i'm a very very complex person

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 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!