No matter what the book jacket claims, this is not a novel. It is a series of vaguely interconnected short stories spanning the globe and leaping around in time. A more studious reader may have found more synergy than I did - I have my suspicions regarding the relationships between, for instance, the narrator of "Mongolia," His Serendipity, and the Zookeeper in "Night Train," but they are only suspicions. Nothing is confirmed, nothing is clear. Summing up the plot is impossible, but here's a taste: the book starts with a doomsday cult member awaiting the end of the world in Okinawa, trots back and forth across hundreds of years and thousands of miles, and finally meanders its way back to him at the very end.A lot of people like books with open endings where you're not quite sure what's going to happen or, as in the case of this book, what the hell just happened. I personally prefer things to be at least tied up loosely. I like to know how the characters are related, both to each other and to the overarching story, and there's simply no hope of that for this story. Too many characters, too many details, not enough repetition for the slow kids like me to keep up.That's not to say I didn't enjoy this book. The characters were phenomenal. All so different and yet so three-dimensional, so real. There was a lot more dialogue in this book than I'm used to, to the point where I occasionally had to backtrack to figure out who was speaking, but in general the speech patterns were distinct enough that he said/she said weren't strictly necessary. Also, the descriptions of life in the various locations were brief yet so concise I felt like I was there.In the end, I believe this is a book that requires multiple reads to totally grasp. That is both high praise and harsh criticism. If you like your fiction to be a total mind trip, then Ghostwritten is for you. If you prefer something a wee bit less convoluted, I'd recommend skipping this one. ( )

This is a clever book, yet manages to mostly avoid David Mitchell rubbing his cleverness in the reader's face. The style is unpretentious - or I should say the styles, as there are many different styles in the book, all done well. Each section is about entirely new characters in an entirely new place, living an entirely different life - yet in each one, there's a brush with characters that have gone before. And then in the end, everything connects up in this big ohhhhhhh moment. Clever. Nice. I liked it.

The downside with this kind of structure is you necessarily have some sections you enjoy reading more than others - but there were none that I hated, and only one I got bored with. Each one is so very different from the others, it's almost like a book of short stories, only there's a much bigger aspect to them all. One particular section stayed with me, of a Japanese teenager working in a music shop. It's beautifully done - the boy loves jazz, and he falls in love with a girl who comes into the shop, and the whole thing is wonderfully atmospheric, just like the jazz pieces the character loves. Warm, intimate, wistful, rainy. Really quite beautiful. And just one small event in that story enlightens us on something that has gone before, in quite another place, to quite another character - such a small thing, that means nothing much to the character himself, but has a big impact on this other character he has nothing to do with. It's like that all the way through, and makes one think about how insignificant things connect in such unexpected ways, linking up all over the world.

As for the title - well, one story is narrated by a ghost, another by a ghostwriter, another has a ghost in it - yet the supernatural element is somehow made quite ordinary and not particularly important.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's more in this book that I've missed. I read it without trying to understand absolutely everything, and without putting in much effort to connect things up, so I have the feeling I've missed a lot. But that hardly matters in the end. I enjoyed all the journeys very much.

I read Cloud Atlas first which I really enjoyed, and I have to say, I enjoyed Ghostwritten even more.

First and foremost is David Mitchell's prose. He is one of the annoyingly excellent writers whose sentences I keep wanting to write down to have on file for instant access.

Beyond that it's the ideas and the thrill of the detective work that the reader gets to do in spotting the links between all of the parts of the novel. I really perked up when I realised that not only is Ghostwritten a novel in nine parts that are related to each other, but Ghostwritten is also related to Cloud Atlas and his other books. David Mitchell is building an entire world with his novels. Sneaky bugger.

You could accuse him of being a bit too clever but his novels have a way of arriving at something far greater than the sum of their parts. And the parts are good enough on their own already.

I probably won't read Cloud Atlas again but I will very likely return to Ghostwritten one day. ( )

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. ( )

Starts out feeling like short stories, and in a way it is, but a thread runs through them, and gradually ties them all together in a rather unexpectedly science fiction ending. Terrorists in Japan, a banker in Hong Kong, an old woman in china, a spirit trying to find its origins in Mongolia, gangsters in St Petersburg, a ghostwriter in London, a physicist on the run and a New York radio presenter, all through it as well run themes of love: both happy and sad, and in many different forms. Charming throughout and gripping towards the end, though I was left a little lost by the epilogue. Fab. ( )