cyphomandra

I picked this up because I loved The Intuitionist, which may have elevated my expectations – I enjoyed this, for the most part, but I didn’t love it, and possibly it’s suffered a bit by comparison. It’s still very good.

The nameless protagonist is a nomenclature consultant, famous in his field for product names such as New Luno (soda), Loquacia (an anti-shyness medication) and Q-100 (hybrid cars), and famous to all for naming Apex, sticking plasters matched to skin colour. Events put him in a small town considering a name change – originally named Freedom by escaped slaves who settled there, then changed to Winthrop after the rich white family who made their fortune in barbed wire, and now a millionaire software pioneer wants to change it to New Prospera. The nomenclature consultant must decide.

It’s a satire; about marketing, about names, about the way we hide unpleasant things (under new names or under bandages), and about race. It’s sharp, short and uncomfortable, but these characteristics also make it a little distant as a reading experience. I really liked the moments when the barrier between the protagonist and the world around him broke down – his ongoing feud with the hotel cleaner, the journalist who just keeps asking him, “Are you keeping it real?”, which also broke the boundaries of the book enough to drag me in before I realised. I am also fond of the last line.

And I have just discovered there is a new David Mitchell book due out in May. I am madly excited by this (I loved Cloud Atlas) and even more excited to discover that it's set in Japan in 1799 with a Dutch protagonist, and an opening chapter complete with engravings from period obstetric texts. What I should really do now is read the last forty pages or so of Number9dream, which I think is a book with a lot of potential but also a lot of ability to irritate the reader - I got so caught up in the kaiten (submarine version of kamikaze) pilot's diaries that I couldn't cope with returning to the present day protagonist, and put it down for just that little bit too long. Black Swan Green was perfectly admirable technically, but I'm personally not fond of the novel as a linked series of short stories approach.