Ghostwritten

I just finished David Mitchell’s first book – Ghostwritten, another book of variously-voiced fragments, with some impressively, chillingly prescient moments of reflection upon terrorism and world politics, given that it was written in 1999.

The book was in many ways just like Cloud Atlas: the same idea of having a series of stories set in different times and places that inform one another but are linked only by a recurrent idea here, a repeated character there (who could really have been a non-repeated character, much like Vincent Vega’s appearance in Butch’s story in Pulp Fiction – it’s done to raise a smile, to slightly inform); the same seriousness in moving into science fiction that surprised me in Cloud Atlas; even two characters who appear in both novels – the very same Timothy Cavendish and a rather different Luisa Rey. The final similarity is that it is tantalisingly close to being a brilliant book, but falls just short.

The advantage that Ghostwritten has over Cloud Atlas is that the different speakers are much less exaggerated, an exercise in different voices, rather than different generalised fictional genres. Where Cloud Atlas felt like the class clown doing his best impersonations of teachers and celebrities, Ghostwritten felt much more like fragments of well-developed novels with well-developed characters. Some stories were inevitably better than others: I enjoyed a sweet, plaintive love story between a Japanese boy who works in a record shop and a girl who is curious enough about him to come back after her first visit in order to speak to him far more than I enjoyed one about a simple woman living in a tea shop as politics in China alter the world around her but never her outlook. I thought the idea of a sentient defence system governed by four Asimov-influenced laws with the power to kill everyone on the planet taking moral cues from a radio talk show host much more compelling than the limp and long-winded section regarding the woman who made this system possible, and her empty digressions on some simplified ideas of quantum physics mostly made up of buzzword (though the link between these two passages was the strongest of any).

Where the stories were good, they were very good, and Mitchell writes in an elegant, concise and playful style that I very much enjoy, an identity that he allows to come through in these less grotesque characters far more than he does in his latest work. Two or three of the ephemeral characters in Ghostwritten will likely endure in my mind longer than those of Cloud Atlas.

However, Mitchell’s storytelling has two faults. One is that he tries too hard to stamp the identity of his chosen setting on each passage. He puts in far more local colour than it would occur to a resident of that particular place to mention. It’s just not quite subtle enough, and breaks the spell that otherwise keeps us enchanted, especially when other prime facets of his characters’ lives don’t ring true (despite one of his characters being a drummer, I very much doubt Mitchell knows a ride cymbal from a splash). Secondly, a problem that was bad in Cloud Atlas is even worse here: because he writes several tenuously linked stories, he does not quite manage to give a complete and satisfactory story in any one of them. Cloud Atlas at least revisited each of its stories and concluded them (to varying degrees of satisfaction), but in Ghostwritten, only one narrative is repeated, as a kind of epilogue.

Mitchell is a very talented writer, and his books are certainly worth reading. There is much to be admired in his creativity and eclecticism. However, so far, his disjointedness does not quite cohere: it is like listening to a greatest hits album – enjoyable in its own right, but sooner or later you want to hear the songs in the context of their original album: only there is none.

I shall read Number9dream, his second book, tomorrow; I think Mitchell has enormous potential, but so far, I don’t think he has realised it. However, I will be keen to read his work in the future, and hope something truly special will soon come from his fertile imagination.