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The Incarnations, compared in the publisher's description to the work of David Mitchell, is a weird and wonderful piece of historical/fantasy/suspense fiction unlike anything else I've read. The book opens with a letter, written to a taxi driver named Wang Jun by a person who claims to be his 'soulmate'. In this strange missive, the so-called soulmate writes of a number of 'past lives' he or she (or it) has shared with Wang, ranging across centuries of Chinese history. Wang suspects it's a prank, but the letters keep coming, and they grow more and more personal as the writer goes into further detail about the nature of these past lives (or incarnations), which range from the tale of a eunuch and a prostitute in 632 AD, to a story about teenage girls in an 'anti-capitalist' school during the Maoist 1960s. Wang's sanity hangs in the balance as the stability of his marriage is threatened by the letters' content and by his conviction that they are the work of a malicious stalker. As he tries to figure out what's going on, the reader comes to understand that the person Wang appears to be - an ordinary taxi driver, a semi-happily married man, a decent father - is not who he is; his past is much darker and more complicated. He develops a theory about the identity of the letter-writer, which the reader may be tempted to share, but is the truth really that simple?

The use of letters to tell these stories means the 'incarnations' are treated as self-contained short stories within the overarching narrative. This keeps the book constantly unpredictable and surprising while providing you with a reason to care about how and why the stories are connected. The stories are frequently violent in pretty horrible ways, including a scene of castration which I couldn't actually bear to read. There's a hell of a lot of sex (actually it's remarkable when two characters encounter each other and manage not to have sex) but also a lot of sexual violence and abuse. Relationships are frequently the product of some kind of bargain, and sex work appears to be a recurring theme, often an inevitability for young, poor women and men alike. Severe mental or physical health problems affect almost all the main characters at some point. Men are sex-obsessed, violent, horrible to their wives and abusive to their sons; women are vain, selfish, neglectful towards their children and stab each other in the back. Altogether, nobody comes off very well, although the straight men in these stories are particularly repugnant. Wang himself is often hard to sympathise with, and some of his actions are very questionable indeed. The narrative is powerful, though, with the most effective section being the one set in 1966, a shocking reminder that there are events in real, recent history more terrifying than any dystopian tale.

I understand why people might think this book is similar to some of Mitchell's work, but The Incarnations, for me, doesn't compare to Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas. The stories are all gripping and cleverly paced, but they lack any clear difference in narrative style, and it was this (in part) that made the aforementioned books so enjoyable to read. It's a good job The Incarnations is such an interesting read, as it's best devoured quickly. If I had stretched my reading of this book over a longer period of time, I imagine it would have seemed unbearably, unremittingly grim. It's a great work of fiction and very original, but not something I would want to revisit.

Not-entirely-relevant note: I know proofs are meant to be uncorrected, but I don't usually encounter more than a handful of mistakes in them; this seemed to have one on almost every page - bad/nonexistent punctuation, spelling mistakes and odd, unnatural-sounding insertion of characters' names into dialogue - and I was only able to ignore these because I was already aware it was uncorrected. Therefore I'm not knocking a star off for this, but if I'd been reading a finished copy with the same volume of errors, that would be another story.