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. ( )

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 ghost 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, even 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. ( )

"Ghostwritten" is the first novel by British writer David Mitchell, who also wrote the Booker-nominated "Cloud Atlas," a book I read earlier this year which I loved to a degree words cannot express. Naturally eager to read the rest of his works (of which there aren't many), I started with "Ghostwritten." In the same style as "Cloud Atlas," this novel is a series of short stories or novellas that have wildly different settings but are linked through multiple connections, sometimes large and obvious, sometimes small and subtle.

Whereas "Cloud Atlas" is a voyage through time and space, "Ghostwritten" is merely a voyage through space, taking us from the busy subway of Tokyo, to the empty deserts of Mongolia, to the gloomy streets of St. Petersburg and to the thousand of little rooms, attics and offices of London. There are nine stories in total, some better than others. Mitchell has lived in Japan, the U.K. and Ireland, and these locations are portrayed more vividly than the others - particularly Petersburg, which didn't sit right at all with me. Likewise, some plots are stronger than others; I was naturally more invested in the Irish physicist on the run from the CIA who makes a last stand in her hometown than I was in the thoughts and feelings of a jazz store clerk with a crush on a customer.

What's the book about? A lot of things. The major one would seem to be the connectivity of the world, how everything we do has repercussions and how we are all linked together. This didn't impress me much - it's been done before and is somewhat gimmicky. But there's a myriad of other themes present: destiny, desire, responsibility, identity, globalism, helplessness... the problem is that there's far too many of them, and they're expressed rather clumsily. While "Cloud Atlas" focused on one major theme (power), "Ghostwritten" has a hundred little morals elbowing each other out of the way for stage time. Nonetheless, there are a few pieces of thoughtful wisdom littered throughout. This was my favourite, a depressing condemnation of the existence of altrusim:

"A traveller went on a journey with an angel. They entered a house with many floors. The angel opened one door, and in it was a room with one long bench running around the walls, crammed with people. In the centre was a table piled with sweetmeats. Each guest had a very long silver spoon, as long as a man is tall. They were trying to feed themselves, but of course they couldn't - the spoons were too long, and the food kept falling off. So in spite of there being enough food for everyone, everyone was hungry. 'This,' explained the angel, 'is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves.'

"Then the angel took the traveller to another room. It was exactly the same as the first, only this time instead of trying to feed themselves, the guests used their spoons to feed one another, across the room. 'Here,' said the angel, 'the people think only of one another. And by doing so, they feed themselves. Here is heaven.'"

Tatyana thought for a moment. "There's no difference."

"No difference?"

"No difference. Everybody both in heaven and hell wanted one and the same thing: meat in their bellies. But those in heaven got their shit together better. That's all."

Having said all of this, it's unfair to compare "Ghostwritten" with "Cloud Atlas." This was Mitchell's very first novel, and for a debut it's quite impressive. Yes, the message is a bit messy, and yes, some of the sections are weak. Yet it still drew me in, and entertained me, and presented a thoroughly interesting and well-constructed world.

As a novel, Ghostwritten is quite good, and as a first novel it's amazing. It's just a shame for Mitchell that the first of his novels I read was "Cloud Atlas," one of the crowning literary masterpieces of this decade, and thus I envisage him as a being of pure energy that pumps out miracles 24/7. It's the same damned thing that happened with Michael Chabon and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." ( )

I love the post-modern nature of this book and how David weaves together apparently disparate stories into a single novel. ( )