A Review of David Mitchell's Number9dream: "A Hypnotizing Read"

I bought David Mitchell's Number9dream from Amazon.com after someone phoned me and said, sounding out of breath, "You've GOT to read this book!", then hung up. I didn't know which book he meant, so I took it as an excuse to buy this one...

David Mitchell's Number9Dream is a novel about our sense of reality - the way that mediums like TV, books and the Internet and the characters within them become as much a part of our lives as the events directly affecting us. It's a free ride through the character's consciousness, and I loved it!


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The Plot of Number9dream
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In David Mitchell's Number9dream, we are spending a summer following Eiji Miyake as he tries to locate his long lost father and bring closure to that part of his life. He travels from the southern island of Yakushima to the heart of throbbing Tokyo, where he suspects his father will be found. Each of Number9dream's eight long chapters then takes us into a different aspect of Japanese culture, with Eiji's search forming a narrative thread that stitches the scenes together. From his rented apartment above a small video shop, he heads for the Panopticon building, from where he thinks he can gather information on his father's whereabouts. While sitting in a cafe outside the building and working up the courage to go in, he spots a beautiful waitress who is later to develop into a romantic interest; this is just another exploration of the connections we make with people in the modern world, and in this case it's love that unites the two. There are brief interludes here where we flash-back to Eiji's childhood and his very special and close relationship with his sister, Anju.

-Possible plot spoiler in the next paragraph (skip it if you don't want to know!)-

Through a complex series of events, he soon finds himself working in a lost property office. He then falls in with a man at a video arcade, ends up in a Mafia-like gang war, discovers the writings of a somewhat mad attic fabulist (I love this bit!), finds the journal of a torpedo pilot and finally returns home to his rainy southern island home. The events that cause these dramatic changes in the direction of Number9dream's plot can be as minor as a chance phone call or a coincidental meeting; it is because Eiji is largely unburdened that he can move so freely through the arteries of the city.
This might sound like an evasive and truncated summary of the plot of Number9dream, but this really is all there is to it - a blur of separate events linked by a main character. David Mitchell's Number9dream is more about the culture of Japan, the speed of modern life and the connections we make with people every day.


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Mitchell's Style In Number9dream
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This is the part I love about Number9dream. It's all in the first person, with Eiji telling us very candidly and elegantly exactly what is going on. But sometimes he gets carried away and starts day-dreaming, and we have to separate fact from fiction to discover what is actually happening. A similar thing happens when Eiji is reading - we don't get told that this is not happening to Eiji and is actually a book he is reading, we just have to show a little intelligence and figure it out for ourselves. The effect of this is that the story is much more exciting and dramatic than a book which obeyed common sense - Eiji can imagine whatever he wants and take us on that journey with him. It's rather like entering into the character's consciousness, but instead of knowing where he is and what he is doing, we have to extract this ourselves from the stream of conscious thought that he experiences. I'm afraid that I can't really do this style justice without giving you a short excerpt, so here's one picked at random:

A kryptonite-green Jeep, throbbing with time-travel music, mounts the pavement. Lolita in the passenger seat spits cherry pips out of the window, while Dalai Lama darts in, nursing a fluffy white ferret - it sports a pink-and-lime bow tie - in one arm and three videos in the other. "Jason and the Argonauts thrilled us, Sinbad chilled us, Titanic killed us. Myths are no longer what they used to be. I should know - I wrote them." I check the return-by dates and thank him. Dalai Lama moonwalks out and waves the ferret's paw like this.

Out of context, you might find this all a little confusing, but let me tell you this - it is still confusing in context. Half the fun of Mitchell's style in Number9dream is that sometimes you don't quite know what is going on - you have to keep reading to figure it all out. Often the chapters don't explain themselves until the very end, so persist and you'll be rewarded.

David Mitchell's description is rich, his characters weird and unbelievably deep - just take a look at what Dalai Lama says in this excerpt and you'll see what I mean - and it's one of the most enthralling writing styles I've ever had the good fortune to stumble upon.


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The Verdict on David Mitchell's Number9dream
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Number9Dream is as much a grand tour of Tokyo as it is a moving personal story. The subverted and twisting plot-line races through Tokyo's underworld with unpredictable flashbacks of Eiji's childhood, finally returning us to his home island and leaving us wondering whether any of it actually happened at all. It's an exhilarating ride. But it is David Mitchell's style, rather than the characters or plot, that makes Number9dream unique and worth devoting your time to. Though it seems not to fit any genre, I think "filmic hyper-imagined fiction" would fit the bill nicely. The only drawback of such a fast style is that we often leave characters behind before we really get to know them.

Highly addictive, David Mitchell's Number9dream is the kind of novel that keeps you up at night, infiltrates your dreams and makes you stay off work "ill" just so you can finish it. I loved it so much that today I dialed a random number on my phone; when a guy picked up, I said "You've GOT to read this book!". I think he'll know which one I meant.