And the relentless replacing of you with yer in his speech grated like hell. The problem is, Mitchell wants us to like him so his villainy serves little purpose. Dean, the bass player, is insidiously obnoxious and would make a splendid villain. It's like he's so smitten with the band he's created he neglects to bother much about its components. When I think of how many memorable characters he created in Cloud Atlas it's baffling that here he couldn't come up with a single one of compelling interest. Like the long gratuitous passages of crass chit chat and the Madame Tussauds cast of dead rock stars who each appear for a cameo appearance but who are mostly as silly and gimmicky as waxworks. In fact, at times it seems like 90% dressing with a thin story running through it. He lovingly describes their songs and provides us with (longwinded dreary) interviews they give to the press. He writes about them with fidgety infatuated excitement. This often struck me as a novel written with too much glee and not enough artistry.
They at least though were entertaining in their silly madcap way. The decline began with The Bone Clocks and Slade House. My love affair with Mitchell reached its peak with Cloud Atlas. I hate to say this but, after some entertainment early on, I found Utopia Avenue irritating, vapid and often boring. Mitchell's American editor at Random House is novelist David Ebershoff. In 2007, Mitchell was listed among Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World. In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. His two subsequent novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I'd spent the last 6 years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself." Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), moves around the globe, from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-Millennial New York City, as nine narrators tell stories that interlock and intersect. In an essay for Random House, Mitchell wrote: "I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. After another stint in Japan, he currently lives in Ireland with his wife Keiko and their two children. He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England. David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A.
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