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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
hard to get into........but worth it in the end, 21 Mar 2007
This is the last of David Mitchell's current output I have read. After being utterly enamoured by 'Cloud Atlas', 'Ghostwritten' and 'Black Swan Green' I was really looking forward to this. I'd have to say though that this is the hardest read of Mitchell's four books. The other three really WERE "unputdownable" but this one I had to give up on half way through and come back to it after a few weeks.
The central figure of the book is Eiji Miyake, a kid from the sticks, and his adventures in the Tokyo metropolis. He arrives in Tokyo on a mission to find his biological father, having lost his twin sister in an accident and been abandoned by his mother. The book tells the story of his seven weeks in Tokyo. The narrative employs Mitchell's trademark magical realism to illustrate Eiji's travails.
Like all of Mitchell's other works, 'Number9dream' is best seen as a collection of tales rather than an uninterrupted story. It flits between reality and Eiji's imagination with ease. I found this fine for the first part of the book but I got lost in the chapter "Study of Tales". For the first time reading Mitchell I didn't get the point! I still don't know what the stories Eiji was reading here were about. Perhaps I'm just not perceptive enough, but this felt like a little bit of Emperor's New Clothes. Hate to be too critical but there you are!
The rest of the book is thoroughly enjoyable and I'm glad I read it. I particularly liked the Yakuza sequences. Very violent, very Manga. The chapter describing the war diaries of Eiji's great uncle was also very well written.
A good book but not as good as the rest of David Mitchell's work. If you're coming to him fresh read 'Cloud Atlas' or 'Ghostwritten' first.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another excellent novel from David Mitchell, 5 Mar 2001
By A Customer
Number9Dream is a stunning drawing together of consciousness, fantasy, fiction, history, diary and dream that holds up the dilemma of the contemporary consciousness. Culture draws upon all these areas of reality perception, continually reinventing one as the other without ever finding a true centre. It is this that Mitchell's writing does so well - the tenuous yet persistent interconnectivity of separate modes of reality, whether different lives or forms of cultural experience. The ever increasing dovetailing in culture of ancient alongside new, national with international, individual and cultural, organic and technologic, western and non-western - without reconciliation - makes modern Japan a perfect setting for his story. The style is less tight than his first novel Ghostwritten, but is far more playfull and daring in scope. It is very much an example of the dream literature spearheaded by Haruki Murakami in Japan in novels such as The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.The central story is about a twenty year old man who once beheaded the Thunder God in his small agricultural island to avenge the death of his twin sister and who has come to an overwhelming Tokyo to seek his father. The identity of his father lurks behind every door in the complex plot - but as each is opened he vanishes. A buildungsroman where the extreme violence at the hands of the Yakuza is contrasted to the polite sensitivity of the firstperson narrator Eijo, whose self-effacing love of the girl with the perfect neck sweeps aside the cultural differences of class, wealth and education. Immersion in the reality of an amusement arcade motorbike race is wrapped up with a visit to a geisha house and fantasies of virtual reality gaming violence, sales of body parts, Pentagon hacking and email viruses are part of life for this impoverished orphan living in a rented capsule above a video shop. Modern life is shown as an extraordinary pastiche where the most satisfactory outcome of the search for meaning can only be gratification from the (enthralling) search itself. Mitchell doffs his hat at Murakami in his statement that John Lennon's #9Dream is a progression upon the Beatles' Norwegian Wood (also the title of a novel by Murakami). Both he claims are songs about aloneness and certainly the novels are about being alone or anomy. Number9Dream novel borrows from the Telemachus tradition of the son searching for a father. The 'Goatwriter' interludes borrows from the Mousetrap tradition, and works to highlight extreme pastiche of modern society, with the Goatwriter - echoing of the title of Mitchell's first novel Ghostwritten - searching for the Holy Grail of writing, the untold tale. It reminded me of Wim Wenders Until the End of the World where characters travel from Europe under threat of war to the centre of Australia to find the foundations of dreams and writing - and the Goatwriter story, like the 'Mousetrap', is a miniture of the concerns of the novel itself in its reflections on reality, dream and self. And in summary: I couldn't put it down.
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fizzing, multitextured, overwhelming and human story, 31 July 2001
By A Customer
In Ghostwritten Mitchell excelled when confronted with the Other; in the superb opening tale of a Japanese subway bombing, or the epic story of a soul's journey through many hosts in its search for its origin. That novel failed when the basic components were familiar, when the plot and characters occupied recognisable spaces, and when Mitchell overreached in terms of the variety of tales he told. In Number9dream the book achieves a degree of unity - it basically follows the story of a young man looking for his father in Tokyo, this plotline interrupted, delayed, sped up and dropped by other voices and stories that want to be heard. Tokyo is described in terms of an opaque, fast, towering underworld, a reference to the subterranean region of the mind accessible through dreams. Therefore, as Eiji experiences a psychological resolution to his quest, by returning to his starting point, can Tokyo's complex, overwhelming landscape be razed to the ground. The novel is verbally lush, some sections extraordinary (the double date, the kaiten pilot's diary), whereas some parts are weaker, owing again to familiarity (movie-ish false start opening chapter) or overreaching in style (the goatwriter sections). However, it is a beautiful book, full of amusing, lovely, believable and complicated characters, and Eiji as protagonist reacts always with a reassuring lack of pretension to the mad, unreal reality that he occupies in the loud, overcrowded city.
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