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This is an unusual work: or, perhaps, several, as it is ingeniously organised around the lives of several different characters which almost form separate novels, although they are interconnected. Starting and ending with the unhappy Pacific voyage and apparent medical problems of Mr. Ewing, it then introduces the reader to the former Caius College music student, Robert Frobisher.

Frobisher – a difficult student, perhaps – has encountered some problems after being ejected from the University, and has fled his family and creditors to Belgium in the hope of restoring his fortunes as a musical amanuensis to an aging English composer. He succeeds, for a time, and writes to a college friend, Sixsmith, describing his new life.

Sixsmith is a science student and apparently very successful. He appears in another intertwined story as a Nobel prize-winning physicist who harbours grave doubts about the safety of a new type of nuclear reactor being built in America by his current employer, Seaboard. This is not a wise career move, as the corporation’s attitude to troublesome staff seems to favour rapid and drastic silencing of its real or potential critics. Does his warning survive him? Read on….

Next, we meet Timothy Cavendish, a humdrum literary agent who becomes over-ambitious after one of his authors achieves a most unexpected success. Forced to hide from the thuggish relatives of this author (who naturally want a cut of the proceeds) he ends in an old people’s nursing home recommended by his brother but, it seems, unable to leave. Can he escape?

The other stories that form this novel are equally curious, but they do eventually form a well-integrated whole as the relations between apparently quite distinct lives are revealed. Perhaps the author might have resisted the temptation to invent a ‘newspeak jargon’ for his post-apocalyptic Hawaiian interlude, but it does add to the atmosphere of gloom and decay!

David Mitchell ISBN 978-0-340-82278-4

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