Product Description

Set at the fugitive edges of Asia and Europe, a hauntingly memorable debut from an acclaimed new writer

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10851 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-20
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"What is real and what is not?": David Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts, plays with this question throughout its "parts". (That there are 10 sections is just part of the mystery of this book's schema.) Told through a range of voices, scattered across the globe--Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Petersburg, London--Ghostwritten has been described as a "firework display, shooting off in a dozen different narrative directions" (Adam Lively).

Certainly, Mitchell offers his readers a vertiginous, sometimes seductive, display of persona and place. "Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo," he writes in "Okinawa", the first section in the novel. "It's so big that nobody really knows where it stops." That sense of the global extension of the (post)modern city, the networks-- cultural, technological, phantasmagoric--to which it gives rise, is one key to this story of a Japanese death cult devoted to purging the "unclean" (gas attacks on the metro). "No, in Tokyo you have to make your place inside your head": that's how this immense world gets smaller, more subjective, more mad, as the narrator, Mr Kobayashi, sheds his "old family of the skin" to join a new "family of the spirit". It's a common theme. "I'm this person, I'm this person, I'm that person, I'm that person too," chants the voice of "Hong Kong", in the second section of the book. "No wonder it's all such a fucking mess." Neal's talking about his world, his life as a Hong Kong trader--"he's a man of departments, compartments, apartments"--but he might also be describing the experience of reading Ghostwritten. At once loquacious and knowing, leisurely and frantic, Mitchell offers his readers a huge, but fragmentary, portmanteau which builds in the links between its parts--aching bodies, reality police, the "ghost" writer in the machine of contemporary life, its mad, comic, and cosmic voices--without quite convincing you that they really do come together. -- Vicky Lebeau

Lawrence Norfolk, Independent
'Demands to be read and re-read...an astonishing debut'

Daily Mail
'Engaging, engrossing, written with a zen-like lucidity'

Customer Reviews

Feeling a bit left out...
Lots and lots of people think this man is incredible, so I feel pretty sheepish writing this, but I just can't seem to click with Mitchell. I see a lot of reviewers have discussed the short stories/coherent novel issue, but for me it's the quality of the writing. I just don't find his writing beautiful. I find it quite workmanlike, in fact, lacking in poetry and precision. And I know there are thousands who think I am wrong, so maybe I am?

But I had a couple of other problems with the book. One, in all of the early chapters (I think up to London), women are repeatedly derided as whores, bitches, etc. I know this is the character speaking in each case, and the characters are all flawed in some way, but why do so many of them need to talk like this? I found it quite shocking. Men are also slagged off, but not in the same sexually-loaded terms. Is Mitchell trying to say something about the inherent misogny of our world...or did it all just slip in because it felt 'natural'to him?

Two, I found the angles he took for each country rather stereotypical. A lot of the characters are straight out of central casting. The Irish folk are all wise wits who are in tune with nature and still leave their back doors open. The Australian woman is down to earth and says oath a lot. (I have never met an Australian who says this! And I've spent a lot of time there.) I could go on...

And the eastern chapters...I can't believe a man as clever as Mitchel has never heard of Orientalism, but apparently not. Or maybe he just doesn't care.

Anyway, I gave the book three stars because obviously I am missing something in terms of its quality, and I did enjoy reading parts of it, and, most importantly, anyone who smuggles a rip-off of the Terminator plot past their agent and publisher deserves a little something for his chutzpah.

So many strands
When I started reading Ghostwritten, I wondered why it was marketed as a novel instead of the collection of short stories it seemed to be. Admittedly each section of the novel would reference and sometimes overlap with another section of the novel, but it still seemed to be a quick way of getting around the problem that short story collections traditionally don't sell that well.

And then I got to the Clear Island and Night Train sections and suddenly it all came together, plot strands and themes winding together to turn the disparate characters into an overall symphony of what David Mitchell has to say to the world.

Written in a flowing style that is equally capable of comedy and action and sentiment, Mitchell has turned out a great novel. It reminds me a little of Murakami, a little of Iain Banks (and Iain M. Banks), with snatches of Philip K. Dick but is far and away its own beast.

The first section about the cult member is interesting although, as you'd expect, emotionally distant, but is immediately followed by the romantic tale of a young Japanese boy, then an English businessman in Hong Kong who is haunted by a ghost, a Chinese woman and her viewpoint on the changes in her society, an awareness that hops from person to person, a gang of art thieves, a musician who is also a ghost writer, an Irish scientist whose theories are wanted by the CIA and then a late night DJ who gets a very special caller.

My favourite sections are Kyoto and Clear Island, but this is the sort of novel that will undoubtedly reward rereading and no doubt favourites will change. At any rate, I think this is one of the best novels I've read this year.

a brilliant writer but an overly self-conscious book
I agree entirely with Mary Whipple - this was a book in which an author was less telling a story and more showing what talents he has. There's no question that he does have talent but if he made less of an effort to showcase it, it would be more evident in the story. I enjoyed this but felt like telling him to calm down a bit.