Grief's an amputation, but hope's incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.

Slade House by David Mitchell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Slade House is David Mitchell daring you to get bored.

Structured as a set of stories about people visiting Slade House - a mansion whose existence seems to defy the laws of physics - the same rhythm echoes through each of the tales. The first chapter is about an autistic boy, Nathan Bishop, who visits the house with his divorced pianist mother in 1979. While she's inside displaying her talents to world-famous musicians, Nathan is outside in the garden getting his long-awaited first taste of friendship. However, what is his new companion really after?

Fast forward a few years and recast those themes into a different person's life: longing meets fulfillment in a whirl of emotion too intense for anything amiss to be noticed until it's (almost) too late. Fast forward again. Repeat. With every repetition, the similarities are striking, but so are the differences in the ways that the characters perceive Slade House. You come to expect certain things to happen again, but there's surprise in noticing just which details do and don't reappear, and in finding that the stories are more connected than you might at first expect. As a result, even though you might be pretty sure you know how things are going to turn out, you can't help but get pulled to the idea that this is the chapter where the cumulative force of the past is going to catalyze a turnaround. It creates suspense and momentum where there could otherwise be choppiness and predictability.

It also makes it possible to care about the characters. When you know what's going to happen to someone, it's easy to become detached. When you think you know but aren't sure, you're drawn towards hope like a moth towards fire (a recurring image in the novel, for good reason). And it's a wonderfully diverse group of characters that we have here, and I loved how we learn about their lives through understated little details instead of lengthy spelled-out histories.

I'm giving it four stars instead of five for a couple of reasons: 1) most of it reads like a standalone that doesn't rely on knowledge of The Bone Clocks, but it ultimately doesn't quite achieve that; 2) there's a cliche scene of a villain telling a victim all about their nefarious plan for no remotely logical reason; and 3) there's a strange obsession with one character's weight, to the point that it's the first thing that appears in any character's mind when they think of her. Really?

Aside from those issues, I found this book to be creepy and saddening and thrilling - another example of how skillfully David Mitchell can bridge multiple voices and sub-stories into a cohesive whole. Any time I had to put it down, I did so reluctantly and couldn't wait to pick it back up.

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