Review: Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Having read Mitchell's award winning Cloud Atlas (it won the British Book Awards Literary fiction award, and the (from a sales point of view) coveted Richard and Judy Book of The Year), I was keen to see what his first published novel, "Ghostwritten" was like.

The structure is very similar to that of Cloud Atlas - stories are told from the perspective of various protagonists, with occasional meetings between them: for example, we have a courting young couple spotted in an airport bar by a businessman from another story. As an idea, this works really well as Mitchell uses great attention to detail to nicely tie the story together. His literary ability and excellent characterization even manage to make a mass-murdering terrorist a vaguely sympathetic character.

Before getting into more detail, I want to get my main criticism out of the way. it is an issue I think that few people would have, but one which put a dampener on the whole novel for me. He has a character who is obviously a physics genius (he does over-egg how smart she is, and to my mind this is the weakest character in the whole book) who has an absurd lack of knowledge about things she would have a complete grasp on. For example, she mentions - as an idle fancy- the distance from the sun to the earth, and overestimates the distance by four and a half times. She also seems to have a very poetic turn of mind for a physicist, and also her backstory doesn't quite add up - for example, she seems blissfully unaware that the company she works for (who design guidance systems for space rockets) gets a large proportion of it's funding from the American military, and that the guidance systems she designs are used in actual missiles that kill actual people. Given the high standard of characterization throughout the novel, this is very poor, and stands out glaringly to me.

If the reader had no or very little science background (as I suspect Mitchell has) then this would not be an issue, and probably wouldn't arise. Some checking of facts by either Mitchell or his editor could have completely avoided this issue, and made her naive rather than unbelievable.

The rest of the characters in the book are brilliantly well drawn - I particularly liked the feckless writer and the Russian art thief. Their escapades are well realised, and occasionally quite funny: there is a scene where the writer hides in a cupboard in a casino to escape a couple of knife-wielding cousins. It is interesting to see that this book contains ideas that will resurface in Cloud Atlas. The writer appears as (if I recall correctly) a music student, only slightly tweaked and slightly less moral.

Mitchell's writing style is poetic and full of visual detail, which draws the reader into an almost film-like experience. This works very well throughout the novel, although I think this novel would be almost impossible to film - mind you, they said that Tristram Shandy couldn't be filmed.

Mitchell captures the idiosyncrasies of his characters very well. His turn of phrase is often outstanding, and presents the characters' thoughts and desires very well.