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Ghostwritten by David Mitchell - 5* - My Review

“We’re all ghostwriters, my boy, and it’s not just our memories, our actions too. We all think we are in control of our own lives, but really, they are pre-ghostwritten by forces around us.”

This novel consists of a series of nine interrelated stories.

1. It opens in Okinawa. Quasar is part of a doomsday cult (led by His Serendipity) that plans to release nerve gas in a Tokyo subway.
2. Satoru works in a record shop in Tokyo. He falls in love with one of the customers, Tomoyo, who lives in Hong Kong.
3. Neal Brose is a British expat living in Hong Kong. He is involved in a fraudulent financial transaction related to the Russian mafia. His wife left him, and he is having an affair with a Chinese housekeeper.
4. In rural China, a woman runs a tea shack on the Holy Mountain and communes with a tree spirit. This story follows the life of the woman and the massive changes in China over the course of her life of 80 years.
5. In Mongolia, a disembodied spirit lives in the heads of its hosts and can move from one person to another if they touch each other. It is searching for identity through finding its origin story.
6. In Petersburg, Russia, an art heist is planned, executed, and does not go well. The ring of art thieves is led by a man from the Russian mafia.
7. In London, Marco is a drummer in a band who also works as a ghostwriter. He gets involved with a bet as to who can win the most money in a casino.
8. Mo is a quantum physicist is in hiding on Clear Island off the coast of Ireland. She is a fugitive working on the future of computing technology. The US military wants to use this new technology and she does not want to cooperate.
9. Bat Segundo is the host of a late-night radio show. He takes calls and plays music. One of the callers, known only as Zookeeper, appears to be a sentient artificial intelligence. Zookeeper calls each year. On air, it destroys a secret US Government project site, saves the world from nuclear war, and tries to decide whether to keep a comet from destroying the earth.

An Epilogue brings the stories together, returning to Quasar in Tokyo as he attempts to escape the nerve gas attack. I will not document all the linkages as it is part of the fun of reading this book to figure them out.

This is not a light read and is the type that would benefit from re-reading. The intricate connections among these stories are sometimes fleeting so it requires close attention to catch them all (and I am sure I missed some). There are many literary and musical references. Themes include the role of coincidence in life, the desire for a meaningful existence, and the human tendency to try to discover meaning amid the chaos. David Mitchell is a brilliant writer. His use of language, variety of topics, and depth of storytelling is among the best. He is one of my favorite authors and this was his impressive debut. Readers of his entire catalogue will notice some characters from other works. I have not yet read them all, but I found connections to Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and Utopia Avenue. This book is both intellectually stimulating and engaging.

It sounds very adventurous doesn't it? I love David Mitchell and this is one of the few that I haven't read yet. Maybe, maybe next month.

Yes it would work for adventure!