While my negative feelings about the book pale in significance to yours, I’m most of the way through re-Reading Cloud Atlas as a palate cleanser.
I hope one day to be able to read his previous work again and enjoy it, but definitely need a long break.
Okay, random thoughts time (and anything in spoiler tags will be pretty major:
The celebrity cameos - Just became more and more painful as they went on. The way they were introduced was awful too, along the lines of "Wearing a black hat and a wry smile he said hello to the Utopians. "Chuffin' heck, it's bleedin' Johnny Cash!" said Griff", I have never winced so much while reading a book, and all of the famous types felt like horrible caricatures rather than anything close to real people.
Dean - I'm not convinced that Mitchell has ever met anyone who's working class in his life now, and just based him on bad sitcoms.
The way the final three chapters are from his perspective made the end of the book a truly turgid read, and fucking hell, what tedious shite it was too, the acid trip being particularly pointless. As I mentioned above, I've never been so happy for a fictional character to die, and it was the only part of the ending that I really liked.
Jasper - What could have been an interesting and thoughtful insight in to mental illness...
Took on a bizarre fantastical bent? As rather than being schizophrenic he was actually possessed by a character from one of Mitchell's other books? This might have been an okay idea in something else, but in a book which is otherwise so reality based it just felt bizarre, and annoyed me no end. It's a real shame too as I liked some of Jasper's chapters, but for his story to end in such a strange manner was cheap and unsatisfying in the extreme.Elf - Someone I liked, but I really didn't need
the dead baby shite, and her realisation that she was gay was handled in an embarrassingly patronising manner. Still, at least some of the time her chapters were enjoyable which is something at least.
The Drummer bloke - Poor sod only got the one chapter. Probably for the best though.
As a whole the narrative
really didn't go anywhere, it was just the slow, gradual success of a band, occasionally they'd have a personal revelation but it was never that interesting, and then it ended, making me wonder what the point of it all was. All of which might have been forgivable if the prose was better, and if all the character's had been well written, but it wasn't to be. Also as I said in a previous post, if it wasn't by Mitchell I'd have ditched it after a hundred pages, and I'd be amazed if I read anything he produces after this now, the reviews will have to be absolutely stunning.