It's clear, however, that Mitchell has a problem when it comes to sustaining a straight narrative without benefit of channel-flicking. Does he have a vision and voice of his own, or is he more of a mashup artist, a maker of structurally ingenious page-turners? In full flow, he makes the pages turn sufficiently smoothly to make such questions seem churlish as well as simple-minded. A lot of his writing takes the form of pastiche, and he's equally wide-ranging in the writers and genres he "does": Haruki Murakami, airport thrillers, Melville, science fiction. Style and, despite some recurring interests, themes don't have much bearing on his authorial signature, which has to do with more diffuse devices: multiple narrators and narrative modes, a wide range of settings in time and space, wispy connections within and between his books. But even after four substantial novels – one of them, Black Swan Green (2006), semi-autobiographical – it's hard to get a sense of his artistic personality. D avid Mitchell, of Cloud Atlas (2004) rather than Peep Show renown, has become a big name in the 11 years since his first book, winning prizes, attracting admiring reviews and finding a large, cultish readership.
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