Title: literary self indulgence
Review: I was constantly aware of the author's self conscious writing while struggling to wade through this book. I kept on hoping it would redeem itself in the second half. While it improved, I feel the various stories do not add up to a whole greater than a sum of its parts - in fact the disjointed nature of this book kept me from caring about or getting involved with the stories or characters. I fail to see why Mitchell structured the book as he did except to try to impress the reader with his literary craft. The stories set in the future took constant work to understand the showy, manipulated language. I was never able to move beyond the artifice of it. Perhaps it requires a British male sense of humor and class consciousness to find the characters of Cavendish and Frobisher more funny than obnoxious, pompous and annoying. There are better ways to reveal the consequences of human greed and cruelty than this book.
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