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"What is real and what is not?" David Mitchell'sGhostwritten: A Novel in Nine Partsplays with precisely this question throughout its elaborately compartmentalized narrative. (That there are 10 chapters in this 9-part invention is just one more aspect of the author's mysterious schema.) With its multitude of voices and globe-girdling locations--Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Petersburg, London--this first novel offers readers a vertiginous, sometimes seductive, display of persona and place.
At the heart of Mitchell's book is the global extension of the postmodern city, and the networks (cultural, technological, phantasmagoric) to which it gives rise. A metropolis like Tokyo is quite literally beyond our comprehension:
Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It's so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It's long since filled up the plain, and now it's creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaiming land from the bay in the east. The city never stops rewriting itself. In the time one street guide is produced, it's already become out of date. It's a tall city, and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one.
At this level, urban sprawl becomes an epistemological condition. On one hand it leads to a Japanese death cult, purging the "unclean" from the city's subway with nerve gas. And on the other, it produces a certain splintering of the human personality. "I'm this person, I'm this person, I'm that person, I'm that person too," chants Neal, the narrator of the book's second part. "No wonder it's all such a ... mess." He's talking about his life as a Hong Kong trader, a "man of departments, compartments, apartments." But he might also be describing the experience of readingGhostwritten. At once loquacious and knowing, leisurely and frantic, Mitchell offers a huge, but fragmentary, portmanteau. And while he's labored diligently to solder together the many parts--the aching bodies, the reality police, the impossibly complex machinery of contemporary life--his novel, too, may suffer from an excess of split personality.--Vicky Lebeau
A Ghostly Voice Whispering Visions from other Stories When I started reading this book, I was initially thrown and a bit puzzled by the fact that the chapters appeared to be separate narratives with no relationship to each other. Then slowly, and quite uncannily, a line or reference would trigger a sometimes subtle, sometimes acute memory from a previous chapter.
This kept me reading, and the references kept building in layers. They were often clever, surprising, funny, tender, or shocking. By the end of the book, I could see that what initially appeared fragmented, has an undercurrent cohesiveness that makes this experimental work both intriguing and enjoyable.
The characters are varied and often weird, but never uninteresting. They range from a delusional mass murderer, to an Australian girl reading War and Peace on a train, to a young music store manager with a crush on one of his customers, to and old woman who owns a tea-shack, to a money launderer, to a kind of viral intelligence that invades human minds, to a sentient satellite.
The settings too are wide-ranging (Okinawa, Tokyo, London, Mongolia, St Petersburg), as indicated by the place names that are used for chapter titles. Mitchell freely mixes gritty newsreel realism with elements of magic realism and science fiction.
This is an ambitious but successful novel well worth reading.
Thoughtful, sensitive, and insightful Much has been made about the enigmatic title of this novel, which reads, as others have said, more like a collection of inter-connected short stories, but that connection itself may be the key to this wonderful debut novel from a richly talented author. Although the book ends perhaps two chapters too late, notwithstanding its mostly regretable dip toward science fiction, each tells the story of a coherent whole which itself is entertwined into a larger whole best described by the end of one of those stories: "Finally I understand...how the forces that hold (us) together are one."
We ghostwrite our own lives in our hopes and ambitions; we merely are characters within the complex fiction of time. Or, as another of the characters says: "Does chance or fate control our lives? Well, the answer is as relative as time. If you're in your life, chance. Viewed from outside, like a book you're reading, it's fate all the way."
Ghostwritten is one of the best American novels I've read in many years and places Mitchell squarely beside Baker as perhaps the best American novelist alive today.tarantino meets calvino Fans of postmodern literature will recognize hints of Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler." The action lurches from one story to the next, connected only in tangential ways. What is an unimportant detail in one story is the highlight of another story. Mitchell uses this structure to elaborate on themes of chance and coincidence.
Another comparison (slightly strained maybe) would be to Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction, with its careening plot-line, snappy dialogue, and multi-dimensional characters. As in that movie, the vignettes in Ghostwritten are really engaging as short works of their own.
The strange structure of the book would be really grating without good writing, and it's a testament to Mitchell's abilities as a young writer that he was able to pull this off so successfully.
