Book review: David Mitchell's Slade House reaffirms fiction's vital moral importance
If you haven't yet read anything by the bestselling author, this may be the ideal place to start
by David Mitchell
Random House
All good novels lure us into what Henry James called the house of fiction, where we surrender ourselves and lose track of time. Reading is about desire, and fiction's rooms give us ample space to fantasise selves and worlds entirely unlike our own.
All of which can make us vulnerable. When we read, we let our guard down and let ourselves go. And because the house we've entered is haunted, the dreams drawing us in can quickly morph into nightmares. Sometimes, we get so lost we even have a hard time finding our way back out.
That's what happens to the characters - think of them as readers - who enter the Slade House located within Slade House. It's situated in Slough, a place 20 miles west of London that endured particularly heavy Blitz bombing in October 1940. All of Slade House unfolds during October - to be precise, the last Saturday in successive Octobers at intervals of nine years, beginning in 1979 and culminating in 2015.