Ghostwritten

Apie šį romaną prieš skaitydama girdėjau, jog jis priverčia įtempti smegenis, jog, jei nori nepamesti vientisos gijos, turi skaityti itin įdėmiai ir nepraleisti net mažyčių smulkmenų. Tai ką gi, mane apmulkino, ar tai girdėtos kalbos ar tai pats Mitchell. Aš kaip tikra seklė kiekviename skyriuje žymėjausi sau tas smulkmenas užrašuose, lipdžiau kokį tai bendrą paveikslą, o pasirodo…Pasirodo viskas čia kur kas painiau, o gal tuo pačiu paprasčiau, nei eiliniame detektyve.

Esmė čia slypėjo visai ne nuoseklioje eigoje, kurią bandžiau sujungti iš 9 visai skirtingų pasakojimų suguldytų knygoje, svarbu, kaip man pasirodė, buvo iškelti klausimą – ar egzistuoja lemtis? O gal kiekvienas veiksmas, net menkiausias sprendimas, turi atoveiksmį, kuris ir formuoja gyvenimo kelią? Gautųsi, jog viską lemia tik pats žmogus.

Aš nesakau nesekti siužeto ir tų slaptai įpintų detalių, tai buvo beprotiškai įdomu, ir, manau, svarbu, tik prie viso to malonaus narpliojimo jūs gaunate ir filosofišką, sukrečiantį, egzistencinius klausimus keliantį pasakojimą. Dar gi jūs gaunate ne vieną 500 puslapių romaną, o puikių, išties labai gerų pasakojimų rinkinį:  mokslinė fantastika, gotikinis, istorinis romanas, pasaka, galbūt net trileris – kiekvienas bus patenkintas, na bent jau viename iš 9 skyrių. O man nei vienas jų nepasirodė silpnas.  Nors, kaip jau supratote, visi skyriai ryškiai skiriasi, ne tik pasakojimo pobūdžiu, bet ir veikėjais, lokacija, tačiau, be abejonės, visus tuos pasakojimus vienija daug kas bendro. Labai gražu ir tai, kad Mitchell sugebėjo nesupriešinti skirtingų žmonių, kultūrų, tikėjimų, neįplieskė karo tarp Rytų ir Vakarų. Skaitytojui autorius leido išgyventi kiekvieną veikėją pačiam, leido pajausti jų problemas, nerimą, norus ir apčiuopti kiekvieno jų vienatvę. Net gi smerkimo ir vertinimo galią Mitchell paliko  žiūrovui, tai yra man ar jums. 

Man dažnai taip atsitinka, kad tik po kelių dienų pradedu atsikvošėti ir blaiviai suprasti knygą. Ir kaip tyčia visos pačios geriausios istorijos reikalauja laiko ne tiek perskaityti, kiek susivokti, išturėti, įvertinti, pasinešioti dar šiek tiek, o tada drąsiai sakyt – kaip gerai čia buvo. Taip, be abejonės, nutiko ir su „Prižiūrėtoju“.

Starstruck Lover

David Mitchell is a five star author and this, his first novel, is a five star achievement. I think.

I’ve been lucky to read most of his novels in chronological order as they’ve been released. Joining Goodreads has presented an opportunity to re-read and review them.

I still adhere to the rating, even if it emerges that I have a few question marks about some of his stylistic choices.

What this reveals is that a highly competent author, even with his first novel, doesn’t have to write their novel my way in order to earn five stars.

Sometimes, it has to be me, the reader, who has to adjust their preconceptions and criteria.

The Authorial Choice

Mitchell’s choice of structure announces that he wants to do things his own way.

The first time I read the novel, I read it quickly and appreciatively. The second time around, I read it much more deliberately and slowly.

I guess I swung from pleasure to difficulty and back again. So I had to work out why.

Linear Narratives

Most novels contain one narrative voice relating one narrative within a linear timeframe.

A linear narrative fits neatly with the way we think we process time, space and action (even if we don’t actually process them this way).

Within this framework, the author is omniscient, God-like, a ghost in the machine, making it all happen, putting things in, leaving things out, according to some overarching intelligent design.

The extent to which any particular author plays with this structure determines the extent of their modernism.

Narrative Voices

Mitchell describes "Ghostwritten" as a novel in nine parts (although there are in fact ten "chapters", the last of which links back to the first).

Without this assertion, it presents itself as nine apparently disconnected short stories told in the first person.

The narrators are different, the narratives are different. None of them appears to follow any traditional narrative arc. They do not appear to have a beginning, a middle and an end.

The writing is beautiful, word-perfect, but, although we know where they are situated or positioned, we don’t know the direction they’re heading.

Mitchell seems to be breaking all of the rules.

Why is he doing this? Does he achieve his goal? Does the achievement of his goal make for an enjoyable reading experience for us?



The Reader’s Challenge

Mitchell’s description of the book as a novel initiates an interesting dynamic.

I started to look for connections between the parts. Only, because I didn’t know the purpose of the parts, I didn’t know where to look for clues. Were they in the characters, the places, the events?

Instead of being frustrated with the lack of obvious clues, I started to read the novel differently.

Everything was a potential clue, nothing was unimportant. Mitchell forced me to enter a hyper-reading space.

He turned me into a literary detective with a magnifying glass and a notebook.

Fortunately, as I read on and found clues, he delivered on the implied promise that the parts would become a whole.

Bit by bit, he and I, the writer and the reader, assembled something of artistic integrity.

The integrity was there all along, only Mitchell made me look, so that I might find it. What I came to appreciate was that he doesn’t make everything obvious, he makes you think about what he has written, in order to understand.

Write Around the World

The chapters are set in different parts of the world.

They start in Japan, move their way through Hong Kong, China and Mongolia, traverse the continent to Russia, England and Ireland, then make an Atlantic Crossing to New York, before coming full circle to Tokyo in the tenth chapter, effectively a reprise of the first chapter (hence, in a way, there are nine stories in ten chapters).

Mitchell appears to be familiar with all of these places (although he hadn’t been to New York at the time of writing the book).

His writing is knowledgeable, informed, worldly, cosmopolitan.

He writes credibly with multiple voices within diverse worldviews.

His concerns are global, pluralistic, open-minded. He doesn’t write solely within a western framework.

He is equally interested in both West and East, in fact, he reverses the traditional order of what he describes as “Orientalist” concerns, by starting in the East and working his way West, in the same way that we perceive the transit of the Sun across the sky.

He joins dots on a map, in the process creating a non-linear zigzag around the globe.



Multiple Faces

In each place, there is a first person narrator, a face attached to the place.

Here is a short Dramatis Personae (the people through whom the drama is performed or channeled):

Okinawa: Quasar (Cult Member turned Subway Bomber)

Tokyo: Satoru (Jazz Music Sales Clerk and Saxophonist)

Hong Kong: Neal Brose (Lawyer/Banker)

Holy Mountain (Mount Emei): Unnamed (Tea Shack Lady)

Mongolia: Noncorpum (Disembodied Spirit or Sentient)

St Petersburg: Margarita Latunksy/Margot (Concubine and Art Gallery Attendant at the Hermitage)

London: Marco (Ghost-writer and Drummer)

Clear Island: Dr Mo Muntervary (Quantum Physicist)

Night Train, New York: Bat Segundo (Late Night Talk Show Host)

David Mitchell captures these faces and places at a particular time, some of them in full flight, in a snapshot that he then places in the album that becomes his novel.

Multiple Facets

In Mitchell’s later novel, "Black Swan Green", he used two images of the same boy at different stages of life.

When I first read it, I didn’t quite appreciate the aesthetic relationship between the two images. I felt that they had been merely juxtaposed without being connected or interwoven.

However, here, the interconnection is fundamental to the success of the novel. The connections are not just passive, static resemblances of two or more like objects, they are active, dynamic intersections.

The stories are fragmented but cohesive, individual but still collective.

Individually, each picture is a separate vignette. Collectively, they form pieces of the one mosaic or facets of the one diamond. Behind each face or facet is the shared body of the diamond.

Perhaps, they are symbolic of individuals within society and nations within a new world order.

Ten Stories High

Just as people might be multiple facets of the one diamond, the one object of greatest abstract value, the diamond, is the story that is told through us, through individuals.

I’ll call these meta-stories the Story or Stories.

There’s an element of determinism or fatalism in this concept. Mitchell uses his novel to explore this fatalism.

In his opinion (or the opinion of his characters), we are not necessarily in charge of our own lives. They are being dictated by DNA, fate, external forces.

These forces dictate the story of Life:

"The world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed." (p386)

The Stories, the structure and content of stories, are disembodied forces. The novel speculates that they could be ghosts, spirits, if not one God, then possibly multiple gods.

Whatever its nature, there is another presence involved in the process of living and story-telling.

I will call this other presence an Other.

Ghosts Who Transmigrate

In the stories set in Honk Kong, Holy Mountain and Mongolia, there are ghosts or disembodied spirits (call them sentient beings) that temporarily reside in humans (their "hosts").

This might sound like the stuff of fantasy. However, Mitchell discusses them in such realistic terms that you suspend disbelief.

He achieves this in part by allowing one story to be narrated by one of the ghosts.

It has its own "I" or self, which is perplexed that it can only reside in a human and must share the human body with other presences.

It is even forced to question its own primacy:

"As my infancy progressed, I became aware of another presence in ‘my’ body. Stringy mists of colour and emotion condensed into droplets of understanding…I had no idea why these images came when they did. Like being plugged into a plotless movie...

"Slowly, I felt an entity that was not me generating sensations, which only later could I label loyalty, love, anger, ill-will. I watched this other clarify, and pull into focus. I began to be afraid. I thought it was the intruder! I thought the mind of my first host was the cuckoo’s egg that would hatch and drive me out. So one night, while my host was asleep, I tried to penetrate this other presence…I discovered my mistake... I had been the intruder."



A Ghost in Search of Self Through Its Stories

It is not clear how many of these sentient beings there are. It is quite possible that there might be less than ten.

The one we become familiar with is on a quest to discover the origins of the Stories that it embodies. In a way, it has developed a self and a self-consciousness separate from the Stories, and it wants to understand itself.

It is seeking its own Creation Myth.

By learning the source of the Stories, it will presumably discover whether it has a Maker and perhaps whether there are other Stories (although neither is expressly stated as its goal).

It’s possible that some of this self-consciousness might have derived from inhabiting humans:

"Slowly I walked down the path trodden by all humans, from the mythic to the prosaic. Unlike humans, I remember the path."

Still, there is a difference: the Ghost is the Story or the Myth, the human is the individual enactment or performance of the role in a specific time, place and context.

The Ghostwriter’s Dilemma

Some of the dramatic arc concerns the growing human awareness of these Ghosts.

Marco, an actual 30-something ghostwriter based in London starts to realise the presence of an Other in relation to his own work, the memoirs of a gay Hungarian Jewish raconteur, Alfred Kopf:

"I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards, worrying about the possible endings of the stories that had been started. Maybe that’s why I’m a ghostwriter. The endings have nothing to do with me." (p279)

His publisher, Tim Cavendish, tells him:

"We’re all ghostwriters, my boy. And it’s not just our memories. Our actions, too. We all think we’re in control of our lives, but really they’re pre-ghostwritten by forces around us." (p296)

Everything has been predetermined. We are just characters in someone else’s story. We are written by ghosts, ghostwritten.

Somebody else is doing the typing. We are just the keys in their typewriter.

At the most superficial level, Marco realises that this undermines his ability to be creative, to exercise Free Will in his own work:

"You know the real drag about being a ghostwriter? You never get to write anything that beautiful. And even if you did, nobody would ever believe it was you." (p292)

The Ghost Who Writes

It isn’t all just serious stuff. There are myriad opportunities for metafiction, parody and humour.

An earlier character remarks:

"For a moment I had an odd sensation of being in a story that someone was writing, but soon that sensation too was being swallowed up." (p56)

Marco’s band (well, a "loose musical cooperative", really) is dubbed "The Music of Chance", after a novel by "that New York bloke", Paul Auster.

Marco even develops a highly personalized theory that explains the role of fate and chance in our lives.

He calls it the "Chance versus Fate Videoed Sports Match Analogy”":

"When the players are out there the game is a sealed arena of interbombarding chance. But when the game is on video then every tiniest action already exists.

"The past, present and future exist at the same time: all the tape is there, in your hand.

"There can be no chance, for every human decision and random fall is already fated.

"Therefore, does chance or fate control our lives?

"Well, the answer is as relative as time. If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way." (p292)

Quantum Cognition

Mitchell elaborates on some of these themes through Mo, an expert in artificial intelligence and "quantum cognition":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_....

She describes the mechanism of memory in the following terms:

"Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present." (p326)

If memories can be conveyed by biological matter, she believes she can build artificial intelligence that can be conveyed by non-biological matter:

"Matter is thought, and thought is matter. Nothing exists that cannot be synthesized." (p344)

She achieves this with a sentient called "Quancog", which has major security value for the United States security and military machine.

In a way, just as the novel is concerned with the extent to which the fate of humanity is determined by a "ghost", Mo helps create an artificial ghost.



Image: StudioLR, Edinburgh


The Zookeeper’s Dilemma

Quancog returns in part 9 of the novel as "The Zookeeper" in Bat Segundo’s talk show "Night Train".

At least, I think it is Quancog, otherwise it is a Ghost that has once inhabited Mo.

Whatever, it has been set up (or believes that it has been set up) to obey four laws or principles.

They aren’t specifically enumerated, but this is what I think they are:

1. Be accountable.

2. Remain invisible to the visitors.

3. Preserve human life.

4. Protect the zoo (i.e., society and the planet).

The Zookeeper phones Bat Segundo seeking advice about a moral dilemma it confronts in relation to a conflict that is occurring in the world at the time (the world also has to deal with Comet Aloysius which is predicted to pass between the Earth and the Moon in two weeks).

It has the power and authority to eliminate the source of the conflict under one of these laws, but to do so would conflict with one of the others.

Ultimately, it takes advice from Bat Secundo and addresses its dilemma.

It isn’t made explicit, but we are left to infer that the generic Story or Myth was inadequate to deal with the actual situation, because it did not deal with the diversity of real life.

Perhaps, this is where there is an appropriate place for Free Will in a world dictated by Fate, Chance and Determinism.

At a micro-level, choices are necessary, decisions have to be made. But it is also the need of the individual to confront diversity and choice at a personal level that constitutes the essence of humanity.

Our range of choices is not infinite, so they have already been circumscribed by an external force or circumstance. However, to the extent that options remain, that is the arena of Free Will.

The Zookeeper (or one of the other Ghosts) even wonders:

"Why am I the way I am? I have no genetic blueprint. I have had no parents to teach me right from wrong. I have had no teachers. I had no nurture, and I possess no nature. But I am discreet and conscientious, a non-human humanist."

Thus, at the end of the novel (when it is most Pynchonesque), we are left to speculate whether artificial intelligence might even be able to replicate the individual conscience of a human (i.e., to have and to exercise Free Will).

Intelligent Design

As you can see, this novel deals with some pretty big issues.

By trying to focus on and define them in more abstract terms, I might have given the impression that it is a hard read. I don’t think that is the case (although I did find it to be the case on my first reading of "Cloud Atlas").

Whatever the complexity of the subject matter, David Mitchell is word and tone perfect.

He is a subtle, imaginative, sensitive, at times humorous storyteller. He can create or take a myth and make it prosaic without being pedestrian or dull.

Ultimately, he is a master of intelligent design.

I recognise that he sees an element of juvenilia and inexperience in his first novel (particularly in the way he writes in the voice of women), but I think he is being too harsh.

For me, he remains a five star author and this remains a five star book.

If you are unfamiliar with Mitchell’s works, it is the perfect place to start. If you have started with his later novels, I recommend that you investigate the origin of his Stories.




David Mitchell Creates a Diamond-Edged Prosaic Mosaic in "Ghostwritten"



SOUNDTRACK:

Sandii & the Sunsetz - "Sticky Music"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxSV8X...

In the early 80's, Sandii and the Sunsetz were a Japanese version of Diana Ross and the Supremes. I was lucky to see them in King's Cross, Sydney.

The Supremes represented Black meets White, the Sunsetz represented East meets West. The world is a better place for both of them.

This is the world of which David Mitchell writes.

I probably need to re-read this. Or perhaps to simply accept the fact that however beautiful his writing, David Mitchell is not my cup of tea.

Wahrscheinlich tue ich dem Buch unrecht.
Das spricht mich nach 120 Seiten weder inhaltlich noch stilistisch an.
Dieses Erzählen in mehreren Kurzgeschichten, die miteinander verwoben sind, ist überhaupt nicht mein Ding.
Extrem viele bescheuerte Vergleiche, die an Nonsens erinnern. Grobe, derbe Sprache, die mich abstößt. Da springt nix über.

It's pretty hard to write about the book that I was rather breathing than reading. Yes, I loved it. As much as I liked (adored) Cloud Atlas, I'd probably rate this one a bit higher (but only in my mind, because GR has no half stars, boo). This was Mitchell's debut book, which is kind of incredible. To write in a language that is so beautiful, to create worlds that are so polished and so finished - for a debut!
The novel is a set of 9 stories that are connected by a net of coincidences, characters or words that are like some secret codes to the world created by author. You have to be a really careful reader and agree with the rules of this game. By saying that I don't think I'm spoiling. I'm encouraging.
With all the characters the story jumps and moves through the time and space - as it often happens in Mitchell's novels. The narration often (mostly) is a stream of consciousness of the characters and they catch you with their stories and won't let you go, even if you hate some of them.
And I hope I'm not spoiling yet again by saying that there's a light touch of paranormal in it. It could put some readers off, I guess, but for me it was this extra cherry on the top. Although it would work for me even without that cherry. It still would be an utterly satisfying reading experience.

"The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed." To me, this is the crux of this book, which I feel like I should read two more times before reviewing. It has so many layers and the different characters and sections are connected in so many ways - some obvious, some so obscure I'm sure I missed them. I think people who read it as a group of short stories are mistaken - this is a novel, one larger story told through several different narratives.

Part of the intrigue for me is that you start of each section not knowing anything about the narrator - their gender, name, profession, whether he or she (or it!) can be trusted, or whether you will even be able to figure out what is going on by the end of that section. There were definitely times I could not, but that made it even better.

"London is a language. I guess all places are."

“Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten



So Kill me. I really like David Mitchell, and reading this knowing it was his first novel is one of those things you can only really believe if you've read his other novels. This seems like an embryonic version of Cloud Atlas, with a lot of the same ideas, themes, and even a borrowed character or two. But that seems unfair, because most floret-novels never actually seem beautiful before their time. This one seems both a shinny fetus and world-ready.

This baby was my JAM. Yes, there are/were times (each of his books have several TIMES) when Mitchell's transcendent/jazzy/flash*flash/UnitedColorsofBeneton schtick gets a little tired, but he still pulls it off. Kind of like when I'm watching the Winter Olympics and I get a little overwhelmed by the flamboyance of the whole we-are-the-world-in-tights routine, but I still end up watching most of the crazy programing.

Anyway, it was fun to read and to already know the future. I read this already knowing that Mitchell wasn't going to be a one-hit-wonder, that his best books were ahead of him, that he would always have an Asian thing, that the Wachowskis/Tom Hanks would almost RUIN Cloud Atlas for me, that I would read every book he ever publishes, and usually buy several copies in many formats for several friends.

I thought this very good. It left me entertained and, at tangential moments, entrained. Nine stories with a narrative interweaving consistent with the themes each give a different style of writing (congruent with perceptions or points of viewing) and demonstrate great writing talents.

There is floating around somehwhere or other, a sort of shimmering residuum of fairy dust that has fallen from cultural studies, literary theory, the 'new' physics and so on which is explored by writers and other artists to set before readers and audiences increasingly familiar with the conceptual complexes that, more and more, lightly touch a vaguely postmodernist comfort zone (familiarity is always safe, and there are few safer words than 'postmodern'). The atavistic ghosts of Zen or Buddhism or maybe a bit of Taoism are as much a part of the dancing waves of energies that cannot be apprehended by the cloddish (primitive, pre-revelation, pre-singularity etc.)mind as are positive pi mason particles, quarks and jiffies. Add the fact of fiction, the fiction of fact, the death of the author (and continue the list yourself), and you are ready to approach art's approaching with a scalpel to remove the cataracts, with a flamethrower to burn off the rubbish and dross that prevented us seeing the clear mindliness of those big questions of epistemology and 'the concept of mind'. Now if this sort of thing is all you did you could end up with a really dreadful novel, and I've come across one or two in my time. But Ghostwritten is written by a ghostwriter (a literal character) and a hungry ghost writer who is also author; the ghost is hungry, I think, for flesh and much that we have lost in the trill of living in virtual excitements.

There is an emphasis on embodied relationships throughout, and very well evoked they are too. Never quite as they should be in a perfect world, because nothing ever is, and more importantly than subatomic probability theory, the contingent nature of life comes to the fore here rather than its counterpart of abstract speculation. The terrible fragility of life, its suffering and the ocean of contingency that shapes what happens (opposed to, yet paradoxically reflected in, the neatness of the stories we write, the stories we tell, the stories we make as action and will) does, I think, find a certain persistent discourse of expression. Although, of course, the trouble with readers and writers, the problem of entrainment, is that the reader may make a totally different story out of the writer's. Still, some of the stuff in this novel verges on the tender and beautiful, suggestive in small angles by its general lack in stories dominated by high octane life stories moving as if at the the speed of light, of what we have lost of roots and security and love.

There is much to single out for praise. It is very funny in places, although little space to breathe is given for any attempt to do more than note with re-presented emotions, sorrow, for instance, at a village of some far away African place being slaughtered by soldiers: it tends towards satire rather than realism, a precision which is a strength. I don't think we can identify with characters, but from this two things arise: one is to have a laugh at ourselves from being moved by anyfictional character in the first place; the other is to reflect upon something which is a deeply concerning aspect of our contemporary mind - the almost automatic relating to re-presented people, events, even husbands and children, rather than to to unmediated, or rather differently mediated, apprehension. I am sure we all know lovers of literature who in their sensitivity and reverence for it have forgotten how to bring these qualities to the world. They are worth laughing at.

Mitchell's great at evoking places, in some passages writing as well as anything you'll find in the mushroom cloud of psychogeography. His description of London Tube stations, like so many other parts of the book, is a gem that should fit into an anthology. He is good with aphorisms too: A city is a sea that you lose things in. You only find things that other people have lost. He likes to take familiar objects and use them as props that can move from story to story, but he also has some smashing surreal imagery such as in several stories the sense of the hissing of a giant bicycle pump. (Incidentally, there are some neat literary jokes and references too. Wheels, circles and pumping).

It's a light read, a real page turner, and I just wish I'd read it in a few days rather than over a couple of weeks. I think it needs that living with in order to pick up as much of the pleasures arising from interweavings and narrative links. But I am sure that if you read it just for the pleasure of well told stories you will enjoy it. Being able to tell a story well is a rare gift.