Monday, 23 May 2011

Current reading

I'm away from home at the moment, and have a book I need to read for review, so with regret (and not wanting to travel with two hefty hardbacks) I've had to set this aside until I return. It's a measure of the book that I can't wait to get back into it.






Mitchell is one of my favorite contemporary novelists, and Thousand Autumns ... doesn't disappoint. It's a mesmering window into a truly fascinating period - the dawn of the modern age - and a snapshot of the intersection of two radically different cultures - feudal Japan in and around Nagasaki, and a corrupt outpost of the Dutch East India Company in 1799. Mitchell is a brilliant, cunning engineer of narrative hooks - it's difficult to imagine a more compulsive, page-turning narrative - but he's also a great writer of character, and on a line by line basis the writing is quite beautiful. When he mentions a bat, "chased by its own furry turbulence", he hooks an image into my mind that I think will stay with me forever.
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9 comments:

  1. contrarybear23 May 2011 at 06:34

    That book is indeed superb -- glad you're liking it too.

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  2. Anonymous25 May 2011 at 05:54

    This is one of the novels chosen for discussion at Fife's Readers' Day in November. J David Simmons chose it for the session he will be leading on - sounds like there will be plenty for the group to discuss.

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  3. Anonymous26 May 2011 at 14:04

    Alastair:

    You'd probably like James Clavell's work, especially Shogun. Shogun has some of the best worldbuilding I've ever seen; comparable to that of Revelation Space.

    BTW:
    The European Union's new space shuttle looks disturbingly like the Nostalgia for Infinity:

    http://gas2.org/2011/05/25/hydrogen-powered-skylon-spaceship-could-launch-eu-into-space/

    Gus

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  4. Nicholas Waller28 May 2011 at 16:06

    The EU-Shuttle looks a bit like Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Fireball XL5:
    http://www.retro.net/db/images/Fireball_XL5/8110/

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  5. Lev29 May 2011 at 12:28

    Mitchell really is one of the masters of the craft. Haven't got this particular book yet but I finished both Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten in a couple of days.

    I remember the EU space shuttle design on another website under the headline 'The Future of Supersonic Flight'. Weird.

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  6. Anonymous30 May 2011 at 12:04

    This book sounds lyrical/descriptive rather than technical. Not heard of it before.

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  7. Al R31 May 2011 at 02:11

    Lev: the trouble with these hypersonic concepts as that they pop up about once a decade and then die a slow death. The man behind the latest splurge is Alan Bond, who was the originator of the HOTOL concept way back in the eighties.

    Madeleine: I can't recommend Mitchell enough. And no, it's in no way technical! It's basically just a big, gorgeous, intensely realised historical novel.

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  8. marcus3 June 2011 at 04:34

    shusaku endo; the samurai (no swordfights - but one of the most beautiful opening pages in any novel i've read)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Samurai_(novel)

    (reading your relevation space books now; brilliant stuff)

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  9. marcus4 June 2011 at 08:16

    REVELATION space, it is!

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