Review of Ghostwritten By David Mitchell

Ghostwritten was David Mitchell’s first book released to acclaim in 1999.

In similar style to his other books it is nine different tales linked together by a common theme.

Each story is based at a geographical location, Okinawa, Tokyo, Hong Kong etc so the book is like a circumnavigation of the world taking you from Japan to the US in 9 different stages.

Some of the stories are quite straightforward to interpret. eg the Tokyo tale is about Satoru, a teenage who works in a specialist Jazz music shop and his meeting of his love, Tomoyo, who is about to start her education in Hong Kong. Then the story moves to Hong Kong to an investment banker who has been caught with his pants down on some dodgy dealing.

All the tales in the book are interesting and moving in some ways, though sometimes they don’t really have a conclusion.

Some of the tales are really prescient. Clear Island tells of a future when the Americans are bombing the hell out of an Arab state in the Middle East and a young mother, Mo, is trying to escape American weapons manufacturers who need her to make their smart bombs even smarter.

At the end of the day, this book is about the human condition and how it manifests itself in different countries and cultures and how people may or may not deal with that. Some of these tales have a happy ending but for the most part they do leave you thinking, What if?

Although it is similar in ways to Cloud Atlas, particularly in the way the tales are linked, at the end of the day this is a very different book which deserves to be enjoyed for its own merits.