’s The Bone Clocks was bewildering in all senses of the word – a swirling, time-travelling tornado that swept up everything in its path: literature, war, good, evil, realism, fantasy and myth. It was fun and confusing, deep and determinedly shallow. Slade House feels like a rat leaving that sinking ship, a sliced-up novella that began its life on Twitter. Throwing off the constraints of 140 characters, we get a drug-fuelled vision of the sort that ended The Bone Clocks. As in the best of Mitchell’s works, characters, plots and motifs cycle, repeat and alter before our eyes. At the centre is Nathan, who in 1979 attends a (Slade) house party, heads towards the attic and, like so many characters in The Bone Clocks, enters a phantasmagorical realm. This same journey will be played and replayed in subsequent sections until the twist in October 2015. Thomas Judd reads teen Nathan and the cartoonishly intolerant cop Gordon a tad too enthusiastically, making Mitchell’s wordiness and souped-up diction feel, well, souped-up. Tania Rodrigues also doesn’t hold back, which leaves it to the plot to keep you going, but only just.
by Erica Jong (read by Suzanne Toren)