Ghostwritten [Paperback]

David Mitchell (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 9, 2001

David Mitchell's electrifying debut novel takes readers on a mesmerizing trek across a world of human experience through a series of ingeniously linked narratives.

Oblivious to the bizarre ways in which their lives intersect, nine characters-a terrorist in Okinawa, a record-shop clerk in Tokyo, a money-laundering British financier in Hong Kong, an old woman running a tea shack in China, a transmigrating "noncorpum" entity seeking a human host in Mongolia, a gallery-attendant-cum-art-thief in Petersburg, a drummer in London, a female physicist in Ireland, and a radio deejay in New York-hurtle toward a shared destiny of astonishing impact. Like the book's one non-human narrator, Mitchell latches onto his host characters and invades their lives with parasitic precision, making Ghostwritten a sprawling and brilliant literary relief map of the modern world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"What is real and what is not?" David Mitchell's Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts plays 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 In the time one street guide is produced, it's already become out of date.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 reading Ghostwritten. 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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Nine disparate but interconnected tales (and a short coda) in Mitchell's impressive debut examine 21st-century notions of community, coincidence, causality, catastrophe and fate. Each episode in this mammoth sociocultural tapestry is related in the first person, and set in a different international locale. The gripping first story introduces Keisuke Tanaka, aka Quasar, a fanatical Japanese doomsday cultist who's on the lam in Okinawa after completing a successful gas attack in a Tokyo subway. The links between Quasar and the novel's next narrator, Satoru Sonada, a teenage jazz aficionado, are tenuous at first. Both are denizens of Tokyo; both tend toward nearly monomaniacal obsessiveness; both went to the same school (albeit at different times) and shared a common teacher, the crass Mr. Ikeda. As the plot progresses, however, the connections between narrators become more complex, richly imaginative and thematically suggestive. Key symbols and metaphors repeat, mutating provocatively in new contexts. Innocuous descriptions accrue a subtle but probing irony through repetition; images of wild birds taking flight, luminous night skies and even bloody head wounds implicate and involve Mitchell's characters in an exquisitely choreographed dance of coincidence, connection and fluid, intuitive meanings. Other performers include a corrupt but (literally) haunted Hong Kong lawyer; an unnamed, time-battered Chinese tea-shop proprietress; a nomadic, disembodied intelligence on a voyage of self-discovery through Mongolia; a seductive and wily Russian art thief; a London-based musician, ghostwriter and ne'er-do-well; a brilliant but imperiled Irish physicist; and a loud-mouthed late-night radio-show host who unwittingly brushes with a global cyber-catastrophe. Already a sensation on its publication in England, Mitchell's wildly variegated story can be abstruse and elusive in its larger themes, but the gorgeous prose and vibrant, original construction make this an accomplishment not to be missed. 5-city author tour.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 426 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375724508
• ISBN-13: 978-0375724503
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (125 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #25,428 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Mitchell's first novel, GHOSTWRITTEN, won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. NUMBER9DREAM, his second, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2003 he was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and his third novel, CLOUD ATLAS, was shortlisted for 6 awards including the Man Booker Prize and won the British Book Awards Best Literary Fiction and the South Bank Show Literature Prize. He lives in Ireland with his wife and daughter.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#30 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical

#45 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical

#52 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#66 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#77 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

#30 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical

#45 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical

#52 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#66 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#77 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

60 of 64 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A fearless feast of a book December 18, 2000

By Lynn Harnett TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Ambitious, complex, and intriguing, Mitchell's first novel grapples with the paradox of a small, vast world. His nine interlocking chapters (plus a tenth which circles back to the first) are narrated by a disparate lot from around the globe, connected sometimes by only a glimpse and a fleeting thought, sometimes by more fateful encounters. As the book proceeds, more connections become apparent, most of them random.

It's an intriguing organization, best followed by reading the book in one sitting, so as to keep track of the various plot threads and people. However, at 426 pages, this is unlikely for most readers.

But Mitchell's novel is more than a philosophical play on fate and chance and the six degrees of separation that radiate from us in all directions. The novel is filled with real characters, some venal and pathetic, some appealing, a few remote, one repellant. The settings range from self-consciously contemporary Hong Kong and earnest, teeming Tokyo to a tight-knit island off the Irish coast, the Mongolian desert, a remote Chinese mountain, a late-night radio station in New York, the streets of London and the bleak underside of post-Soviet St. Petersburg.

One narrator is a bent lawyer haunted (literally) by the ghost of a little girl, a pawn to his own greed, trapped by his estranged wife, his rapacious Chinese maid and his high-powered, crooked employer. Another is a self-deluded Russian woman, trying to escape her life by a big score in stolen art. The book opens with the fervid ramblings of a Japanese cult fanatic, a terrorist who planted poison gas on a Tokyo subway, and closes with the same or similar narrator....

A young musician and writer in London, whose life is adrift, saves a stranger from being rundown by a taxi, drifts some more, then makes the big decision he's been wrestling with all along. A young jazz musician in Tokyo, also adrift, makes a leap for love. A brilliant physicist whose discoveries are used in the Gulf War flees home to Ireland but is forced to succumb to the strong arm of the American military.

Some chapters are more successful than others. Which these are, however, is a matter of taste. The writing soars energetically throughout but styles, moods, even genres vary. Mitchell employs ghosts, apocalyptic scenarios, sociopathic thugs both criminal and sanctioned, as well as ordinary longings, ambitions, loves and failures.

An old Chinese woman narrates my favorite chapter. Her long and eventful life is lived entirely around her tea shack on a rural mountain path leading to a Buddhist temple. Here she is raped by a warlord and abused and despised by her lazy father. The Japanese invasion comes to her mountain and then the Chinese Nationalists, the Communists and the cadres of the Cultural Revolution each in turn bring violence and destruction to her life and livelihood. And each time she rebuilds her shack. She finds solace and companionship in a speaking tree and grows wise in the ways of the world without ever venturing into it. Hers is a marvelous voice, sharp without being hard, sardonic but never jaded, full of life and wit and complexity.

Another favorite is the chapter that follows, in which a transmigrating spirit goes on a pilgrimage to discover its origin and meaning. The spirit moves from person to person by touch and crosses Mongolia in pursuit of a folktale, inhabiting a Western tourist, a suspicious old peasant woman, a shaman, a vicious killer and more. Exploring the human psyche, it struggles to do no harm but its own goal remains paramount. Delightfully strange.

As for flaws: some characters are less well developed than others and the apocalyptic elements are jarring and unconvincing. The penultimate chapter brings us to the brink of World War III which may have been brought on by a well-meaning artificial (possibly) intelligence with godlike access to our technology. The transition from explorations of human nature, connections and chance to a sci-fi parable is unconvincing at best.

But Mitchell writes with the confidence of an artist with no fear. He will try anything, no matter how fantastic or mundane. His writing switches from displays of virtuosity to sober meditation, his point-of-view from intimate exchange to global conspiracy.

An excellent, engaging book, sure to attract as much criticism as praise, which is by no means a bad thing. Read more ›

64 of 70 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Almost great July 30, 2004

By J. Darcy

Format:Paperback

About half-way through this book, I was starting to believe this would be a great book. I don't just mean good; I mean great. The author has a tremendous gift for narrative, with many descriptions and phrases that would inspire both awe and envy in anyone who appreciates the mechanics of writing. The characters are vividly drawn so that the reader cares about each one, which is no mean feat considering the range of characters involved - including one who is impossible to like and one who's not even human. Best of all, the slow emergence of links between what at first seem totally unrelated storylines is done to perfection. I was in heaven.

Then I hit the last two chapters. Where I had come to expect magic, as all of the storylines finally converge, I got...what? Very suddenly, with only the most tenuous connection to the rest of the story, this non-point-of-view character with tremendous power appears, as though the author just read about "deus ex machina" and decided to give it a very literal interpretation. Then one of the characters who had actually drawn our sympathy earlier, who had been most central to the converging storylines, gets dispatched in an almost offhand way. Many of the connections established before are just left hanging, as though someone had punched a huge hole through the just-woven fabric of the story up to that point. I can almost see the author losing energy or interest, after the painstaking effort to craft the earlier chapters, and slapping the rest together just to be done with it. Maybe an overzealous editor was involved.

However you look at it, though, the ending can only disappoint. I have never seen such an immensely promising book take such a precipitous nosedive at the end.... I would seriously recommend that readers read revel in the the marvelous though incomplete story up to that cutoff point, and then stop instead of ruining the experience by reading the rest. Read more ›

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Ghostly Voice Whispering Visions from other Stories December 23, 2005

By Gopal Ramasammy-Cook

Format:Paperback

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.

35 of 44 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Promising but uneven first novel January 4, 2001

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Can't join all the Hooray Henries praising this as a "masterwork": it's a good first work of fiction, and Mr. Mitchell shows considerable promise, but "Ghostwritten" is, at best, a half-realized effort.

The book is a series of 9 loosely but cleverly connected vignettes tracing the joys and travails of a wide variety of contemporary characters: a millennial cultist, a young Japanese jazz lover, a stressed-out ex-pat Brit working in a shady Hong Kong securities firm, an old Chinese woman living in a tea shack, a St. Petersburg kept-woman, a London slacker, an Irish scientist, a New York DJ. The tales, which are essentially complete in and of themselves, are each told in the first-person, and are written in a variety of styles ranging from the pseudo-Amy Tan of the Chinese narrator to the Nick Hornsby-ish musings of the young Londoner scraping out a living by ghostwriting and playing in a band. Characters and incidents central in one tale reappear in fleeting glimpses, snatches and references in the other tales, suggesting something like "It's a Small World After All" and that we're all interconnected in ways that we can't really begin to fathom.

If this sounds a little New Age-y it's because it is-one section of the novel, "Mongolia," even follows a disembodied spirit as it migrates from host-body to host-body trying to unravel the riddle of its own existence. This is either your cup of tea or it isn't...for my part I found it pretty hokey.... Mitchell is a keen observer and has a terrific knack for simile: when he's treating something down-to-earth like backpackers meeting on a train, or waking up with a hangover in a strange bed, or the sound of a jazz saxophone, or visiting a loved one with Alzheimer's, or the synergy between a medical and moral crisis (in the case of the Hong Kong broker) he's very compelling and provokes smiles or grimaces of recognition. When the author is indulging in flights of metaphysical fancy, however, he's merely tedious and borderline pretentious.

It seems to me that Mitchell is a talented miniaturist trying, unsuccessfully, to be a whole lot more. The sections that are the most realistic-Okinawa, Tokyo, Hong Kong and London-are far and away the most successful in the book. When Mitchell (a British citizen living in Japan) tries to write from a geography or cultural consciousness he knows less well he is unconvincing and clumsy. "Holy Mountain," for instance, with its improbably out-of-touch peasant woman narrator, recycles every cliché about 20th century China, and has a number of inconsistencies, such as the narrator mistaking a microphone for a "magic silver mushroom," but in almost the same breath making an off-hand reference to a jack-hammer. Or the "Clear Island" section, which is one half lyrical paean to rural Ireland, one half silly Frederick Foresythe spy-on-the-lam-from-a-sinister-global-conspiracy piffle.

It is the St. Petersburg section, however, that is almost comically inept, rife with error. While some of these mistakes are easy enough to overlook-such as when he has two ostensibly Russian women introduce themselves using "Miss" and "Mrs." (forms of address for which there are no equivalents in Russian) and then shake hands (something Russian women would never do among themselves)-others, like having a female character called "Petrovich," are unlikely to be missed by anyone who has ever been to Russia or read a Russian novel. Admittedly, this just comes down to poor editing...the real problems with the section are much more fundamental: an extraordinarily cheesy plot, which asks us to believe that priceless works of art are being successfully smuggled out of the Hermitage using a floor polisher; and the demeaning and deeply stereotyped portrayal of all the Russian characters, as one-dimensional and sinister as James Bond villains.

In the end, unfortunately, the pulpier parts of the novel subsume the more serious and restrained parts, and the book ends in a serio-comic vision of the coming technological apocalypse that could have been lifted straight out of Arthur C. Clarke. I don't mean that as a compliment. Hopefully next time around Mr. Mitchell will play more to his strengths as a particularist and leave the Pynchonian post-modern globe-hopping to...well, to the inimitable Pynchon himself... Read more ›