Slade House by David Mitchell - a review

"Slade House" by David Mitchell

A (Halloween) review

Welcome to Slade House. Soooo glad you managed to make your way here. Slade Alley does have this habit of disappearing into thin air, you know. And if you manage to find its entrance, it’s so easy to miss the little door to the sumptuous garden. Even if you’re looking for it! But now you’re here, let us keep you company during these blissful hours. They may well be your last...

Prior to reading this book, I only knew David Mitchell through his Cloud Atlas. Reading that novel, I had been impressed by Mitchell’s ability to combine wildly diverse genres and to convincingly give voice to different narrators, all within a grand, perfectly controlled structure.

"Slade House" is a much slenderer and less ambitious work and yet it shares certain elements with the earlier novel. The book takes us from 1979 to 2015, with each of its 5 sections set in October at intervals nine years apart. Each segment (except for the last) is narrated by the “guest” lured to Slade House. Mitchell’s genius in conveying different narrative voices is as brilliant as ever and, in each case, the period and the setting are masterfully evoked. The structure necessitates a degree of repetition, but this never annoys – rather it gives the novel the feel of a dark ritual.

Some critics have hailed the originality of Slade House. I'm not so sure about that.  In reality, Mitchell makes the most of several common tropes of genre fiction, managing to blend them into one gripping book. Nominally a “haunted house” supernatural tale (although ultimately it's not), Slade House also has elements of psychological horror, noir (including a detective “anti-hero” in its second part), time-travel (of sorts), crime fiction, “missing person” thriller, Harry-Potter-like dark fantasy, all (ironically) played out against a very realistic backdrop and featuring very credible characters. If there is such a thing as a postmodern ghost story, this would be it.

Unfortunately, without denying that this is a haunting and quite scary yarn, my initial enthusiasm dampened somewhat as the novel progressed. Being a supernatural tale, Mitchell has some explaining to do if he is to give his novel an internal logic. Since he does away with the omniscient third person narrator, he resorts to monologues by certain characters, which are very obviously meant to fill the reader in. Admittedly, Mitchell tries to incorporate these passages into the plot (one of the characters is berated for revealing too much), but at times we seem to see through the author’s workings – in other words, art does not  manage to conceal art.

What irked me most, however, was the final segment. Having suspended disbelief without particular difficulty throughout the book, we are then expected to accept a twist which takes us to a different level of fantasy. I found this rather too sudden a gear-change. Reading other reviews, I understand that the ending makes reference to Mitchell’s earlier novel The Bone Clocks and is more effective if one has read that first. So perhaps I should now get my hands on The Bone Clocks and then book a return stay at Slade House!

Paperback, 233 pages

Published June 28th 2016 by Sceptre (first published October 20th 2015)