Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell.
New York: Random House, 2001.
$24.95 - 426 pages.

Ah but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what is a Heaven for?
- “Andrea del Sarto,” Robert Browning

David Mitchell has noble aspirations. Ghostwritten reminds me of those heroic gambles - in fact, gambling, chance, and the perversity of random events runs through this novel like the cord of a necklace - wherein a protagonist takes the combined resources of his life, grits his/her teeth and says, “Let it ride.” Rather than take his modest winnings and go home to a secure, prosaic life, he takes a risk and rolls the dice. Even when he loses, we cautious folk admire the gesture.

David Mitchell could have published a short story collection, and his readers (and critics) would have been content to read each of the 10 episodes in Ghostwritten, and then behave like thrifty shoppers selecting tomatoes at the grocery store, prodding, sniffing, selecting the best and leaving the culls.

Certainly, each episode in this novel would have easily qualified as a short story. Instead, the author gambles. Linking the stories together with cross-references, music, poetry, repetitive imagery , and random meetings, Mitchell creates a work unified by a singular theme - the mysterious bond that unites all of us in a kind of mystical serendipity. In other words, Mitchell attempts to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Each chapter is given a geographical location, including Japan, China, Mongolia, Russia, London, New York, and a small island off the coast of Ireland. The central characters are a diverse menagerie: a member of the Aum Doomsday cult in Tokyo; an ancient Chinese “tea and noodle shop” owner; a philandering musician in London; a neurotic Russian floozy embroiled in an art forgery/heist scheme; a lovelorn clerk in a vintage record store; the DJ of a late-night “music and talk” radio station; a brilliant physicist with the means to destroy or create the future; a dying, diabetic financier; and a disembodied, century-old spirit searching the minds of a hundred “hosts” for a lost folktale. None of the characters have significant connections with each other, yet their lives brush shoulders like preoccupied commuters in subways and airports. Sometimes, the tenuous touch of passing strangers alters destinies; sometimes it appears meaningless.

Reminiscent of films like “Nights on Earth” or “Six Degrees of Separation,” Ghostwritten has the structure of a spider web - a network of interconnecting threads in which an image or musical note originating in a shopping mall in Tokyo is reproduced on a radio station in New York or an art gallery in St. Petersburg. A preoccupied woman stepping in front of a speeding cab in London is saved by an out-of-work drummer who shoves her to safety. Both continue on, oblivious of the consequences, like the random movement of protons or the journeys of rogue comets. The young Australian woman reading War and Peace on a night train in Mongolia is still reading the same work when she meets Mo Muntervary in another story. Part of a Yeats poem in one story is completed in another and works by Chet Baker and Miles Davis weave through conversations everywhere like a form of cosmic background music.

However, these 10 chapter-long inner monologues can stand alone. My favorites are as follows: the ancient Chinese woman who has seen her little shop on the edge of a holy mountain destroyed and rebuilt a dozen times. Despite pillage, rape and massacres, the onslaught of tourism, occasional pilgrimages, and marching armies, she has stoically endured beneath her holy tree (which communes with her). The Japanese teenager who loves American jazz and clerks in a record store delivers some of Ghostwritten’s most memorable, thought-provoking passages. For example:

Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It is so big that nobody really knows where it stops .... In the time that one street guide is produced, it has already become out of date. It is a tall city, and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one. Things are always moving below you, and above your head. All these people, flyovers, cars, walkways, subways, offices, tower blocks, power cables, pipes, apartments, it all adds up to a lot of weight. You have to do something to stop yourself from caving in, or you just become a piece of flotsam or an ant in a tunnel .... You are pressed against people body to body in the metro, several hands gripping each strap on the trains. Apartment windows have no view but other apartment windows. No, in Tokyo you have to make your (private) place inside your head.

Then, there is the wonderful Bo Muntervary who makes a vain attempt to come home to an island off the coast of Ireland, hoping to return to a life filled with pubs, colorful Irish friends, and the love of her blind husband. But, Bo has a remarkable talent that is coveted by the Pentagon - she can design devices that can send missiles down the elevator shafts of any building in an “enemy country.” She also dreams of building a sentient computer that has moral and ethical reasoning.

Finally, there is Bat Segunda, the DJ for “Night Train,” who plays soulful jazz while he insults, badgers, and cajoles his call-in audience in the wee hours of New York radio (He resembles the jaded, angry Barry of Eric Bogosian’s “Talk Radio.”). However, Bat has met his match when a caller who identifies himself as “The Zookeeper” begins to raise moral and ethical questions about world affairs.
Bat’s belief that his caller is just another crank is quickly dispelled when the Zookeeper begins to speak with an eerie omnipotence about the world’s satellites, warheads, and covert activities. Zookeeper sounds like a weary deity who had decided that a considerable portion of the human race needs to be erased. As he calls in on successive nights (and years), he becomes increasingly upset about the state of the world. At times, he seems to be moving at more than the speed of light around the earth, assessing, analyzing. Then, the explosions begin in distant (and not so distant) cities and something resembling the Apocalypse begins to unfold. (Could this be Muntervary’s “sentient computer” up there ... making some hard decisions?)

This is a remarkable book. Let me hasten to add that not everyone agrees. The New York critics trashed Ghostwritten. However, a large number of European reviews glowed and raved, calling it “literature for the 21st century” and the product of “a remarkable talent” and “a multicultural spectacular.” Well, I don’t think I’ll weep and wring my hands in feigned ecstasy, but I like it a lot. David Mitchell tried to do something that is a bit awe-inspiring. Maybe he didn’t do it. Maybe it falls short, but that make little difference to me. He seems to be a kind of literary Icarus that over-reached himself. Maybe he came down in flames, but he made a breath-taking flight and a hell of a splash.

(Gary Carden is a writer and storyteller who lives in Sylva. He can be reached at gcarden498@aol.com)

 

Back to Top

The Smoky Mountain News