Book Review: Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Maybe the truth is under your nose, and you can indeed tell the forest for the trees. “As chess players or writers or mystics know, the pursuit of insight takes you deep into the forest,” notes one character in Ghostwritten. “Days were I’d just gaze at the steam rising from my coffee, or stains on the wall, or a locked door. Days were I’d find the next key in the steam or the stains or the lock.”

There’s not a chess player to be had in English expatriate David Mitchell’s dazzling, rich novel. But there are writers and mystics and a dizzying array of key-seekers and globe-hopping settings ranging from the edenic to the apocalyptic. In what is a synopsis-defying collection of genre-bending, interconnecting stories and round-and-round-and-comes-out-here development, we follow the widely-varying circumstances of, among others, a brainwashed terrorist in Okinawa; a deceitful, “bent little lawyer” in Hong Kong; an elderly woman running a tea shack in China; a Manhattan disc jockey; an Irish physicist; and a transmigrating spirit in Mongolia who has “walked down the path trodden by all humans, from the mythic to the prosaic."

Besides interrelated, puzzling, and puzzle-making references and reappearances by key players, the stories, whether prosaic or of the “shinier-myth” kind, are held together by a ping-ponging thematic stance on chance and fate, cause and effect. “Why do events have this life of their own?” wonders one character, while another contends that “we’re all ghostwriters, my boy. And its 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.” More determinably chancy is the belief that “evolution and history are the bagatelle of particle waves,” and that “the most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken.”

Just as Mitchell is adept in couching philosophical ideas about chance and cause within the appropriate cultural context, so too is he convincing in setting the tempo and mood when relaying differing concepts of, and attitudes to, time and truth. An old peasant woman in rural China expresses a reflective, resigned feeling: “With the certainty of an old dying woman, I know it's not the truth that much matters.” She also considers that “all the yesterdays and tomorrows spin around again sooner or later. The world has long forgotten, but us mountain-dwellers live on the prayer wheel of time.”

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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