What Book to Read?

After reading some of Mitchell’s recent books, I’ve gone back to the beginning to read his first one, published in 1999. It’s probably just as well I enjoyed some of the later one before trying Ghostwritten, because without some understanding of his work, I doubt if I’d have got beyond it. I would probably have admired his prose, but given up entirely on the content.

Like Cloud Atlas (2004), which I reviewed here, and The Bone Clocks (2014) – here – Ghostwritten is a novel in a number of parts – nine in this case. Each part has a different narrator, a different location and a completely different feel to it. The first and the brief coda at the end have the same narrator, Quasar, who is a member of a millenarian doomsday cult responsible for a gas attack on the Tokyo subway, based on a real terrorist incident. The second is about Satoru, a young Japanese jazz lover working in a record shop in Tokyo. The third is a monologue narrated by financial lawyer Neal Brose, who is part of a money laundering scheme in Hong Kong. The fourth is told by an old Chinese woman who runs a tea house on Mt Emei, the Sacred Mountain, and who has lived through and suffered under the warlords, the Nationalists and the Communists. But heaven forbid that Mitchell be considered a realist writer; the fifth section is told by a disembodied spirit, a ‘noncorpum’ which survives by inhabiting living hosts. This section takes place mainly in Mongolia, where the spirit is trying to trace its origins. The sixth section is set in St Petersburg, where Margarita Latunsky is a museum attendant in the Hermitage Museum; she is also working for a gang of art thieves. The seventh section features Marco, a part-time drummer and part-time ghostwriter in London. In the eighth section, Mo Muntervary is a physicist studying quantum cognition; she returns to her birthplace in Ireland in an attempt to evade American officials who want to use her work to create intelligent weapons. The ninth section is the text of segments of a talk-back radio program in New York, where the announcer is contacted by an entity, Zookeeper, that seems to the reader, though not to the host, to be a disembodied artificial intelligence. The brief coda returns to the Tokyo underground.

As one might expect from having read other of Mitchell’s books, these sections have some links, with characters from one having walk-on roles in another. Thus Neal Bose sees Satoru and his girlfriend in Hong Kong, his maid is the granddaughter of the Chinese tea house keeper, a backpacker staying at the tea house goes to Mongolia as the unknowing host of the noncorpum, Marco shoves Mo Muntervary out of the way of a taxi, the man whose life story he is ghostwriting knows one of the art thieves in Moscow and so on. A few of the characters appear in some of his later books.

These ‘coincidences’ highlight one of the major themes of the book – the importance of chance. Quasar has been given a code phrase and number to ring after completing his mission but the cult has betrayed him and the number connects to a random phone – that of Satoru’s record shop. But in going back after closing up to answer the phone and hear the, to him, meaningless message, Satoru meets the girl he is already attracted to and they begin a relationship. Marco’s section deals overtly with chance. His band is called the Music of Chance. He speculates on a possible pregnancy arising from a tear in a condom he has used: ’Weird. If I’d bought the pack behind on the shelf …’ Then there is his own identity. ‘Why am I me?’ he muses. ‘Chance, that’s why. Because of the cocktail of genetics and upbringing fixed for me by the blind barman Chance.’ And he visits a casino, just to rub in the point. Mo Muntervary’s quantum cognition also raised the issue of chance: ‘Quantum physics speaks in chance, with the syntax of uncertainty’, she thinks.

But are these encounters and actions coincidences? There is also a counter theme; that of design. Some actions are controlled by a non-human intelligence, either the noncorpum – as when the backpacker decides to go to Mongolia – or by artificial intelligence in the radio talk back section. It seems that Mo Muntervary – from the previous section – has designed this artificial intelligence to conform to four ‘laws’. But there are circumstances in which it is impossible to comply with all of them at once. So has design failed too? I found the radio talk back section deeply confusing. A check of comments about the book on the internet confused me even more; see for example this one, which tries to trace the supernatural connections through all the sections.

So what is Mitchell trying to do? His deliberate refusal of coherent narrative, and the themes of chance and design, suggest he wants the reader to approach perceived reality with scepticism. And maybe this is where the title comes in. Marco, the ghostwriter, is talking to the man whose ‘autobiography’ he is writing; the man says ‘the act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.’ Marco replies ‘it doesn’t seem very honest. I’m not writing what really happened.’ ‘We’re all ghostwriters, my boy. And it’s not just our memories. Our actions, too. We all think we’re in control of our own lives, but really they’re pre-ghostwritten by forces around us’. ‘So where does that leave us?’ Marco asks. ‘How well does the thing read?’ is the answer he receives. Hmm. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Nothing that I’ve said takes away from the undoubted power of Mitchell’s writing, though I think it is even better in some of his later books. But I might not have gone on to read these, based on this one. This is because I found it pretty depressing. The hopeful sections seem well and truly cancelled out by the hopeless ones. Mitchell sees a dystopian future, and, it seems to me, no chance of avoiding it. But given how opaque it all is, I might be quite wrong. Do tell me what you think.

David Mitchell doesn’t seem to have a web page. But here’s a review of the book – not that it helps all that much.