Just in case you were wondering if anyone could be more Murakami than the man, here comes David Mitchell - a dyed-in-the-wool Englishman at that - to up the ante a little.
His debut work "Ghostwritten" made him a cause celebre amongst the, undoubtedly graying, postmodern literati; people were expecting a magnum opus as a followup.
Number9Dream, I reckon, will be a hard act to follow.
It is about the search of 19-year-old Eiji Miyake for his father, whom he has never met. Told in first person, it begins as a simple coming of age story; but soon, it traverses uncharted literary territory, juxtaposing Eiji Miyake’s actual journey toward identity and understanding with his imaginative journey.
Interleaving narrations are everywhere; a surrealistic tale featuring three anthropomorphic animals, a series of letters from people irrevocably tied to his past, a journal from his grandfather impersonating a friend, all seem to send the tale careering on tangents unbeknownst to anyone but the author, but finally, in the last few chapters, as it regains a semblance of regular narrative, we see each deux ex machina has served its purpose, albeit retrospectively.
Eiji, in his search for his father, does not just find himself the cliched way; he stumbles upon secrets about his family that, again, reinforce his perceptions that his early separation from his family was a godsend, as far as his sanity would have been concerned.
With a Yakuza gang subject to a coup d'etat by the femme fatale, a few impersonations of identity leading to permanent separations, and a good dollop of surreal language, Mitchell has beaten the master himself.
I give it an 11/10 and for good cause.
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