What I said then:
Cloud Atlas was a little bit insane, but a lot brilliant. Here’s hoping this matches it.
What I say now:
Ghostwritten, Mitchell's first novel, certainly shares many strangenesses with Cloud Atlas, his best known. Both are hugely, ridiculously ambitious, trying to sum up the very essence of what it means to be a human being alive on this earth. And both are tapestries constructed from the fragments of multiple, disparate, barely-connected storylines.
In the case of Ghostwritten we get nine chapters, taking place in nine different locations, narrated by nine different characters. They are: a Japanese domestic terrorist hiding out after gassing a subway; a moony, indecisive kid working in a record store; a hopelessly corrupt banker; a Chinese tea-house owner; a non-corporeal spirit that can inhabit humans and control them like puppets; a Russian member of a group of art thieves; a womanising Londoner; an Irish physicist on the run from the CIA; and an irascible late-night New York DJ. The chapters are linked, but just barely. A character glimpsed in chapter five might momentarily reappear in chapter seven, then narrate chapter eight. Often the connections feel forced and unnatural, and they didn't seem to add a great deal to the book. He could have hit all his thematic targets just as well with wholly disconnected stories, I think.
Mitchell is a very good writer, and he performs the schtick of writing in nine different styles so well that I nearly forgot it was a schtick ... but I only nearly forgot. Given the eclectic collection of narrators, I felt Mitchell never quite changed his narrative voice enough with each narrative jump. A Chinese peasant and an Irish physicist should sound completely different, but too much of David Mitchell seeped through the writing. Cloud Atlas, which follows a similar pattern, is actually more successful in its literary ventriloquism because the different styles at play in that novel are so wildly disparate, there's no way they can blend into each other. (Briefly: Cloud Atlas doesn't just jump all over the world, it also spans a period of thousands of years, beginning in the 19th Century before leaping to the 1930's, the 1970's, the present, and then into the far-distant future.)
The problem with humanity, according to Mitchell, seems to be that we're a species of ghostwriters. We say things we don't mean, we parrot the words of others, we control other people and tell them what to say and do. We let ourselves be told what to say and do. We deny responsibility for our actions. This idea has its most literal expression during the chapter in which a disembodied spirit, moving from unknowing host to unknowing host, searches for clues to its own nature. The spirit can control its hosts (or rather, victims), forcing them to do anything it wants, and the same dynamic is at play in every other chapter in some form or other. The subway terrorist has given his will to the leader of a cult; the contents of the Irish physicist's brain are so valuable that the CIA is determined to confine her to a lifetime of captivity; the Russian art thief is the pawn of various gangsters; and so on.
Given the episodic nature of the book, obviously some chapters are going to work better than others. I suspect each reader will have different opinions as to which sections are the best. It's also pretty much impossible to judge the book until you've read the whole thing, and have the whole pattern complete in your mind (I loved reading Cloud Atlas, but it didn't really reveal itself until the very last sentence). The final chapter, which drifts into the realm of science-fiction, works beautifully. Not only does it do a good job of summing up the novel's themes, but everything that came before it was made better by knowing where we'd ended up.
Mitchell is an extravagantly talented writer, and (once I'm freed up) I'll continue to read his work (Heck, I've already got a copy of his most recent book sitting in a box under my bed). Ghostwritten is his first novel, though, so there are some cracks here that weren't apparent in Cloud Atlas. Still, better that he's getting better than getting worse, right?
Cheers, JC
about to read: A Clergyman's Daughter by George Orwell
books to go: 92
No comments:
Post a Comment