David Mitchell's second novel, *Number9Dream*, is a big book,
both literally (it's 400 pages) and literarily. Weaving dream
imagery, yakuza machinations, the journal of a Japanese WWII
suicide torpedoist, a witch's appearance, and lengthy stretches
of internal narrative, this book is a disjointed, clunky read:
think Dickens meets Coupland, without the literary inventiveness
of the former or the cultural uniqueness of the latter. The plot
is straightforward: Eiji Miyake, a young lad of 20, leaves his
provincial island home to venture in big bad Tokyo to find his
father, whom he's never met. Eiji's twin sister, Anju, drowned
when she was 11, and Eiji feels responsible for her death
(whether he is or not is up to the reader's moral compass to
decide, and it turns out to be a less than engaging ethical
endeavor.) Their mother abandoned them when they were young;
she's an alcoholic and has been in and out of mental
institutions.
The problem with this novel is that it never addresses the main
concern that supposedly pivots the entire plot: why Eiji wants to
meet his father. Mitchell goes to great length to show his
literary intellect and prowess: The first chapter is called
"PanOpticon;" it's the name of an office
building in Tokyo where Eiji believes the answers to his
father's whereabouts lie. There's a subtle trick here: if you
haven't read Foucault, you won't get the double meaning of the
chapter or the building. There are abundant references to John
Lennon, and to *Double Fantasy*; again, if you don't know that
album you're missing the double meaning of the double meanings.
The number 9 and its various forms - 333, a ninth floor, appear
throughout the book, but for what intention? The scenes with
yakuza predators hunting Eiji read like attempts at a Kafkaesque
nightmare, but actually feel intrusive and irrelevant to the
text: a grisly scene in a bowling alley involving three live
human heads as pins; a card game where the loser loses various
organs, detracts from the story rather than what it appears
Mitchell intends it to do - create a menacing, Big Brother
presence.
Mitchell's language, too, is jarring. Would one Japanese kid
really say to another "You spouted such rubbish," and would a
Japanese truck driver honestly use the phrase "Crafty sod still
owes me ten thousand yen"? I think not, but Mitchell, who hails
from Lancashire, England, slips these
Britishisms into his Japanese dialogue. Mitchell also tends to
use the following kind of wording in his long, descriptive
passages: "The living room is polish, tatami, incense. The
kitchen is cooking oil, stainless steel, hard currants. The main
bedroom is linen, jasmine, varnish. The garden is leaf juice,
pond life, and smoke tufts." Not exactly riveting stuff; it lacks
linguistic rhythm or innovation, and reads like a long list
(which, essentially, it is.) The final chapter, which narrates
Eiji's dreams, is actually dull. It takes a highly skilled author
to make a fictional character's dreams interesting - Kafka,
Borges, Garcia Marquez can pull it off; most others can't,
because they forget that the reader has to be emotionally
invested in the mind of the dreamer. Ironically, in the midst of
Mitchell's numerous literary devices, we lose sight of the one
thing the main character does not: his wish to meet his
father.
What's most interesting about Number9Dream is how it
managed to place as a
finalist for the Booker Prize.
- reviewed By Laura Migdal