Product Description

An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what connects him to a jazz buff in Tokyo? A woman on a holy mountain talks to a tree - and the tree talks back - unaware of the effect the financial irregularities of a burnt-out lawyer will have on her life. Add to this a Mongolian gangster, a redundant English spy in Petersburg with a knack for forging masterpieces, a despondent 'zookeeper', a nuclear scientist, a ghostwriter, a ghost, and a late night New York DJ whose hard-boiled scepticism has been his undoing. All of them have tales to tell, and all must play their part as they are caught up in the inescapable forces of cause and effect.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10678 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-20
• Original language: English
• 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'

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

'One of the best first novels I've read in a long time . . . I couldn't put it down' (AS Byatt, Mail on Sunday )

'A firework display . . . a remarkable novel by a young writer of remarkable talent' (Observer )

'The best first novel I have read in ages . . . it beguiles, informs, shocks and captivates.' (William Boyd, Daily Telegraph Books of the )

'Fabulously atmospheric and wryly perceptive . . . a huge new talent' (Guardian Books of the Year )

'The best modern novel I have read for some time' (Rachel Cusk, Express on Sunday )

'A remarkable first novel . . . Eastern, ethereal, yet flecked with flashes of commando grit, this multi-faceted novel is full of surprises' (Time Out )

Customer Reviews

Exciting, intriguing and intelligent debut
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!

Neither a mystery-thriller nor a traditional novel.
Eight people and one strange, disembodied spirit give dramatic, first person stories here, in nine different locales, ranging from Okinawa to Mongolia and New York. Each chapter is as compressed and carefully drawn as a short story, and the author gives a virtuoso performance in finding an appropriate, and different, narrative voice for each individual character--from the tough art thief in Petersburg, to the romantic lover in Tokyo, the savagely abused young woman in China, the disillusioned scientist in Ireland, and the manic night-time talk show host in New York.

As good as these individual chapters are, and as good as the writing is within each chapter, however, the feeling persists that the author is almost auditioning--showing all the wonderful talents he has (and they are many) and all the diverse writing styles he can employ. Ultimately, the book remained for me a collection of interrelated short stories. They did not come together into a coherent novel.

Some obvious overlaps of people and events occur among the chapters, along with many subtle overlaps of theme, reflecting the author's concern with free will vs. control, love and connection vs. alienation and isolation, and the planned vs. the random. But these overlaps serve to whet the reader's appetite for a big conclusion that will tie together all the many characters and the world-wide events in some significant way, and they understandably lead the reader to expect some comprehensive resolution, thematically. With the entire world as his scope and some of literature's biggest themes as a focus, this book ended, "not with a bang but a whimper." Mary Whipple

Ghostwritten is an engrossing, haunting read
On its title page, Ghostwritten is described as a novel in nine parts, but it's really a collection of interconnecting short stories. In the first section, an insane Japanese cult member is hiding out after gassing the Tokyo subway. Then the narrative moves gradually west, through Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mongolia, London, all the way to New York, where a late night DJ talks on despite the threatened end of the world. On the way, we meet crooked businessmen and art thieves and, in one of the strongest sections, an old Chinese woman who lives on a mountain, bemused by the evils of the wider world. Like in Iain Banks's Walking On Glass, the multiple narrative works brilliantly, creating a coherent, fascinating world-view. David Mitchell's prose style is varied but always very readable. This is the best book I've read so far this year, and I'd strongly recommend it.