Ghostwritten

I first got to know David Mitchell through his extraordinary CLOUD ATLAS (2004), a matrix of six connected stories in different genres and periods, encased in one another like a matroshka doll. He repeated much the same formula in his recent BONE CLOCKS (2014), though there the separate stories are linked linearly through the presence of a single character in all of them. [The other two books of his that I have read, BLACK SWAN GREEN (2006) and the vast THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET (2010), are more conventional in narrative technique.] So it was interesting to go back to his first novel, GHOSTWRITTEN (1999), and discover that the interlinked-story idea of CLOUD ATLAS and THE BONE CLOCKS was present in his writing from the very beginning.

Here there are nine separate sections, plus a brief epilogue. Geographically, they start in Asia (Mitchell was living in Japan at the time) and accelerate westwards until they have almost circled the globe. So we have an Aum-Shinrikyo-type terrorist hiding out on Okinawa, a young vintage record store clerk in Tokyo, a high-flying lawyer in Hong Kong, the humble proprietor of a tea shack on the slopes of a holy mountain in China, an incorporeal entity that flits from host to host moving westward through Mongolia, a gallery attendant at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, a womanizing writer (a ghostwriter of the autobiographies of others) in London, a brilliant physicist going home to her birthplace on an island off the south coast of Ireland, and an all-night talk-show host in NYC. Most of the sections already show Mitchell's gift for instantly creating characters that interest us, people of both sexes and in varied walks of life. While the different genres are less clearly defined than in CLOUD ATLAS, Mitchell still shows an impressive range of voice and style; I especially liked the Japanese clerk and British writer, and the talk-show segment, written entirely in dialogue, is brilliant.

The sections are shorter, though, than those in the later two books of the kind, ranging from around 30 to 60 pages. Too short, I felt, to get really into the heart of the characters. Although I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the voice of the "noncorpum" narrator in the Mongolian section, I was especially frustrated in terms of character, since we do not stay with any given host for much longer than about a dozen pages. And although there are indeed connections between the sections, these are most often brief references to people from previous episodes; there is very little sense of the characters' life-stories being significantly extended over the course of the novel. It probably did not help that I was forced to read the book over several days, so that some of the more distant references rang only faint bells for me, or possibly were missed entirely.

The book was published two years before the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11/2001, yet Mitchell is almost prophetic in what I take to be the two major themes of the novel: globalization and terrorism. The circling of the globe via many different countries is more than a narrative gimmick: the book opens with a fugitive seeking isolation and anonymity; it ends with implications of warfare affecting the entire planet. The Tokyo clerk ends up in Hong Kong, a small move, but the protagonist of the Hong Kong segment has business links to shadowy entities in Europe. With the tea-shack lady on the Holy Mountain, we seem to retreat once again to local obscurity, but hers is the most expansive segment in time, and virtually all of 20th-century Chinese history comes knocking at her doors. Mongolia is seen as a kind of no-man's-land corridor permitting the passage of some of the worst elements from China into Russia, and thence to Europe. The Petersburg museum guard gets into difficulties when she discovers that her little local art-heist ring is in fact connected to trans-national crime. And, even on her lonely island, the Irish physicist is on the run from former sponsors in one continent and hoping to escape predatory head-hunters from another.

Perhaps I was just getting tired, but the deeper Mitchell got with his terrorist theme, the less he interested me. One element in all three books of this kind is science fiction, a genre that generally leaves me cold. The use of acronyms and technospeak in the last two sections is indeed typical of the kind of thing that comes out of, say, the Pentagon, but all it did for this reader was to create a vague fog of apprehension, rather than any kind of understanding, or indeed interest. So just at the moment where Mitchell's narrative technique gets most interesting (that talk-show segment), he almost entirely loses me in terms of content, and all the investment I had made in those other characters around the globe goes down the tubes. So the novel fails as a whole, I fear, even though it can be brilliant in parts. Yet it certainly makes a fascinating trailer for the author's later work.

David Mitchell's award-winning debut novel is a fine introduction to his brand of cosmopolitan fiction, a feature that would be evident in his later novels like Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. The novel not only traverses geographical locations from Japan (both Okinawa and Tokyo), Hong Kong, China (Holy Mountain), Mongolia, to Petersburg, London and Ireland (Clear Island), Mitchell also inhabits the skin of narrators who are natives in these places, so that it problematises the local/global perspectives.

The narrative is fractured, and seemingly disconnected. But Mitchell manages to join them up into a composite whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. A member of a Japanese doomsday cult carries out a gas bomb attack in the Tokyo underground and flees to Okinawa, while he awaits instructions and divine messages from his leader, His Serendipity, supposedly through dog barks (I kid you not) and phone calls to his contacts, the latter which finds him connecting with an independent jazz record store in Tokyo, that Mitchell's next narrative focaliser, teenager-about-to-fall-in-love-with-Chinese-girl Satoru, works at. This then brings the narrative to Hong Kong, where Satoru goes with his girlfriend, but by which time, the focus is on a roguish British expat trader who is about to have a worst day of his life when all his misdeeds catch up with him.

And so the story/stories go, switching gears, and even genres, as Mitchell patches them together with gossamer-like threads, that include a ghost and a "zookeeper" technology that possesses a consciousness, exhibiting the intersections of the spiritual, metaphysical and technological, and forcing us to contemplate philosophical questions like what makes us human, the relationship of fate vs chance, the value of truth, and the principles and laws that bind us as a human race.

Heavy-going, no doubt, and truly mind-boggling, with no easy answers, or a clear resolution I can get my head round. Nonetheless, it is an ambitious and engaging work from one of the most imaginative writers today that warrants our attention.

After enjoying "Cloud Atlas," I resolved to read David Mitchell's novels in order. I find the same strengths in his 1999 debut, and some of his slight weaknesses. The challenge Mitchell's fiction embeds is his genre. If it takes its energy and ideas from speculative styles, it also contains that genre's flaw. Ideas dominate, and compelling characters or plot coherence may lag, or flag as thriller elements and mass-market tropes (evil government, financial chaos, conspiracy, terror, thievery, struggling artists or writers, mythic messages, globalization) mingle with more elevated reflections from literary fiction (quantum physics, time and space loops, transmigration, and still more conspiracies and collusions). Mitchell's skill keeps him juggling the reiterating images, and it's fun to watch. Camphor trees, for some reason, prove to me the most enduring of these. You'll also find glimpses of characters/themes in his later work. (I reviewed Cloud Atlas 3-13-13.)

That aspect, for an author beginning his career, intrigued me: one reason why I am moving backwards in Mitchell's oeuvre to watch the dots connect. As many summations of these nine interlinked stories of Ghostwritten can be found, I will limit my review to a favorite snippet from each that captures its essence. "My last defense is my ordinariness." (27) So confides a Japanese fugitive hiding on Okinawa, in a first chapter inspired by real events unleashed, where Mitchell was living in Hiroshima when this was published. We find people seemingly like us in this book, but of course, all hold some secret or are tied to a larger destiny, as elusive as the meaning of camphor trees.

Another Japanese man, barely out of his teens, falls in love. He's a jazz aficionado and sax player. At the record store he clerks in, he finds his destiny in a comely customer. "The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me." (54). Satoru's account draws you in: a literate and thoughtful register that sets off the paranoid devotion of his countryman in the previous chapter effectively. You get the sensation as does he you as a reader are in a story written by another: a casual note that lingers in this novel.

Neil Brose, an Englishman in Hong Kong and a lawyer enmeshed in the markets sector, finds himself noticing what the title of the novel portends, in everyday terms. "Her coming was the coming of a fridge. A sound you grow accustomed to before you hear it." (80) His tale, also set in Asia, overlaps slightly with that of Saturu, as that one did with the man we know as Quasar in the opening.

Moving inward, more Chinese terrain is seen, if from the limited vantage point of an old woman who converses with her "Tree" on Holy Mountain, a site where Nationalists, warlords, brigands, Communist cadres, and finally PRC capitalists contend to control and despoil over the past century. "Nobody owns the land, so nobody made sure it was respected." (125) Cleaning up the messes men make, the anonymous tea shack guardian watches over a patch of the world trying to evade those who seek to cleanse it for greed, ideology, and power. She sees through all her persecutors. "Nothing often passes in men as wisdom."(128) So goes the folly of collectivism. Buddhism enters these tales at a tangent, as does the creation of entities and the apparent transfer of souls; Mitchell glances at these notions more than obsesses on them, and they're filtered by the culture and background and understanding of each of the protagonists.

This wobbles all over the next chapter, the unsteady center of the narrative. We appear to be told by the guiding spirit its origins with a Chinese brigand in Mongolia in the 1930s, and a Tibetan Yellow Hat monk seems to have played a role in its conception or generation. "Slowly I walked down the path trodden by all humans, from the mythic to the prosaic. Unlike humans, I remember the path." (155) Recalling for me (pp. 194-5) the bardo in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, this quest stays dim; this part follows the narrator as she travels from person to person trying to learn of her own creation.

A security guard at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg enters, cocky of her connivance. "As exquisite as being shot!" (204) So she savors a cigarette early in her chapter. The relentless struggle continued from Soviet Russia into capitalist thuggery gets its time on stage, in a section reminding me of pulp entertainment--the heist itself, I might add, as elsewhere in Mitchell, works on its own merits, too. They may be limited intentionally or by the conventions of the genre, but they keep you engaged.

Tim Cavendish will star in his own chapter (and Luisa Rey who appears in a later one) in Cloud Atlas, five years after this novel appeared, and they have cameos here. Tim meets with Marco, a drummer for a loose band The Music of Chance, and Marco conveys the downside of downscale Cool London from the late '90s effectively. He reflects tellingly (on pg. 283) on fate vs. chance. Fate is when your story is read by one on the outside, as in a novel. Chance is when you are in that novel, with no idea of how your story will conclude, or why it's yours at all. This begins with an episode tying this to chapter three, and from here on, characters will begin to enter each other's stories, if perhaps as extras or walk-ons, until the end of the novel. As Marco wonders about memories and actions: it's as if they're "pre-ghostwritten by forces around us." (287)

Mo Muntervary's predicament as forces unleashed precisely in the First Gulf War lead her to confront the security state as a physicist who rejects using knowledge for weapons of mass destruction. "Technology is repeatable miracles." (329) I liked how Mitchell delays the revelation of the teller's gender and of the spouse's condition, but I did not like two errors. "Seventeen counties of Ireland" (317) from a native of that Republic in recollection falls short of the mark, partition or not; also, wouldn't a scientist measure the time it takes the sun's radiated light to hit a retina on earth at eight rather than "twenty-six" (343) minutes? And, on Clear Island off Cork (Mitchell later moved to Clonakilty), inhabitants feel more as if from some Brigadoon in fake-Celtic details than as real.

I doubt anyone in Ireland inherited surnames such as Mrs. Cuchthulain (sic) or Tourmakeady. Also, Mo's surname, Muntervary, is a garbling of nearby Sheep's Head in the original Irish. Something's up, as Daibhi O Bruadair appears (he was a Gaelic poet centuries ago) and so does a dead Gabriel Fitzmaurice (a living Irish poet) as islanders. Given Mitchell's usual command of detail, this chapter feels awry. He left it in two errors, or he erred twice, Mo's chapter rests on unreliable facts, or Mitchell's parodying an "airport paperback" mass-market genre resting on flimsy or bad backstory.

With Mo's foes such as The Texan, Heinz Formaggio, and Mr. Stoltz on behalf of Homer Quancog, one suspects Pynchon territory by now. The penultimate chapter features d.j. Bat Segundo's Night Train call-in show for the New York graveyard shift. The Zookeeper warns listeners: "You are all lapdogs, believing your collars to be halos." (414) This proved engaging, but as another caller explains (?), "I'm speaking through an ingrown looped matrix, Zookeeper." (417) That caller may or may not be the teller of the final vignette, therefore.

Is this legerdemain or talent? Mitchell sets up the kind of postmodern circularity that his predecessors and influences pioneered, and which contemporaries pursue. Borges, Pynchon, DeLillo, or later Roberto Bolano (as the following decade after this novel appeared has brought him international acclaim) and naturally Haruki Murakami fit onto this same eclectic shelf. This slows at times and in the middle and the end you feel the attempts to make links either match or not, and this playfulness can get too sly; you sense a young writer straining to make his mark originally. He comes close, however, and it's a deserving if somewhat uneven entry into his lively imagination.

... will ever believe.
You can also say "What goes around comes around"... just like a certain Metro Line in London.
All the 10 (!) Chapters but 9 places are based on someones perception of "Ghost".

In "Okinawa" it is the purification of the ghosts - as in souls - by a young "pure one", a member of the Fellowship of the New Earth who made that coward gas attack in the Metro of Tokio. Now, hiding out on an island at the large of Okinawa, he makes a telefone call for help...
Which will arrive in "Tokyo" at the rare-discs-shop where young Satoru is working. He is a hobby saxophonist who meets the first real love of his life just in this shop - where the ghosts of all those defunct Jazz players are looming. And she invites him to her home...
Which is in "Hongkong" where we also meet a money-launderer for some Russian mobsters. His wife has left him for England to divorce. He himself remaines in the common flat where the ghost of a little girl is seeking company. His maid - a Tibetan-born but Hongkong-raised "one-of-a-kind" type is sucking all the money and life out of him - until he meets his destiny precisely under the Big Bright Buddha statue on Lantau Island...
The most gripping story of all - that is my opinion - is "Holy Mountain", the tale of a Tibetan woman getting old in the shadow of The Holy Mountain. Over and over again her small tea & noodle shack will be destroyed but she rebuilts it all the times. Because she has a ghost in a tree to whom she speaks and who answers, giving her hope and advice. And at the - for her lucky - end there will some connection to the story before...
In "Mongolia" a non-entity - a ghost - has the possibilities to transfer him-herself from one person to another - until there will be an harsh decision to make for him/her. And we will find intruding, annoying backpackers and some very dangerous Mongolian mobster with relations to...
"Petersburg", where a gang of forgers and robbers of famous paitings try to make a fortune in the "Eremitage" to finally emigrate. But fate has other plans...
By case one of the paintings has made its way to "London" right into the flat of the divorced wife of the Hongkong money launderer. And here we come to know the real ghost-writer, doubling as a drummer in a band. And ghosts are looming there and want to be described in the biografy our hero is writing for an old Ex-spook...
And he will save the life of the heroine of "Clear Island" - the last hideout for a woman with brains - a brilliant physicist, a genius in the matter of nuclear spin, reseached by the USA army for her inventions. But first she's able to take the Transsib where she writes down all her knowledge passing through China, Mongolia, Russia after she had met ghosts yet known to us in Hongkong...
And in "Night Train" a DJ in New York has a very strange conversation with the "ghost" of a Super AI to be invented only in the next Century respectively Millenium. And this strange entity saves the world from atomic destruction by the Western and Eastern blocs - and the reader will meet for the first time Luisa Rey from the later novel Cloud Atlas. (Sceptre)...
And in "Underground" the circle will close itself. We will be a part of "Quasar" the young follower of the AUM sect, minutes before the Sarin Gas attack in the Tokyo Metro to purify the souls and ghosts of the Impure...

This debut novel is one of the best I have ever read in my life!
Here the genius of David Mitchell - which peaks years later in Cloud Atlas - is clearly showing.
An outstanding masterpiece which is also very witty and rich of cultural hints.
To read all in a piece - like I did it.
Word of a true book-lover.

I have just finished reading David Mitchell's fascinating debut novel (1999) entitled "Ghostwritten," which brings the reader to experience the journey(s) of experiences through the eyes of nine characters, whose lives interact with one other in quite preternatural and non-obvious ways. The story first takes place in Okinawa and then taking the reader to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Holy Mountain, Mongolia, Petersburg, London, Ireland, and New York - literally across the world.

The story begins with a character named Quasar, who is a member of a doomsday cult called "The Fellowship," attempting to escape captive after causing a chemical attack on Tokyo Subway by hiding out in Okinawa. He views people as "unclean" and disgusting, and devoted his whole being to the one called "His Serendipity" while awaiting for a comet to collide with Earth (as a part of the prophesy). Then, we moved to a 19-year-old record-shop clerk who goes by the name of Satoru who has love for music and we see him becoming attracted to a girl named Tomoyo. Soon, we would then move to Hong Kong into the life of a lawyer (Neal) who is struggling both on a personal and professional levels. Then, we focus on a Chinese woman who's living her whole life in a tea shack on a Holy Mountain where, from a certain perspective, we see time passes by. Next, the Mongolia is seen through the eyes of a transmigrating "noncorpum" entity that survives by inhabiting living hosts (this story is incredulously interesting to me) and we see its struggle to find the source/nature of its existence. Then, we'd move to the life of a thief in Petersburg who's struggling after the Hong Kong's business crash and we see her life evolving as she and her band attempts to steal a valuable painting. We then go to London where we meet a ghostwriter/drummer who's trying to get by while avoiding the deepest seductions of the city. Eightly, a physicist living on Clear Island, studying quantum cognition, after being on a run from CIA due to her research being used by the government as a weapon. Finally, we'd move to New York where we see through the eyes of Segundo as a radio show host who kept getting calls from a non-corporeal artificial intelligence called "The Zookeeper." Then, we see Quasar again as a dexterous conclusion to the whole story that jolts one to ponder the meaning of it all.

Throughout the entire book, each character gets their own chapter and it sure felt like a short-story on their own. Each doesn't get boring nor dulling, but equally fascinating to see how they go about their lives. And, reading all together these stories of each characters make the book as a whole interesting because one will see the connection(s) between them, in either bizarre or riveting ways. This is what makes the book pretty exciting yet haunting to read.

I personally came across this book after hearing so much about "Cloud Atlas" (which I haven't seen or read yet) and wanted to read the very first book of Mitchell's, just out of curiosity - and I'm glad that I did because it was such an enchanting read. Mitchell did an excellent job weaving the unrelated stories together to create the whole picture in order for us to "see" the connections between them.

It's to be recommended.

... will ever believe.
You can also say "What goes around comes around"... just like a certain Metro Line in London.
All the 10 (!) Chapters but 9 places are based on someones perception of "Ghost".

In "Okinawa" it is the purification of the ghosts - as in souls - by a young "pure one", a member of the Fellowship of the New Earth who made that coward gas attack in the Metro of Tokio. Now, hiding out on an island at the large of Okinawa, he makes a telefone call for help...
Which will arrive in "Tokyo" at the rare-discs-shop where young Satoru is working. He is a hobby saxophonist who meets the first real love of his life just in this shop - where the ghosts of all those defunct Jazz players are looming. And she invites him to her home...
Which is in "Hongkong" where we also meet a money-launderer for some Russian mobsters. His wife has left him for England to divorce. He himself remaines in the common flat where the ghost of a little girl is seeking company. His maid - a Tibetan-born but Hongkong-raised "one-of-a-kind" type is sucking all the money and life out of him - until he meets his destiny precisely under the Big Bright Buddha statue on Lantau Island...
The most gripping story of all - that is my opinion - is "Holy Mountain", the tale of a Tibetan woman getting old in the shadow of The Holy Mountain. Over and over again her small tea & noodle shack will be destroyed but she rebuilts it all the times. Because she has a ghost in a tree to whom she speaks and who answers, giving her hope and advice. And at the - for her lucky - end there will some connection to the story before...
In "Mongolia" a non-entity - a ghost - has the possibilities to transfer him-herself from one person to another - until there will be an harsh decision to make for him/her. And we will find intruding, annoying backpackers and some very dangerous Mongolian mobster with relations to...
"Petersburg", where a gang of forgers and robbers of famous paitings try to make a fortune in the "Eremitage" to finally emigrate. But fate has other plans...
By case one of the paintings has made its way to "London" right into the flat of the divorced wife of the Hongkong money launderer. And here we come to know the real ghost-writer, doubling as a drummer in a band. And ghosts are looming there and want to be described in the biografy our hero is writing for an old Ex-spook...
And he will save the life of the heroine of "Clear Island" - the last hideout for a woman with brains - a brilliant physicist, a genius in the matter of nuclear spin, reseached by the USA army for her inventions. But first she's able to take the Transsib where she writes down all her knowledge passing through China, Mongolia, Russia after she had met ghosts yet known to us in Hongkong...
And in "Night Train" a DJ in New York has a very strange conversation with the "ghost" of a Super AI to be invented only in the next Century respectively Millenium. And this strange entity saves the world from atomic destruction by the Western and Eastern blocs - and the reader will meet for the first time Luisa Rey from the later novel Cloud Atlas. (Sceptre)...
And in "Underground" the circle will close itself. We will be a part of "Quasar" the young follower of the AUM sect, minutes before the Sarin Gas attack in the Tokyo Metro to purify the souls and ghosts of the Impure...

This debut novel is one of the best I have ever read in my life!
Here the genius of David Mitchell - which peaks years later in Cloud Atlas - is clearly showing.
An outstanding masterpiece which is also very witty and rich of cultural hints.
To read all in a piece - like I did it.
Word of a true book-lover.

What could these nine characters have in common? How could their lives possibly intersect?
1. a cult member who becomes a terrorist and then hides out on a tiny Japanese island.
2. a record-shop geek in Tokyo who falls in love.
3. a British attorney in Hong Kong who becomes involved in a money-laundering scheme.
4. an old Chinese woman who has spent her long life running a tea shack on the mountain trail leading to a Buddhist shrine.
5. a "noncorpum" intelligence who is seeking in Mongolia for a body to inhabit.
6. a prostitute/gallery attendant/art thief in Petersburg who longs to retire to Switzerland.
7. a slacker drummer in London who decides to reform his womanizing ways.
8. a physicist who is hiding out in Ireland because the CIA wants her to create the ultimate weapon.
9. a late-night radio DJ in New York who may soon be a witness to the end of the world.

Trust me, David Mitchell connects all these lives together in multiple and ingenious ways. Indeed, part of the fun of the book comes from spotting the connections.

Each of the nine characters gets his or her own chapter, and all are excellent stand-alone short stories. But taken together, with the inter-connectivity and an overriding theme, they form a cohesive novel. Quite a feat of virtuosity.

What stands out here is the author's ability to write with a different voice for each character. All the stories are first-person, and the narrator in each sounds spot-on perfect, with the possible exception of the Russian woman, who sounded more American to me. It seems almost as if each story was actually dictated to Mitchell, who then became the "ghostwriter."

This was Mitchell's first novel, and he repeated the structure of connected short stories in his later, more famous novel Cloud Atlas. In some ways this book was even more enjoyable to read than his later effort.

The last page of the novel asks the question, "What is real and what is not?" I wonder if Mitchell as a youth read the novels of Philip K. Dick, who in many of his novels posed the same question.

This novel is addictively readable, has characters who are totally believable, provides the reader with some things to think about, and is overwhelmingly clever (perhaps just a tad too much so). Highly recommended.

I read Ghostwritten after reading Cloud Atlas and being very impressed with David Mitchell. I suppose my first thought while making my way through the novel was one of jealousy. Mitchell can really write, and to do all of these voices at such a young age (I believe he was in his 20's still) is incredibly impressive. Add to that the fact that this was his debut and the admiration keeps rising.

Ghostwritten could be described as Cloud Atlas in embryo. The two books are structured similarly, and there are even a couple of familiar characters, though it is not, to my knowledge, considered any kind of a prequel. Mitchell takes the reader first throughout Eastern Asia and later further around the world through a series of somewhat coincidentally connected characters and their stories. Some work better than others, but all were quite interesting to me. Mitchell has a talent for planting déjà vous throughout the novel, as we find little connections between events and stories. I want to reread the novel just to fish out the loose connections I "think" I made. Part of my awe regarding Mitchell's work is his depth of world knowledge. Whether it's Asian money markets, eastern philosophy, experimental physics, or an average joe trying to pick up women, Mitchell has an authentic voice for each.

If I have one criticism it would be the book's penultimate chapter. I really liked where he seemed to be going with the chapter's central idea (no spoilers here), but I had a difficult time connecting with the DJ character and I felt this very important plot line was under developed and the novel did suffer for it.

Overall it's a worthwhile read that perhaps gave birth to one of my favorite reads in many years. An incredibly impressive debut novel.

I really, really want to like David Mitchell. He's a wonderful writer, with some great ideas; but I think it's actually the latter that causes his books not to work for me in the end. The structures of the books ultimately take precidence over the content, resulting in some very uneven narratives.

Maybe the fault lies with whoever is trying to market his books as novels. They aren't. With the possible exception of 'Black Swan Green', which I haven't read, they're short story cycles: a legitimate, if little known, genre in its own right. If I pick up a short story cycle, or collection, I expect not to like some of the offerings, and possibly to skip them. But with a novel I expect to be engaged by a longer, more involved narrative, and this is why I find Mitchell ultimately frustrating: some of the stories are so very good, but in the end they're only ever stories. They finish just when I'm becoming absorbed, and too often the next story just isn't as enjoyable.

I don't know. Enough people seem to think he's brilliant that maybe this is just a matter of personal taste. But on the other hand, many of those people calling him brilliant base it on the 'originality' of his multiple narratives and voice-changes - and isn't this what all good novellists do, though generally on a broader scale? I'd say I'd like to see what he'd do with a long, sustained narrative, but given the reviews of 'Black Swan Green', maybe fragmentary is what he does best, and I should just go back to linear narratives...

I actually didn't like "Ghostwritten" by David Mitchell in the very beginning. There was something pat and crammed and dry about the way it started off. But then as each of the stories unfolded (it's a novel in 9 parts, each set in a different part of the world, from a different character's point of view), at breakneck pace, I changed my mind. Drastically.

"Ghostwritten" is brilliant. It's a bit surreal, with generous helpings of intrigue and violence, and it seems Mr. Mitchell has had the ability to inhabit character and place, with total integrity and intensity, from the very beginning ("Ghostwritten" is his first novel). I've read two other books of his, including his latest (fifth) novel (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet) and it was lovely to see where he's come, how much his writing style has matured, and at the same time, how much it didn't have to.

My favourite part was something I was in thrall of with "Cloud Atlas" as well - the gradually building sensation of the connections between the chapters and characters and contexts. Both books have a particular structure. "Cloud Atlas" has a kind of nested Russian doll formulation, and "Ghostwritten" features a most pleasurable ghost like tendril, like smoke signals from one part to the next. There's even a ghostwriter character in the London chapter (which, incidentally, was grand fun to read while living in London), but the sensation of a ghostwriter flitting through the parts, connecting them in tenuous yet tangible ways, was present long before that section.

I want to hoard the last two novels of Mr. Mitchell that I haven't yet read (I have them both on my shelf), but I think I won't be able to. He's just too good.

David Mitchell's first book is an astounding debut by a first rate author. This book is not a single narrative but 10 short stories, each one linking with the previous and yet each one with a different narrative voice, and different storyline. In the end, things come back to where we started from but in a way that invites you to challenge your assumptions about how you read the first story.

There is a sense of surrealism in the whole - you are left at the end of the book wondering what is "true". This perhaps is the books intent, and in this it is strongly reminiscent of Murakami. Mitchell has lived in Japan, and much of this book is set in East Asia, and it seems likely he has deliberately learned from Murakami. His writing is easy going, humorous but with hidden depths. However, I much prefer David Mitchell's work because, unlike Murakami, his work actually seems to go somewhere! There are none of the characteristic dropped threads of Murakami that make you think he just stopped writing when he got bored. Instead, Mitchell's work has a clear structure that takes you through the entertaining short stories leading to the final conclusion.

These are also slightly spooky stories. Some are blatantly supernatural, but others just are classic good stories - where a likable protagonist has to work through bad things happening to them.

Each story has plenty to occupy you too. There is astute political comment, some interesting science that leads into philosophical questions and so on. Definitely a book to discuss with friends.

Now some small criticisms: Firstly, I read this book after reading Cloud Atlas. David Mitchell wrote this book first, and that now makes me think Cloud Atlas was less innovative. The inter-related short story idea being largely what Cloud Atlas does first. This seems characteristic of Mitchell. Even in his wonderful "Black Swan Green", the chapters could almost stand alone as short stories on their own, though they all add to a very coherent narrative. Mitchell is a master of the short story form though.

Secondly - and this one is just me being picky - the scientist mentions a jiffy and we are told there are so many in a second. Except we are treated by a 1 followed by very many noughts. Two things struck me: (1) How are you supposed to read that number? What word did she actually use when she said that? and (2) no scientist would have said that. They would have said that there are 3 times 10 to the 29th power jiffies in a second. In any case, unless I miscounted, there were too many noughts there! But making that point shows I am a pedant, and not that Mitchell is a bad writer!

All in all this is a very good book, well worth reading.

This is my 4th David Mitchell novel, working my way backwards.

I am left, as with Cloud Atlas, with the feeling that there were more pieces to the puzzle than what I was able to grasp or more strands to the web of connections than I was able to see. I also have a suspicion some of the pieces are only hinted at and it is left the the reader's imagination to fill in some blanks. His writing is poetically descriptive, layered and overall outstanding. I find all his books entertaining and I am one quick to toss a bad book.

Almost a philisophical work clothed in a novel...the many details and that which is more important in conventional writing such as: plot, pacing and story...less important than the intersecting and revolving themes.

Only author I have ever read who writes like this.

Ghostwritten is the fantastic debut novel by David Mitchell. Composed of nine loosely interlinking stories, the book spans several continents, follows radically unique protagonists, and is written in exuberant genre riffing styles. It's a dizzying introduction to a very talented author. From the start of his career, Mitchell reveals himself to be that rarest of writers who can be enjoyed on a micro level; assembling beautiful sentences that make the reader stop and savor them a second and third time.

The first five sections are so impressive it seems impossible the next could be as brilliant as the last, yet Mitchell one ups himself again and again, taking the reader in widely different, fantastically satisfying directions. From a young Tokyo jazz enthusiast falling in love, to an alien parasite on a journey of self-discovery across Mongolia, Mitchell has remarkable control over his character development, and his settings, particularly the Asian ones, are strikingly vivid.

Unfortunately, Ghostwritten begins to lose steam somewhere after the halfway point and stumbles by the end. It's very apparent this book began as a series of short stories the author realized could be loosely strung together and called a novel. This isn't a problem in principle, but the novel begins to lose its breezy energy as the narratives become increasingly self conscious: the London section goes on far too long for no comprehensible reason other than to show off the writer's awesome prose chops, and the all dialogue construction of Night Train is gimmicky at best and derivative at worst.

Mitchell would later perfect his multiple narrative technique with his third novel, Cloud Atlas. But where the later book uses a less complex method of threading the narratives together, it's thematic arc poignantly ties the stories together in a fulfilling way that Ghostwritten simply cannot pull off.

Overall, Ghostwritten is so well written it's easy to forget it was by a first time author. Though Mitchell would take his multiple narrative technique and stylistic mimicry to greater heights in later works, their execution in his debut is no small feat. For all its flaws, Ghostwritten is a marvelous read, as fun as it is smart.

"The art of memory is the art of ghostwriting."

GhostWritten is Mitchell's debut novel and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Subtitled A Novel in Nine Parts, this book is a pioneer in reimagining the form of the novel. It not only contains some of the most memorable and colourful characters ever committed to writing but all of them weave in and out of each other's lives in completely unexpected ways.

The characters are:

A lawyer racing to catch a ferry whilst his suffers from a divorce and the ghost of a child in his apartment. A spirit who hops from soul to soul across Mongolia in search of its origins. A computer program which argues moral philosophy with a radio talk-show host (in between describing its incredible aerial views from a satellite) on the eve of World War III. A Russian art-thief forced to tolerate the sexual advances of her curator boss. A cult member tasked with an act of terrorism involving the Tokyo underground. A drummer in London who's going to have a hell of a night at the roulette tables. A Chinese mountainside noodle-shop owner who suffers under the warlords, then the Kuomintang, then the Japanese and then the Reds. A Japanese jazz shop assistant who struggles with first love and the prospect of losing his beloved failing a crucial decision. A quantum physicist who's trying to escape the clutches of the United States military.

All the above, intertwining and linking. Some closely, some merely in passing. David Mitchell's GhostWritten is like a short-stories collection, only not. Most short stories involve either a single story-teller telling different stories or many authors telling their own stories. This book felt one story ripped and stretched into almost disconnected by a few authors who each tried to put a little of themselves into each chapter.

In a word, Ghostwritten feels like it's been ghost-written. By ghost-writers seeking to have their true powers unleashed.

"Lunatics are writers whose works write them". Lunacy as a literary phenomenon, eh? Now that's food for thought. Read Mitchell and have a feast.

I thought this was really, really good, but like his Cloud Atlas, it lacks resonance after you leave it. I did have my favorite characters and loved almost all the stories, but it kind of fell toward the end.

The book portrays 9 disparate characters whose lives are presented in amazing detail that enriches - and not stifles - the stories. Each story is a tightly packed nugget of story almost complete in itself, and yet all of them are interconnected in a ...more An awesome debut--

I thought this was really, really good, but like his Cloud Atlas, it lacks resonance after you leave it. I did have my favorite characters and loved almost all the stories, but it kind of fell toward the end.

The book portrays 9 disparate characters whose lives are presented in amazing detail that enriches - and not stifles - the stories. Each story is a tightly packed nugget of story almost complete in itself, and yet all of them are interconnected in a subtle and realistic way that, as a whole, it proffers a compelling worldview and a very cool concepts of chance and interconnectedness.

Some stories are better told than others but I can't help but be impressed by DM's sheer ability to create diverse characters and tell engaging stories for all of them. My favorite characters were definitely the Japanese terrorist, Neal Brose, and the "noncorpum." The first two in particular were just hilarious and I couldn't help laughing out loud. The "noncorpum" story was both original and emotionally engrossing.

One dissatisfaction I have with this work and his Atlas Shrugged is the lack of resonance. When I read, say, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment or Brothers Karamazov, or Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was deeply moved by the characters and was sorry to put them down.

Not so with DM's Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas due to the nature of their structure. Number9dream in this regard offers a better (and more traditional) story.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book immensely, and I very much look forward to his new book that's coming out in next June.

Highly recommended

What an amazing first novel! Nine interconnected stories that leave the reader wondering how, when, and why. The characters who populate David Mitchell's novel are both diverse and similar. Each is searching, some up close, some within, one in other bodies. Each character whether young or old or in which century tries to relate to the world around him with respect to the universal longing to belong somewhere and to someone. From the young lovers to an old peasant woman who runs a tea shop to a disembodied soul who inhabits bodies at random, all of them want the same thing. The plot of each story is somehow connected if only marginally in some cases, but the vastness and smallness of the universe is called up in each instance. The nighttime radio show host who invokes outrageous callers and ultimately invokes the one who may--or may not be--calling the shots for infinity. The only real disappointment is that you expect all the characters to come together somehow in the end and that just does not happen. The end leaves you wondering what the book, and life, is all about which is apparently the theme of the book. Despite a few flaws, this is a thoughtful and interesting book. Many passages call out for underlining and rereading; and the next question is: what will David Mitchell write next??!

The concept of Ghostwritten is compelling: several unrelated, interconnected stories that somehow are suppose to create a whole. At first, part of the fun in reading Ghostwritten is being plunked in the middle of some interesting crisis in a character's life. You become fascinatingly absorbed in the tale and then suddenly you're unceremoniously removed from the character's somewhat unresolved story and plunked into the middle of another character crisis in another part of the world. Disoriented, you read along sucked into this new tale only to have this happen to you again and again. It's jarring and throws off the momentum a bit, but keeps the novel fresh and exciting.
What makes this so much fun is unexpectedly stumbling across interconnections to characters from past stories that thread throughout. I found myself excited from anticipation when each new chapter began, looking out for the surprise connections. Because of this, I read the book slowly, savoring each new twist and turn wanting to make the read last. Mitchell is a good storyteller and sucks you in completely.
Perhaps in reading this so slowly I missed something. The last interesting chapter is London with the ghostwriter. The final few chapters fall apart, especially the New York City chapter. The DJ chatting with the Zookeeper was a complete "What the ...???" moment and when I read the last page I scratched my head and thought, "Did I miss something?" I didn't understand the point to having the stories interconnect outside of its entertainment value. I wasn't quite sure I "got" the big picture. I think the novel went in a full circle but I'm unsure.
It's enough to make me want to closely re-read the novel to see what I've missed but I don't think I really need to know that badly to compell me to re-read Ghostwritten. It's a fun read, full of wonderful visuals and lyrical writing but for me it wasn't a completely cohesive read. I give it three stars. Recommended, but expect to be somewhat disappointed with the ending.

The structure of David Mitchell's Ghostwritten is ambitious, particularly for a debut: it is told through nine different prisms - each chapter is a new story, superficially unrelated to the others, but each has fleetingly contiguous episodes: during the first, a fugitive cultist subway bomber telephones his anonymous handler and leaves a cryptic message. In the second story we see the other end of that conversation: the phone is picked up and treated, as a crank caller, by an unwitting record shop owner from Tokyo. Later the record shop owner follows his girlfriend to Hong Kong and, in the third story, we see the pair observed from afar as passing figures by the subject of the third story, an expatriate lawyer who is involved in financial fraud. And so on. These inter-plot encounters are inevitably light and seemingly incidental, but plainly they're deliberate, knitting the narrative ever so loosely together. It's a striking effect, and led me to reflect on the way we tend to hermetically seal our compartmentalised worlds when at some level there is a fundamental interconnectedness of things, but all the same I doubt this was Mitchell's primary concern.

What it was, however, I really couldn't say. The knitting of the episodes was extremely loose, and scarcely drew tighter as the book progressed: the stories are otherwise very different, and each obliges the reader to acquaint himself with a new set of dramatis personae, infer a new set of relationships between them and absorb a new set of personalities. Allowing roughly three significant characters in each story (there are often more) that's roughly thirty characters to hold in contemplation, none of whom can be segregated from the others (as they might in a collection of short stories, for example) since, for all the reader knows, they may need (and if usual conventions are obeyed, ought) to be held *in relation to* one another. That's an imaginative feat which may well be beyond my powers of literary comprehension, and was certainly beyond the limits of my patience.

In places, therefore, I found Ghostwritten very frustrating indeed. Just when you'd expect an ordinary novel to pick up some momentum, Mitchell asks you to put on the brakes, set aside what you've learned, and start learning about a new set of characters. As a result, the book is rather too easy to put down and it took me some time to finish it.

It might have been passable were the episodes self-contained dramatically - if each had its own dilemma, plot and resolution - but for the most part they did not - each episode asks the reader to engage for closure in the next: figuring out this book involves assimilating some very odd pieces of jigsaw, which don't make much sense by themselves, and are only really brought together at all - and even then only weakly, at the very death.

I thereby confess I didn't understand the point of the last two episodes - and therefore the book - at all, as these were the ones which seemed intended to pull the book together (and in the last, join back to the beginning as if some sort of Möbius strip). As a piece of fiction Ghostwritten failed spectacularly for me.

Mitchell writes well in places but lazily in others, and his characters are mostly underdrawn and generic (all were narrated in the first person, and most spoke in more or less the same idiom). There were some interesting contrivances along the way - the disembodied being in Mongolia was fun - but Ghostwritten didn't grab my interest nearly hard enough, nor pay off that attention nearly well enough - to make this a recommended read.

Olly Buxton

"Ghostwritten" isn't a novel in the usual sense; it is up to the reader to discern a narrative in the 9 chapters (plus a coda), each written from the perspective of a different character in locations spanning the globe. The first few chapters surprise and delight as the author reveals the diverse, yet interconnected worlds of his characters. By midway through the book, encountering a new protagonist, setting, and authorial "voice" every 50 pages or so became tiresome - especially because most of the stories aren't really good enough to stand on their own. As familiar details recurred, I struggled to remember where they had been seen before, trying to discern meaning in the threads connecting the tales.
I shouldn't have worked so hard. We are introduced early on to "His Serendipity;" the ghostwriter in another story plays in a band called "The Music of Chance;" later on, a physicist muses about quantum theory and unpredictability. The themes of chance, fate, and interconnectedness are presented in an increasingly heavy-handed manner as the book devolves into poorly executed genre fiction. The climax is mired in bizarrely slapstick science-fiction cliché - all the more unfortunate since world events have overtaken the author's vision. Some readers will find the New York-based story to be more upsetting than the author apparently intended, given the satiric tone of the chapter.
The writing itself was good throughout and nearly all the stories had their own beautifully observed moments. However, the whole enterprise collapses under its own weight and ends up reading more like a college writing assignment than a completed work. Still, I would look forward to reading a more conventional (or better-edited) book by the same author.

David Mitchell's "Ghostwritten" is a dazzling debut by an exciting new writer. "Number 9 Dream" may have garnered alot more attention for its Booker Prize nomination but after leafing through them, "Ghostwritten" seemed the more accessible of the two, so I went for it and wow....what an amazing read it was. I loved nearly every moment of it. Mitchell takes us on a magical mystery tour through major cities and other exotic locations in Asia (Okinawa, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mongolia) and Europe (St Petersburg, London, Ireland) and uses the short story medium to showcase current phenomena and burning issues of the day, from the horrors of terrorism, nuclear war risks, fraud and corporate greed, to eastern mysticism, political blackmail, and love and infidelity. The individual stories are presented as a series of self contained vignettes which are bound together by a common sensibility running through them. Occasionally, a familiar character may resurface without warning only to vanish just as suddenly. The fleeting reappearance of characters from past episodes makes them feel like passing ghosts in the night. The stories are multi-genreal and though different as chalk and cheese, share a sense of the unexpected. My own personal favourites are the ones set in St Petersburg, Hong Kong and Ireland. Only the last story disappoints. It's bizarre and difficult to follow and a downbeat ending to an otherwise spectacular collage of scenes from our modern age. David Mitchell is such a talented contemporary writer I reckon we will hear alot more from him in the future. For a first effort, "Ghostwritten" is an incredibly mature, assured and imaginative piece of work. One of my best reads this season.

Ghostwritten is the first novel by British author, David Mitchell. Told by nine different narrators, with a plot spanning centuries and continents, this is an amazing debut novel. The narrators are a member of a doomsday cult who releases poison gas in a subway in Tokyo, and details his retreat to Okinawa and a small nearby island, Kume-jima; a jazz aficionado who works as a sales clerk in a Tokyo music store; a lawyer in a financial institution in Hong Kong who has been moving large sums of money from a certain account; a woman who owns a Tea Shack on China's Holy Mountain and speaks to a tree; a non-corporeal sentient entity which is searching for who or what it is; a gallery attendant in Petersburg who is involved in an art theft scam; a ghostwriter/drummer living in London who saves a woman from being run over by a taxi; an Irish nuclear physicist who quits her job when she finds her research is being used for military purposes; and a late night radio talkback DJ who finds himself fielding calls from an intriguing caller referring to himself as the zookeeper. Mitchell weaves together these nine narrations into a cohesive whole with vague or occasionally direct references to a myriad of common themes, characters, objects, or words (including, but not limited to, albino conger eels, camphor trees, an earth-bound comet, Kilmagoon whiskey, jazz music, cleaning toilets and artificial intelligence) in each narration. His characters muse on, ponder and articulate on various themes: love/lust; chance/fate; brainwashing; propaganda; one's own place in the world; why we are who we are; principles; and the character of London Underground Lines; There is humour, irony, intrigue, and a plentiful helping of tongue-in-cheek comments. And when Mo Muntervary tells Father Wally “Phenomena are interconnected regardless of distance, in a holistic ocean more voodoo than Newton”, she could be describing Mitchell’s own love affair with connections: fans of Mitchell's work will also recognise certain characters and concepts from his other novels, in particular, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green and number9dream. This is a brilliant debut novel.

Most books, you relax into.
You pick something up, you read the first ten, twenty, thirty (hell, maybe a hundred) pages, and you know pretty much where you are. When you relax into a book, it isn't that you switch on the automatic pilot, more that you have (a) decided whether or not you like what you are reading and (b) invested a certain amount (of intelligence or time or whatever) in wanting to find out what happens between now and the end of the thing.
This is true for movies too. At some point, you relax into it.
This is not true for "Ghostwritten."
"Ghostwritten" is like that film with Guy Pierce. "Memento." You see it? It's about a guy who has a problem with his memory, such that he can only remember the last ten minutes. You start watching the film at the very end and - as the film progresses - you watch the events leading up to the end in ten minute chunks. Which makes for something of an unusual cinematic experience. You don't get to relax into the characters. You watch the whole film as if it was the first ten minutes. You construct everything afresh each time the film jumps back ten minutes.
"Ghostwritten" is "Memento" to the power of ten (because reading a book - for the most part - takes more time than watching a movie).
What you get is this: ten chapters (nine of which are of roughly equal size, and nine of which involve different characters) about people in the world set in different geographical locations (ranging from Tokyo and Okinawa to Mongolia, Petersburg and London). Certain events - such as the death of a lawyer in Hong Kong - have ramifications elsewhere, in other chapters and amongst other character's lives.
However - importantly - the ramifications do not give the book cohesion. Certain characters mutter darkly about cause and effect (and you can't help but be reminded of the butterfly wing / earthquake chestnut), but these things are for the most part just that: muttering. The book lacks cohesion.
That isn't a disaster, because the book contains terrific writing, terrific. It is a lot of fun. It's just that, in my humble, it is better to start "Ghostwritten" expecting a series of loosely conected short stories, than it is to start it expecting a novel. Because a novel should satisfy some deep part of the reader intellectually (and "Ghostwritten" feels, at least in part, like an intellectual wearing his erudition on his sleeve - look ma, no hands, look ma, no feet - all that).
To conclude: David Mitchell is bright (bright like David Foster Wallace is bright) BUT - unlike DFW - the erudition does not get in the way of the writing. I would argue that this is not a novel. But I would also argue that this is great writing. A great debut (short story collection).

Okay, so the ending is flawed, but what a marvellous book! I can easily forgive it its flaws for the joy it has brought me. All the voices are so individual, so utterly convincing that time and again I was dragged along deep into each story, even though at each new story it took some refocussing to get to grips with the who, what and where. By the way, I found this one of the advantages of the episodic set-up: it forced me to stay alert all the while, not only because I constantly had to figure out what each story was about, but also because I was constantly on the look-out for connecting threads between the stories. David Mitchell's real forte, however, is his effortless style. Every voice sounds true and just right, and the themes and metaphors - the novel's deeper layers - are so lightly interwoven with the stories that they form an integral part of the whole and are never forced upon you. One of the novel's most important themes is chance versus fate and the way trivial actions (like phoning a wrong number) can have a deep and lasting effect on people far away you have never even heard of. Central in more than one way, therefore, is the marvellous, dreamlike episode set in Mongolia. For the story that the I-person (or what do you call a ghost?) is so desperately seeking for me sums up very beautifully the novel's view on chance and the role of cause and effect. It goes like this: "There are three who think about the fate of the world. First there is the crane. See how lightly he threads, picking his way between the rocks in the river? Tossing, and tilting back his head. The crane believes that if he takes just one heavy ste,. the mountains will collapse and the ground will quiver and trees that have stood for a thousand years will tumble. Second, the locust. All day the locust sits on a pebble, thinking that one day the flood will come and deluge the world, and all living things will be lost in the churn and the froth and black waves. That is why the locust keeps such a watchful eye on the high peaks, and the rainclouds that might be gathering there. Third, the bat. The bat believes the sky may fall and shatter, and all living things die. Thus the bat dangles from a high place, fluttering up to the sky, and down to the ground, and up to the sky again, checking that all is well." In short: a very rich and rewarding book.

I must echo most previous reviewers' sentiments about Ghostwritten. It is well written - of that there can be absolutely no doubt. Each of the nine stories is unique. It's difficult to imagine that these nine pieces could come out of the same mind. The characters are well developed (as well developed as they could be from first-person narratives) and the settings convincing.
What doesn't work here is the idea that this is a novel comprised of nine interlinked stories. It just doesn't satisfy the way a novel should. When I picked it up, I was prepared to be confused, trying to put all the pieces together but I did expect them to all fall into place in the end. And while some ideas did come together, the majority didn't.
So, why the four stars? As I said, each piece was well written and intriguing. Plus there's a certain amount of mystery that compelled me to keep reading. That sense that the reader was a part of the mystery Mitchell was setting up. That it didn't pan out the way I'd have liked it to didn't really disappoint me because it was so well done.
My suggestion - look at this as a collection of individual works of fiction tied together by loose threads. If you like more cohesive "tales of coincidence" try Geoff Nicholson's Bleeding London or Richard Beard's Damascus.

David Mitchell begins exploring the themes in "Ghostwritten" that he will later explore in "Cloud Atlas": identity, wanderlust, disorientation, and the need to know one's place in the world. This novel is actually a series of interconnected short stories (some more strongly connected than others) about characters who who are either dragged passively from place to place or are firmly rooted without the means to leave.

The need to tell one's story -- in fact, the need to HAVE a story to tell -- permeates the book. When I reached the conclusion, I felt an understanding on an emotional level rather than an intellectual one. I couldn't immediately explain "what it all means", but I felt an empathy with the characters.

Mitchell's work isn't easy to read if you need your books to be linear and have a clear through-line. But his amazing ability to shift between voices -- like no one else I've ever read -- is more than worth the time it takes to work through a book like this. He takes us from a Japanese cultist, a British businessman, a Russian goldigger, and others so smoothly and convincingly you'd almost think each section was written by different authors.

I read "Cloud Atlas" before reading "Ghostwritten", and I do believe the former is a more accomplished, rewarding book. But "Ghostwritten" is probably an eaiser read than "Cloud Atlas" (the shifts are less jarring), so if you're looking for a less challenging introduction to Mitchell, this is probably where you should start.

The subtitle to David Mitchell's debut, "A Novel in Nine Parts," hints at both its strengths and weaknesses. The nine parts are in fact nine interrelated short stories ranging from 30 to 60 pages, each set in different locales (Okinawa, Tokyo, Hong Kong, rural China, Mongolia, St. Petersburg, London, remote Ireland, and Manhattan), each with different narrative voices. The book's strength comes from Mitchell's ability to convincingly create distinctive voices for each of his narrators, and to a lesser extent, render their surroundings. The weakness is that the stories are linked tangentially by various events, objects, and characters, in a way that is somewhat entertaining, but ultimately fragmented and ephemeral. First published in the UK in 1999, it's a true pre-millenial work, chasing themes of the role of chance and fate, and spiritual rebirth in the face of a new era. By the end, one wishes he'd weeded out the weaker stories, and not tried to tie them all together in an attempt to bring the global village to life.
Every reader will have their own favourites among the various stories, mine were actually the opening two. The first is the delusional ramblings of "Quasar," an Aum Shinrikyo cultist who is hiding out on Okinawa after having released Sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway. This is followed by a beautiful portrait of a slacker Tokyo jazz buff working in a specialist jazz record shop. It's a perfect piece, highly evocative of one of filmmaker Wong Kar Wai's more gentle moments. Then, after a somewhat basic foray into the decline of a corrupt British lawyer in Hong Kong, we switch to the life story of a woman working at a tea shack at the bottom of a remote Holy Mountain in China. Her life spans the entire depressing history of modern China, as she suffers at the hands of feudal warlords, Japanese invaders, Nationalist Chinese, Communists, the young cadres of the Cultural Revolution, and finally the indignities of the capitalist reformation. It gets a bit cliché at times, but mostly works.
This is followed by a piece you'll either love or hate, the story of a transmigrating spirit/soul in Mongolia. It switches host bodies through touch, as it seeks out the origin of a folktale which it hopes will explain the nature ot its existence. I personally found it entirely hokey and New Agey, but I'm sure others will disagree and find it charming. The subsequent story of an art heist from the Hermitage Museum, perpetuated by New Russian gangsters with the aid of an ageing Kim Philbyish British spy is an initially pleasant change of pace, but grows more and more tiresome as the characters fail to rise beyond stereotype. It's also the one story where Mitchell's ability to capture place and people fails. It finally gives way to the story of an amiable womanizing musician/ghostwriter in London, which is both droll and engaging in an awfully Hornby-esque way, However it's somewhat undermined by its overt referencing of the Paul Auster novel "The Music of Chance" both in name (the narrator's band is so named), plot (as in the Auster book, the narrator meets two rich men and spends an evening gambling with them), and theme (the role of chance in life).
The final two chapters are especially weak, as they build to an apocalyptic global nuclear exchange. The first tracks a brilliant Irish scientist who is disillusioned by her work and its military application in the Gulf War (that she should be surprised by this is rather silly). She attempts to escape to her tiny home island of the coast of Ireland so that her knowledge of "quantum cognition" won't fall into military hands. While Mitchell's depiction of the island and its inhabitants is charming (especially her relationship with her husband and son), the story descends into a rather silly pseudo-thriller story with a ridiculous ending. Still, it's better than the final piece, the transcriptions of radio broadcasts of New York late night DJ who stays on the air during what may or may not be WWIII, unleashed (or not) by possibly artificially intelligent weapons systems. He takes calls on the air, and most of the story is a running dialogue with either a high-end hacker, which may actually be the artificial intelligence itself. It's not a particularly successful foray into sci-fi and is especially unfortunate given the high quality of some of the writing earlier in the book. When Mitchell stays away from the ephemeral and spiritual, his talent in capturing the human condition are a joy to read, unfortunately, in this book he too often succumbs to the desire to make a larger point--whereupon the prose grows tedious and trite. Hopefully, he'll try sticking to the more intimate pieces next time.

Please allow a brief introduction: I gave this novel "only" four stars because I save 5-stars ratings for timeless masterworks, "masterwork" being used in the fullest sense of the word.

This said, Ghostwritten is an impressive novel and David Mitchell (whom I was already familiar with, thanks to another novel of his: Cloud Atlas) is now one of my favourite authors.

What is the subject and "shape" of this novel? Hard to pin it down at the outset... Some reviewers spoke of "compartmentalized" fiction, so I might play along as well and use the very same expression. Ghostwritten is made of finely interwoven short fictions interspersed with elaborate links (i.e. a name dropped in the middle of a conversation, some description that will bring other characters, from previous chapters, to mind, etc.).

The general "mood" of the novel is melancholic, it's as if the lives narrated in the novel had only one purpose: to put the next episode into motion (like in dominoes).

It might be me, but I got the impression that what Mitchell is trying to say (beware of reviewers looking for "meanings"!!) is that our lives are useless "per se", we're just small gears in a grand design. Rich lawyers, art-thieves, backpackers, poor peasants, our lives (be them fascinating or not) are only meant to affect yet other lives/event, preventing the grand narrative of the world from ending. Hence, the melancholy (how can you be happy when you sense that you're being used? That no matter what you do, you're just the smallest part of something to big to fathom?)

That's my interpretation, take it "cum grano salis".

Mitchell writes in a fine prose and he's showing an impressive familiarity with a broad range of "locations" (his fictions are set in many different parts of the world) and backgrounds (he talks about business, history and many other topics in a convincing manner, meaning that he probably backed his work with some attentive research).

There is really no need to discuss this novel any further: it's very good... and you should read it!

For a debut novel, Ghostwritten is fantastic. In light of what Mitchell accomplishes in Cloud Atlas, however, Ghostwritten seems like a warm-up. Cloud Atlas is a more virtuosic version of Ghostwritten, as both range across space and time to include multiple protagonists. Both novels feature ethical concerns centering around corporate corruption, technological advances, and human nature's will to power. Musical composition is a prominent motif in both novels, as well. If you only have time to read one Mitchell novel, make it Cloud Atlas, but Ghostwritten is a page-turner and worth the time.

I read this book after Cloud Atlas and was expecting a fiasco. The first story didn't change that, but it was haunting enough to keep me reading.
I cannot deny the literary value that the Atlas has over this book. But this one isn't a trashy chain of novels either. halfway into the book I decided to skip a night's sleep to finish the book and I do not regret that.
The several apparently unconnected stories become somehow intertwined at the end and you get to the point where you understand what the book is about: not as much as ghosts, or people or spirits, but rather about the choices we all make and their immense effects over perfect strangers. I felt like watching people's lives over God's (or whatever each of you call divinity) shoulder!

David Mitchell attempts a lot in this first novel, and for the most part he succeeds. This is a book best read twice, in order to pick up all the subtleties of synchronicity woven into it. Nine characters spread across the globe are all part of the same story, most without realizing it. Or are they? It's not clear, at times, whether these are reliable narrators, and the narrative itself calls into question the nature of ourselves and our actions. What's most unsettling, and becomes the part of the book that simultaneously succeeds and fails most dramatically, is the shift of tone from one chapter to the next--from light romance to melancholy ghost story to heist caper, from New Age road story to small-town charming to impending Armaggeddon. While showcasing Mitchell's range, this fragments the narrative more than it should, so that the tales seem to stand more apart than together. Still, Mitchell is a hell of a writer, with a gift for description and a lively imagination. This deserves to be read, and you deserve to read it.

I just closed this book moments ago, and am still not exactly sure how I feel about the ending. I loved the idea of this book, its complexities, its varied voices, the scope of its locations. I loved that the author used distinctly different voices to tell each narrative. I loved how these characters briefly overlapped into each others' stories. Very clever and well thought out, especially for a first time writer. The non-human's story, though, kind of lost me a bit, as did the last 50 pages or so. I felt like it was written in an esoteric language that I didn't quite understand. I wish that the author hadn't taken this turn when he did, because I was on the verge of giving this book 5 stars. By making this story too complex, perhaps, he lost me. At the risk of sounding unintelligent, it just went over my head.

An absolutely superb book that immediately entered David Mitchell onto my list of top ten writers.
The true beauty of the book is in the writing. Mitchell is skilled in his craft and as each new chapter opens, you're sucked into the world of its characters. His Hong Kong, London, China, Tokyo and other locations are so densely and well described that you feel as if you've actually visited the locales.
And Mitchell's characterization is superb as well. Every one of his cast of twenty or thirty main characters is perfect ... an exact description of who they are; you can't leave the book without a sense of having met a new cadre of friends that you'll carry with you.
Much of the marketing about the book talks about its unique, interwoven structure. And, that's definitely there. It starts out small, but by the end of the book becomes almost suffocating as you consider the interconnections that each of us has with the whole world. In the last few chapters I had a few moments of amazement as puzzle pieces fell into place and I saw how Mitchell's world fit together.
Mitchell uses his structure to underlie the basic themes of the book, but does it subtly enough that the reader's awareness and understanding is slow and revelatory.
Overall, an easy book to read that's beautifully written and totally engrossing.

I loved the first story - beautifully written, very interesting choice of character to explore and a convincing background for Quasar. The second was also excellent, but things start to fall away after this. I wasn't too impressed with the Hong Kong or St Petersberg stories, couldn't even read through the London one, and the China story was a bit cliched, with the whole "perpetually hard lot of Chinese women" theme a bit laboured, albeit accurate.
I'm really surprised so many other reviewers didn't like (or perhaps didn't "get"?) the ending of the New York story, a very clever twist after we started the book dismissing the "White Nights" as nothing more than a deranged fantasy.
Mitchell can certainly bring his characters to life, but plotwise I think he's taken on too much. I felt that some stories really didn't need to be here (e.g. the London piece), while others could have been taken further, e.g. Satoru's story, although this character seems to have been reincarnated as Eiji in Number9Dream.
All in all, a very good read, even if you have to skip a few of the middle stories.

David Mitchell is another great talent that can be added to the group of first time Authors, who if they can maintain the excellence and originality of their first book, are destined for long, distinguished careers.
You and I have read books that were made of stories that interlocked, each story complete and seamlessly transitioning from one's end to the beginning of the next. There are also great books like, "An Instance of the Fingerpost" by Iain Pears, that have different voices recount the same series of events, as they perceived them. "Ghostwritten" is entirely different, it can only stand in its entirety, and its nine stories in ten parts equal one great tale.
The 9 elements of the book range from the familiar, to what appear to be historically based fiction, and then on to science that I believe to be well into the future. The interesting point here is the style the Author uses to bring these storylines together. It is not a single event viewed from many perspectives. The common cue that ties one part to another can be an event, an object, or something a bit more exotic in a spiritual/life form capacity. Also very well done is the Author's placement of the cues, the points at which he ties one element to another. The stories do not unwind in a linear sequence, nor are the common cues based on a formula, by doing this he keeps the reader's attention to detail, anything less and you will miss some of the fun.
The book is very well done, was a very different read, however it was not vague, nor obscure, or surreal. There are times when a new style of story too often means dense complicated prose that can cause some readers to not try the new Author. This is absolutely not the case with "Ghostwritten". This is different and accessible, and I believe will appeal to a wide range of readers.
There was only one reason I stopped short of 5 stars, and it had nothing to do with the caliber of writing. There was an event that by definition is very disturbing and uncomfortable to read. It was made even more grotesque by the language used. The vile language, in my opinion, was unnecessary. It was used to describe an event that if the reader was not appalled by it taking place, the reader is one who cannot be shocked by anything.
With the one exception a very fine work and debut.

Beautiful writing and some clever twists but after a while it felt a bit like homework to me, something that I was assigned and had to admire but wasn't really absorbed in. Then I gratefully put it down, realizing I don't have to write a paper on it!

He has a really beautiful turn of phrase but everything felt at a distance to me, I wasn't really involved with the characters and felt like I was observing rather than experiencing things with them. I read about half (got to the spirit part) and realized I was not really involved and let it go.

This review is probably going to make me unpopular among the legions of fans of this novel who have reviewed it on this site, but if everyone agreed on everything in this world things would be mighty dull.
With that said, David Mitchell is a good writer. His prose is consistently fluid and within the body of each of this novel's parts - ie stories - he often succeeds in creating a narrative that is suspenseful and imaginative, but where he fails is in creating flesh-and-blood characters that the reader cares about. Instead, they come off as mere symbols, the significance of whom is unclear.
The plot structure - a sort of La Ronde where one character in one story is indirectly linked with a character from another, a global six degrees of separation - while at first of interest becomes increasingly muddled as the novel progresses. This isn't an easy read and it may be beneficial to set up a character chart to help keep the interrelationships straight.
There also appears to be a ghost story running throughout - something to do with the transmigration of an errant soul. I wasn't keen.
Again though, David Mitchell is a talented writer and there are moments throughout that are quite inspired. I particularly liked the first chapter "Okinawa" in which he portrays the paranoia of a member of the cult responsible for the sarin gas attack in Tokyo. "Petersburg", which tells the story of art forgers in Russia, is also quite involving. And the novel's penultimate chapter "Night Train", which reads like a radio show transcript set during what appears to be the brink of World War Three, manages to gain a certain level of suspense, though I think this reader at least missed its point.
I would be interested in reading more from this author. I understand his second novel is in the works. "Ghostwritten", however, is just not my bag.

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.

This book is Mitchell's first novel. That said it is cohesive & tightly written. The book is a series of linked first person narratives told by nine characters. The nine characters range from a terrorist cult member (my favorite)to a late night deejay.In between are various nationalities from various stages of life.In short they & we inhabit the global village.All the characters are remarkably rendered & intertwined. Their experiences are unique, yet interrelated. The final chapter brings about a shared fate.It is a challenging work. Obviosly the book is not for every reader. Reviewers compare the author favorably to DeLillo & Murakami. I struggle w/Delillo & love Murakami. I don't see the connection, especially to Murakami, but as reference points in a global literary village the comparisons are helpful. I look forward to his next effort.

Ghostwritten is a very entertaining and inspiring read, until the author drops all the plot-line balls he's been juggling to grasp one and hold it out to the reader at the end of the book. I was very impressed up until that point with well-drawn characters living in shimmering prose. The ending wasn't terrible, just a bit of clumsy bait-and-switch. I can empathize that endings are difficult to pull off, and I had to work hard on the one in my novel Fools Poll. And Mitchell's ending is much more complex.

The ghost aspects that ran through the different novellas that made up each chapter were best when presented in more vague fashion. Then we get to an intelligence that inhabits bodies, leap-frogging toward some origin tale that resides in Mongolian folklore. Well written, but brings you up a little short: "Huh? I have to believe in this metaphysical position to keep going?" At least that was my reaction.

The whole promise of the book, chapter by chapter, was how is the author going to pull all these people together? That promise is not fulfilled, and I hate to say that because I wanted it to work because Mitchell is a brilliant and gifted writer. The last three chapters were like saving the worst for last. Third to the last, we meet another well-drawn character but are sucked into a physics exercise about intelligent war machines and a scientist who regrets her contribution to this technology. I might well be too dense to follow the hints, but it got a little unbelievable from there. We are shifted from a beautiful book to a TV spy caper.

The next to the last chapter is really the last chapter, as the last chapter is a needless re-visitation with the first chapter's cult character finishing up a possibly delusional mission. The next to the last chapter suddenly falls flat in the writing department, and no wonder, with its jarring end-of-the-world nuclear war threat averted by a mysterious omnipotent being/character/machine (?) who calls into a late night NYC radio talk show host to explain all this. Heady stuff; I just don't think the author pulled it off too well. It turns out that most of the characters we have met in such engrossing detail earlier in the book were somewhat pointless diversions, with clever and slender links to others that probably were intended to mean more to the reader than this one got out of them.

But you have to give David Mitchell credit for trying. And you have to give him credit for excellent writing. I've read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which is why I picked out his first, Ghostwritten. And I will definitely read his other books, as well.

Stories. At first seemingly disconnected, but slowly clues in one story indicate something else in another. Some of the links seem simple and easy, some are are quite obscure. Some stories are quite tightly linked together. The more you progress through the book these connections become stronger. The first few stories however seem to link only by the simplest of coincidences, those connections become stronger as the stories move on. The multiple links through mutiple stories.
By the end of the book I kept checking back in earlier stories for the events that I had missed.
The author spent time in Hiroshima teaching English, and I think this has had an influence on his writing, both for locations and in the use language. You can read each story by itself, or as a whole. The final one however does seem to bring everything together.

This book held my attention unlike many others, keeping me awake reading many nights! Each long chapter is almost like a different story, but all of the stories are interlaced. This is done very cleverly until the very end, where I was disappointed by the way everything wrapped up. That was my only reason for four stars rather than five. This book is very well written, with beautiful language and characterization. It's hard to describe the plot, so let me just say check out Ghostwritten for yourself!

I primarily bought the book based on the great reviews it received from English newspapers. I am part Japanese and was intrigued by a modern novel with a slice of Japanese plot. This novel, which basically is 9 stories in one, started out brilliantly. The Japanese portion is well-researched, well-written and amazing in the way the author captures some of the unwritten and taboo themes in Japanese society - teenage antagonism towards society, growing issue of mixed children fathered by Japanese businessmen and Philppino prostitutes, break down of family values and young adult's work ethic, just to mention a few. It is probably the best and most realistic portrayal of Japanese society I have read to date. I was hooked and in awe. The stories set in Hong Kong, China and St. Petersberg were also gripping and enjoyable. I liked how he wove the Japanese plot with the Hong Kong plot. For me it was pretty much the last 2 stories that killed the book. Somewhere the author fell off the edge of the cliff and went gaga. Maybe I just don't have the literary appreciation? I don't know. I have just asked my husband to read the book and tell me if I'm gaga or not.

This book is overpowering - almost unendingly brilliant, exciting, interesting and frequently hilariously funny. It's very addictive - I couldn't put it down. For a first novel, you can see the seeds of the genius which are fully realized later in "Cloud Atlas", a work of the first order. Although much of it is a bit "pulpy" as opposed to "literary", the way the stories interconnect is consistently brilliant, and the book's themes are intertwined in an intricate mesh which completely works.

What are these themes? That we are all connected and interrelated, and yet the world is spiraling out of control. Sometimes the author has the writer actually state the theme of the book (this is done in Cloud Atlas too) - violating the writer's injunction to "show, don't tell", and yet it works here to bring the wildness down to focus, and to show that the writer is serious and has an important message to tell.

At the end you are left with the feeling that you have been seriously entertained, but also that you got something more out of it - for me a greater appreciation of the world, and how we are all connected. A tremendous work, and unlike many books which I find moving, an enormously entertaining book as well.

cloud atlas--dazzling. but like lots of dazzling things, it's something you have to look away from once in awhile. i couldn't put Ghostwritten down. the lapidary style is there, the imaginative leaps. the clues that connect all the characters in a matrix of sorts. the voices (this guy is a literary ventriloquist, for certain) haunt you. exotic far east stuff--stuff for history buffs. sex and drugs and stuff. david mitchell is the new william boyd/martin amis--he's that bloody good. 4 stars cause 5 are reserved for classics, kids. if you are a writer yourself, you'll be inspired by this, i think. i may seek out number9dream now!

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.

Ghostwritten is at first glance a collection of short stories, located in places as diverse as a small jazz shop in Tokyo, a tea shack on Holy Mountain, a small Irish island and a radio studio in the United States. But all the stories have connections with each other: characters from previous stories pop up, sometimes so glancingly that you have to be very aware. In the end this is a (very intelligent and masterfully crafted) novel about what is and is not true, what is real and what only exists inside (or even outside) the human mind and why do make people which decisions. It is actually quite diffucult to summarize the contents of the book, but it is absolutely wonderful: read it!

This is the first book that I ever read, finished, started over at the beginning, and read straight through again. That's not to say it is the best book I've ever read, but dang it is good. I didn't want it to be over, and I wanted to go back through and make all the connections. I'm sure I'm still missing some.

If you liked Cloud Atlas, you will like this novel, too. Like Cloud Atlas, each of the stories in Ghostwritten could stand on their own as a short story, but they are so intricately woven together, in ways that matter and in ways that don't. Mitchell is an artist and craftsman. I love his writing style, so full of humor and insight. His characters are as real as any I've read.

This is the first book that I ever read, finished, started over at the beginning, and read straight through again. That's not to say it is the best book I've ever read, but dang it is good. I didn't want it to be over, and I wanted to go back through and make all the connections. I'm sure I'm still missing some.

If you liked Cloud Atlas, you will like this novel, too. Like Cloud Atlas, each of the stories in Ghostwritten could stand on their own as a short story, but they are so intricately woven together, in ways that matter and in ways that don't. Mitchell is an artist and craftsman. I love his writing style, so full of humor and insight. His characters are as real as any I've read.

This remarkable novel speaks volumes about our increasingly interconnected planet. It does so, however, without the xeno/techno-phobia that often comes hand in with realizations about our shrinking planet. Rather, it delivers a wonderful story that is by turns scary, beautiful, funny, sad...I could go on.
As for the story itself, consider how you would describe how your parents met, without even mentioning them until the final words of your narrative. That is what "Ghostwritten" strives for, and achieves, a web of utterly random, and yet, interconnected events that contribute to an unseen conclusion.
A wonderful first novel!

This is not exactly one whole novel by itself, it is more like a book containing nine short stories, each with its own character, theme, setting, and style. The concept of the book reminds me of the novel, Magnolia, where although each segment is a story by itself, the characters and their stories are somehow linked to one another.
This is an enjoyable book. The book brings us around the globe, giving us wonderful insights to different cities and cultures. It introduces us to a variety of interesting characters, from the young, middle-aged, old and even spirits.

Although the subtitle for Ghostwritten is "A Novel in 9 Parts", it didn't read like a novel - although it had characteristics of a novel, it also had some characteristics of a collection of short stories, or novellas - so, I refer to it as a new form - the shovellae.

Themes of fate, chance, and the cosmos are the threads connecting the 9 "parts," each set in a different location (Japan, Mongolia, London, New York, and so on). The human desire to wander - both literally and figuratively - helps drive the plot(s). But it's the restlessness of the characters (including the ghost) that provides the central narrative thread. Ultimately, the shovellae explore, singly and collectively, different perspectives on the concept of interconnectedness; the characters are constantly searching to find or escape someone/something to either make him/herself whole or alternatively set him/herself free.

It is a remarkably inventive work, and one I recommend highly, particularly for those who like Cloud Atlas. If you're looking for something traditional - something that has plot closure, for example - you should probably keep looking.

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.

Why has there been so little hype about this amazing book? Where are all the prizes and fanfare? It's just stunning in its evocation of the modern world, and seems to me very prescient about the nature of terrorism; the covert power struggles over use of technology (explored in chapter eight); the individual floundering against unwieldy hegemonic forces and the ever present and affirming power of love.
The title is brilliant and I loved the literal and post modern playful use of the free-ranging consciousness or "ghost" writer to draw us into the theme of human interconnectedness. Some of the plots are very Hollywood pitch and facile, but this playfulness is part of a post modern relationship with readers. The plots are extraordinary and beautifully evoked in Mitchell's easy use of language that mimics, lives and proselytises. Some reviewers have found the 'six degrees' theme rather pointless in the text - the links don't seem to take us anywhere engaging past idle recognition of intersections of fate. I feel that these intersections produce different kinds of meanings to the 'six degrees' theme. To me they draw attention to the timeless themes of human connection and that individualism is greatly flawed as a Western aspiration etc and I think the book is deeply political in its offering of these snapshots of human identity. The chapters add up to an intelligent, heavily freighted and mesmerising tome.
The most exciting thing for me reading the book is that Mitchell respects his readers. I like where he is taking us and can't wait for the next book.

This novel has captured my imagination, colored the world as I see it, and raised the bar for each new book I read. Each chapter is written from a different character's perspective, in a completely unique style, which showcases the depth and breadth of this young author's prowess. Like Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, this book carries the reader into many minds, dances around a single event from various perspectives, and reveals the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate and unrelated events around the world. I am in awe of this author, and could not recommend this book more strongly to a well read, curious reader.

GHOSTWRITTEN is a startling original debut novel set in places as disparate as Okinawa, Mongolia, and London, each locale and its attendant narrator adding another story to Mitchell's tapestry. This is new millennium globalism, where people are connected by the most tenuous threads as they inhabit the same world run by coincidence and fate. You'll find that many reviewers will be unable to summarize the plot of this book; instead, they will describe the characters. That's because the plot IS the characters - who they are and what they represent.
The rhythms of the prose are often staccato and simple, but there is a beauty to it, a sure truth to the words. I entered this fiction and emerged blinking in what seemed like sudden light. Sometimes Mitchell's inventiveness was simply too much to take in, and it struck me as forced, originality for originality's sake, but, all in all, he succeeds admirably.
I suspect David Mitchell's GHOSTWRITTEN will be one of those books people either love or hate; you'll react to it on a visceral, not an intellectual, level. Certainly people who like only traditionally told tales will be disappointed, as will lovers of naturalism and realism. One thing is clear: this book will be discussed by serious readers. You should read it so you can throw yourself into the fray.

In this debut novel, published to almost universal acclaim, the author presents 9 disparate stories, each in a different setting and each with a different first-person voice. The narrators are a Japanese doomsday cultist; a teenage jazz aficionado in Tokyo; a corrupt and haunted Hong Kong lawyer; a time-battered Chinese noodle-shop owner; a nomadic, disembodied intelligence currently migrating through various people in Mongolia; a seductive but battered art thief working at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg; a London-based itinerant musician, ghostwriter, and ne'er-do-well; a brilliant but threatened Irish physicist; and a NYC late-night radio-show host.

That this author can write is not in question. Settings, characters, pacing, and action are beautifully rendered for the most part. Connections between the 9 stories are whispy, ghostlike threads that are intriguing to the reader but play no part in the actual stories---a miniscule mention of swan in one story, for example, echoes in another time and place when some other character dreams of swans. The author's touch with this device is light, light. Coincidence, randomness, what is real and what is not are the themes woven into this intricate and imaginative compendium.

But does this book work, that is the question. I've finally concluded that Ghostwritten is like the Little Girl with the Curl: when she was good, she was very very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid. Seven of the stories I rate as very excellent indeed. Two, the ones set in Mongolia and NYC, I found overwritten, undisciplined, and exceedingly tedious. I suspect the author got locked into the idea that the book could only have a Message if it ended like your average TV show---everything all wrapped up, roll credits, cut to commercial. Seven good stories out of nine makes this book worth reading. To the author I say this: give your readers some credit; they don't have to be beat over the head.

This book is certainly interesting, however by the conclusion I was puzzled and I felt really let down. The book deals with many different characters leading extremely different lives, and throughout the novel one is just waiting to see how the author is going to pull all the threads together. I have to admit to being totally unimpressed with the method Mitchell used to do this. There was no build up to this unexpected and frankly unwelcome conclusion. I say unwelcome as it added absolutely NOTHING to the novel, if anything I felt it subtracted from its worth. However, saying that the book is very well written and some of the characters are beautifully portrayed. One certainly gets a whistle stop tour of the world while reading this book!

I can't recommend this book highly enough! Ghostwritten, David Mitchell's first novel, is the third I've read by the author and by far the most intricate and rewarding. Each chapter clarifies the obscure thread that exists throughout the story until a tangled mess is revealed and subsequently unraveled.

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.

Completely intrigued by the capsule of the story, and the few reviews I had read, I ran out to grab this book. By now, you know about the 9 interlinked stories. Most of the stories, by themselves, stand up very well. Many of them are reminiscent of other works, but still good writing. But I was let down by the lack of a strong link between the stories. Its hard to say more without giving a spoiler. Suffice it to say, if you like short story form, this is an interesting read, but ultimately fails a united novel.