Slade House by David Mitchell - review

One afternoon in October 1979, at the invitation of Lady Norah Grayer, 13 year-old Nathan Bishop and his mother Rita arrive at Slade House, reached down dark and narrow Slade Alley, through a small iron door. Despite the cramped surrounding streets, on the other side of the Tardis-like wall Slade House looms grandly, a mansion at the end of a long garden.

Or does it? Before long, Mitchell has plunged Nathan and his mother into a disorienting nightmare where nothing is as it seems — and which they will never leave. A series of further victims disappear in similar circumstances, every nine years at the end of October: an oafish police officer, Gordon Edmonds; student Sally Timms — hers an especially bad-dream-like disappearing — and then her sister, Freya.

David Mitchell’s new novella grew from a short story written on Twitter in 2014. But while its setting is changed from last year’s Man Booker-longlisted The Bone Clocks — a nondescript, unnamed southern English town — Slade House is set firmly in the same metanarrative: the cosmic struggle between the soul-stealing Atemporals of the Shaded Way and their deadly rivals, the time-travelling Horologists battling to save humanity.

Mitchell is famous for his intertextual tricks, and plenty dot these pages. There are passing references to Zedelghem, the Belgian estate that features in one of Cloud Atlas’s interlocked stories, and an appearance by the sister of Jonny Penhaligon, an aristocratic student gambler who commits suicide in The Bone Clocks. And Marinus, a hero of The Bone Clocks who first appeared in Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, makes a triumphant, shape-shifting return.