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I tried to like it. I really did, but all it did was piss me off. There's a lot of good in it, and there's also a lot of writing that should be a lot better.
Overall, it's a thing of shreds and patches; the actual overall narrative didn't grab me - Eiji's search for his father seems too part-time for my liking - but the individual sections flowed pretty neatly. I enjoyed the later ones more - Kai Ten, The Language of Mountains is Rain, and especially Cards were great - they seemed to flow better between sections. I found Video Games and Reclaimed Land, the Daimon/Yakuza sections pretty crap to be honest. It's hard to explain why... but they didn't feel like they were adding anything, and the nightmare of the bowling alley etc in section four seemed to be forgotten surprisingly easily, and then only remembered at appropriate moments. That said, section one, PanOpticon worked quite nicely with the whole dream/real alternation.
I found the last section the most pleasant to read - the language seems to flow more easily, it's better constructed, but overall there was eery similarity to the Murakami I've read. Murakami's superb, and at times Mitchell sounds like a young guy who really wants to write like Murakami. Well, Murakami-in-translation at least. Didn't quite gel.
Hmn. I'm having difficulty expressing my thoughts on this, which is why I thought I'd post it and see what you lot thought. It's a shame; I really wanted to read it, it sounded great, but just turned out disappointing. Not dreadful, but not so great. Nevermind. Onto The Last Samurai next. |
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