decemberthirty: (starfruit)
[personal profile] decemberthirty
Not last night but the night before, twenty naked robbers came knocking at my door. Oh, no, wait, that’s not what happened. What happened was that I finished David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. Less exciting than naked robbers, perhaps, but the naked robbers might have freaked me out, so it’s probably for the best.

Ahem.

Ghostwritten is a globe-hopping collection of interrelated narratives. Mitchell chooses a group of disparate characters—a member of a doomsday cult in Okinawa, a clerk in a Tokyo record shop, a businessman engaged in some shady money-laundering schemes in Hong Kong, an art thief in Petersburg, a disembodied spirit in Mongolia, a fugitive physicist on a remote island in Ireland, a late-night radio dj in New York, etc—and spends a little time with each of them, getting to know them, outlining their lives, and finding the ways that their lives connect to and influence each other.

Before I read this book, someone (I think it may have been [livejournal.com profile] hells_librarian) described it to me as a “practice exercise for Cloud Atlas,” and I think that description is quite accurate. The similarities were striking enough that I spend the first half of Ghostwritten waiting for someone with a comet-shaped birthmark to appear. (She did, in the seventh of the book’s nine sections. A couple of Cloud Atlas characters made brief appearances here as well.) As in Cloud Atlas, Mitchell makes great use of his chameleon-like narrative voice. He writes about each of his varied characters in the first person, and he does a remarkable job of matching his tone and style to the personalities, nationalities, and idiosyncrasies of each of his narrators. Also like Cloud Atlas, much of the fun of this book comes from spotting the connections both small and large that link the different sections of the book to each other.

In the beginning of the book those connections seemed quite minor, nothing more than the incidental brushings of one life against another that happen to all of us every day: the cultist mistakenly calling the record-shop clerk when trying to reach his leader; the clerk thinking it’s a strange wrong number and hanging up. As the book goes on, however, the connections begin to build both in number and significance, and it becomes clear that Mitchell is trying to get at something much larger than the early chance encounters. The network of links eventually became complicated enough that I drew a chart in an attempt to diagram it all. I wish I had a scanner so that I could show you folks the mess I made with names jotted down all over the page and arrows pointing every which way—that would be the best way to convey the complexity of the book. Unfortunately, I liked the book better in the early sections. The later parts of the book were fun because of all the “Aha!” moments that came as I uncovered more and more links, but I found Mitchell’s musings on chance and free will and the fate of the world to be a bit on the grandiose side. I would have liked the book better if it had been content as a study of the ways people’s paths cross each other without their knowledge.

The bottom line is that Ghostwritten is a fun and very well-written book. It’s an intriguing read, but Cloud Atlas covers similar territory in a more accomplished fashion. I have Black Swan Green sitting at home and I’m anxious to read it just to see what Mitchell can do when he goes in an entirely different direction.

I’m fascinated to see what my book club will have to say about this book at our meeting. It’s quite different from anything else we’ve read, and I wonder what they’ll make of it.

I’m now reading The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst, which, from the early going, appears to be about sex, sex, sex. And some more sex. And gay sex. And maybe a little bit of architecture, and then some more sex. The synopsis on the back called it “darkly erotic” and I guess they weren’t kidding!

Date: 2007-03-22 12:12 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] antarcticlust.livejournal.com
I'm glad you liked it - I can't wait to read it. BSG is SO good. I just started a book club and we read Possession, which I loved, but next we're reading To Kill a Mockingbird (read), Agatha Christie (for a monthly book club? I can read one of her books in an evening!), and Devil in the White City (I want to read it, but it feels a little too book-clubby for me). I dunno. Your book club sounds cooler.

Date: 2007-03-22 02:17 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] decemberthirty.livejournal.com
My book club is very cool, but it wasn't always that way. When we first got started we read a lot of really book-clubby stuff too, and I thought it was kind of waste of time. But as time went on the group narrowed itself down to five of us who all seem to have similar taste and similar ideas about what we want the group to be. Plus, as we got to know each other better, people became more adventerous about books they suggested and we began to get away from typical book club fare. A year ago I was ready to drop out, but now I'm really glad that I stuck it out.

Besides, any book club that reads Possession is a book club that's worth being in!

Date: 2007-03-22 01:28 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hells-librarian.livejournal.com
I definitely called it a practice exercise for Cloud Atlas. I felt like a lot of the observations about fate & other big topics in Ghostwritten were the type of Deep Thoughts nearly everyone grapples with in their early 20s. It's amazing how Mitchell has grown as a writer in just a few books. Cloud Atlas and BSG

I liked BSG quite a bit. It's set in the same universe as Cloud Atlas, but Mitchell doesn't overdo the interlocking pieces. In retropect, BSG reminded me of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha; both have narrators that speak like real children.

Date: 2007-03-22 02:21 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] decemberthirty.livejournal.com
Paddy Clarke is one of my favorite books ever, so now I'm even more anxious to read Black Swan Green!

Date: 2007-03-22 01:48 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jackshoegazer.livejournal.com
I'm excited to read it. It's on my shelf and it's the only Mitchell book I didn't read last year.

Date: 2007-03-22 02:22 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] decemberthirty.livejournal.com
I'll be interested to see what you think of it.

Date: 2007-03-22 02:51 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jackshoegazer.livejournal.com
I thought Number9Dream was good and Cloud Atlas was extremely clever and Black Swan Green was amazing, so my expectations are set pretty high :)

Date: 2007-03-24 12:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] myshkin.livejournal.com
Ghostwritten was both Mitchell's first book and the first of his that I read: I picked it up in a youth hostel and was so captivated by it that I read all night and stole the book when I left. So while you who read it after Cloud Atlas see it is a dry run, I see Cloud Atlas as more technically advanced (obviously, with its nested narratives and created dialects) but not actually making much progress when it comes to them or in terms of being an enjoyable novel. I have yet to read Black Swan Green but am glad at the thought that he is branching out in a different direction.

My bookclub read Cloud Atlas and was, on the whole, suitably impressed. One or two have gone back to read Ghostwritten and been even more so.
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