Review by
Bill Kirton
There are
lots of good writers around today. There are even a few great ones – although I
don’t think any list I’d make of them would contain many of the stellar names
which keep getting short-listed for the major prizes. And there are, of course,
some awful writers – gardeners, models, actors, politicians and others who take
a couple of months off to write a novel now and then – because it’s something
anyone can do, isn’t it? There are all these. And then there’s David Mitchell.
The first
of his novels I read was Cloud Atlas.
I bought it with gritted teeth because I’d read that it was ‘an experimental
novel’ and wanted to know what the fuss was about, even though I knew I’d
absolutely hate it, the way I hated (and didn’t begin to understand) the nouveau roman and all the other
movements defined by adjectives ending with –ist. They were modernist,
post-modernist, structuralist, deconstructionalist and almost any other
combination of vowels and consonants as long as they ended in –ist.
Cloud Atlas was a revelation. It’s a rich,
astonishing, complex achievement. Following its various interconnected
narratives is an absorbing, all-encompassing experience of clambering through
layers of meaning, half-perceived connections and elusive echoes. And each of
the layers is a bloody good, gripping story which works at basic page-turning
levels.
But this
is a review of Ghostwritten which,
amazingly, is his first novel, and if you haven’t yet tried him, this is where
to start because (and I keep having to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms
for amazing and astonishing) not only do themes and even characters interweave
back and forth within each individual book, they extend beyond them and
reappear in his other, seemingly unconnected novels. This is a novelist with a
vision and a grasp of the interplay between fiction and reality which makes me
feel unworthy as a reader. But, in case all this hyperbole and sub-academic lit
crit, is putting you off him (and me), I should quickly add that he’s also
funny, tender, compassionate, mystical, down to earth – and he even writes good
sex scenes.
I know I
should give you a quick synopsis of the plot but the problem with Mitchell is
that you get so many. Ghostwritten is
a novel in nine parts, with a different set of characters and plots for each.
It’s set in Japan , Hong Kong , China ,
Mongolia , Russia , England ,
Ireland and America and
extends over huge distances in time and in experiential dimensions. (Sorry,
sorry, but I don’t think I have the vocabulary to do justice to the way he
conveys contexts in which ghosts cohabit with real people and spiritual truths
jostle with basic material beings and things. And Mitchell would find a far
more enticing and intriguing expression than ‘experiential dimensions’, ugh!)
The first plot
centres on a version of the Sarin episode in the Tokyo underground, narrated by a terrorist.
At one point he phones a number he’s been given and simply relays the message ‘the dog needs to be fed’. The next plot is a sweet mini
love story between a Japanese boy who works in a record shop and a girl who
visits the shop with some friends then leaves. She reappears several days later
as he’s closing the shop. The only reason he’s still there is that the phone
had rung as he was shutting up and delayed him. It must have been a wrong
number because the caller simply said ‘the dog needs to be fed’.
And
so it goes on, with money laundering in Hong Kong, the life story of an old
woman who lives on The Holy Mountain in China and experiences feudal brutality
as well as the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath; a noncorpum in Mongolia
which moves through the bodies of different individuals searching for its origins
and spends some of its time in the body of the old woman in the previous plot;
art thieves and fakers in the Heritage museum in Petersburg, whose finances are
linked with the earlier money-lending section; a ghostwriter with links to the
Russian and Hong Kong episodes; and so on and so on.
I
only hope that this ponderous listing of the bare bones of what are
fascinating, involving stories full of well-defined characters and packed with
convincing settings, dialogues and plot twists isn’t putting you off. No plot
summary can do justice to what Mitchell has achieved here. The stories intertwine subtly, sometimes barely
noticeably. Their interconnections are mysterious, tantalising and seem to
extend their significance. They can consist of the reappearance of an actual
character or throwaway images, such as that of a skinned rabbit. The overall
effect is to immerse you in a world where the artist is in complete control of
his material.
This is
more than writing; it’s verbal alchemy. I’ve focused on the stories and the
woven nature of the narratives but there’s so much more to it than that. His
style changes to match the cultures he’s dealing with and he’s as adept at the
cool distances of Chinese folklore as he is using the modern Western
vernacular. This review doesn’t do justice to his achievement because above
all, the book is satisfyingly readable too. And it’s his first novel, published
when he was just thirty years old. I should hate him, but a person who can give
the reader such an intense experience with such apparent effortlessness is
very, very special.
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