Ghostwritten [Audio Download]

Each chapter in this book is a short story in itself and at the same time they're all collected together to create one incredible and bizarre epic. Mitchell has the kind of talent that just drips off the pages. It's like attending a nine-course banquet, with each dish more fabulous than the last one. He carries you away and amazes you with every new thought. An incredible piece of work. Absolutely fantastic. Soulful is the right word I think.

There's a different character in each chapter so he adopts a different voice to reflect that character. You're inside the head of an old Chinese woman living up a mountain one minute, a disembodied lost spirit the next and a middle-aged genius scientist the next. It's really quite beautiful to read.

There are so many different subjects condensed into one book it's hard to say what it's about, other than the way chance affects our lives. We have the Tokyo subway attacks in one story; the history of China from the Japanese occupation through the cultural revolution through Deng Xiaoping's reforms in another.Then theories of quantum physics and a late night radio show. It's stuffed full. You never know what's coming next.

People who are looking for a conventional story won't like this, nor will people who want their characters to be fully developed. Not that the characters aren't well written. But we don't necessarily get a full picture of their lives, we just get a slice and you don't necessarily know everything about them. Anyone who doesn't like figuring things out for themselves won't like it either, because he leaves quite a lot to the reader's imagination. You have to put the story together yourself and that requires work.

But for people who do like this kind of thing it's the sort of book that's inspiring because it broadens your own expectations. It switches on a light for you. Shows you the world in ways that you haven't seen before. In particular the way he has of dipping in and out of people's heads was fantastic. Reading this book feels like astral walking - it takes you to another level.

Ghostwritten is a series of short stories, each told in the first person by a different narrator, all of different nationalities, linked by chance encounters and cross-referencing. It's a very clever conceit, and the final couple of chapters contain enough references to the previous 7 or 8 to almost persuade you that it all adds up to a coherent narrative. Unfortunately, for me, it didn't quite.

I had two main problems with the book. The main one was, I just didn't believe in all the different characters. Partly this is the problem with a self-consciously "literary" work of fiction - it strives for literary effect. Many of the characters write literary similes and metaphors that were not only similar in style, but also seemed way out of character. ("I lay entombed in a slab of rock, in an embryo curl". ""Oy!" I yelled, and some genteel ladies walking dogs harrumphed. "Alfred Kopf!" I yelled, and a man dropped out of a tree with a turfy thump." Does anyone write, let alone speak like that in real life?) Plus the characters are mostly pretty unpleasant, making it hard to identify with their various troubles.

The other problem was the way the book occasionally lapses into cliche. The section in Ireland is horribly, horribly cliched, with everyone straight out of central casting, including the shop where you leave the money when the shopkeepers are absent, the ex-hippy who stayed and now grows locally respected marijuana, Father Wally the ubiquitous twinkle-eyed priest on his tricycle and, God help us, all-night sessions at the pub: "'Come by then later, Mo, or whenever, so. Eamonn O'Driscoll's boy is back with his accordion, and Father Wally's organising a lock-in.' Lock-ins at The Green Man. I was home.") And I wished he'd drawn the Americans with the same care he applied to the Japanese or Chinese - the military in particular seem to be based on characters from The Simpsons or Dr Strangelove.

As others have said, the old woman on Holy Mountain section was outstanding, worth reading the book for that alone, and the disembodied spirit was also beautifully handled. The St Petersburg gangsters were pretty unconvincing, though, and unlike the Asian chapters, felt like things he's got from movies than actually experienced.

So, ultimately, I felt it was clever, a very interesting read - but a bit cold, and more like an intellectual exercise than a depiction of real people with real problems - except for that wonderful old woman on the mountain...

Ghostwritten is at first glance a collection of short stories, located in places as diverse as a small jazz shop in Tokyo, a tea shack on Holy Mountain, a small Irish island and a radio studio in the United States. But all the stories have connections with each other: characters from previous stories pop up, sometimes so glancingly that you have to be very aware. In the end this is a (very intelligent and masterfully crafted) novel about what is and is not true, what is real and what only exists inside (or even outside) the human mind and why do make people which decisions. It is actually quite diffucult to summarize the contents of the book, but it is absolutely wonderful: read it!