Other turn-of-the-millennium writers (Douglas Coupland and George Saunders among them) had already departed from conventional realism with such provocative opening lines as “I’m Jared, a ghost.” But Mitchell was the one who remembered to leave a trail of breadcrumbs back to reality. No one had ever managed to get a science-fiction thingy up David Mitchell’s nostril.Īlso admirable were the extraordinary narrative feats he managed without ever leaving the boundaries of literary realism. He did not do things like publish stories on Twitter or have Facebook accounts for his characters. Back then, Mitchell was the clean-living nice guy who hardly ever reviewed or blurbed. For a long time, when faced with a difficult question involving my writing career, if someone was trying to feed me publishing-banjax to get me to do something vulgar, I would always ask myself, “What would David Mitchell do?” and act accordingly. And it reminds me that I have an embarrassing confession to make. When I’m in doubt - as I am now - I ask myself, ‘What would Carl Jung do?’ - and act accordingly.”Īlthough I can’t imagine Jung ever turning down any magical food or drink, I’m sure this is otherwise an admirable code by which to live. When she refuses to eat a wild strawberry, the would-be victim gives the following explanation: “In all the tales, the myths, the rule is, if you eat or drink anything - pomegranate seeds, faerie wine, whatever - the place has a hold on you. . . To do this, the host must first get her victim to eat or drink something containing banjax, a substance that makes the soul easier to harvest.

Her host is planning to dine on her soul, after using a kind of science-fiction thingy to reach in through her nostrils and pluck it out. At one point in this novel a character is led through an “aperture” into a magical, intradimensional garden.

The slade house book