Book Club: Ghostwritten

Blurb: An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what connects him to a jazz buff in Tokyo? A woman on a holy mountain talks to a tree - and the tree talks back - unaware of the effect the financial irregularities of a burnt-out lawyer will have on her life. Add to this a Mongolian gangster, a redundant English spy in Petersburg with a knack for forging masterpieces, a despondent 'zookeeper', a nuclear scientist, a ghostwriter, a ghost, and a late night New York DJ whose hard-boiled scepticism has been his undoing. All of them have tales to tell, and all must play their part as they are caught up in the inescapable forces of cause and effect.

I honestly had no idea what to expect when I was told that the next book club read would be Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. "That's that guy that wrote Cloud Atlas" was pretty much the beginning and end of my immediate response but I was very eager to get started as I'd heard such good things.

The opening chapter grabbed me immediately but it turned out quite quickly that I'd slightly misread the opening pages. Some how I had managed to think the whole chapter was, at least loosely, science fiction. It wasn't at all but it began what became an interesting and oddly regular occurrence... Throughout this book, my prophetic powers were completely faulty. I kept assuming certain things about the characters - be it their gender, their location, their situation - that turned out quite quickly to be wrong. I'm not entirely sure what it says about the book other than it is amazing how differently one person can read a story from another.

This book is, essentially, a group of different stories that are all, albeit often very loosely, interlinked. It covers all different histories, countries, ages, cultures, even mediums and so, as expected, there are always going to be certain stories that grab you, speak to you, more than others.

As a whole I really liked this book. It was completely different from anything I had ever read before, each story was amazingly detailed and well-crafted and the way in which Mitchell interlinked the stories so subtly and maintained such pace despite each story being short, was really very impressive both while reading and in hindsight. For this reason, it made the perfect book club title because each one of us picked out different details, different references, different characters that the other had not understood in the same way or even, in many cases, registered at all!

My only real problem with the book - and it lies largely in me as a person, as a reader - was that my mind had a very clear idea of how this story would end, how each story would inter-connect and the novel didn't fulfil that idea. While this is an entirely subjective point and many people won't find this a problem, it was interesting that the book didn't end in the way that any of us in the book club expected or hoped. Like I said, though, that is entirely subjective.

Overall the book club gave an average of 7.5 - one of, if not the, highest mark we've given a book so far!

Despite not connecting with each individual story and despite being disappointed with the ending, overall I enjoyed it and above all it impressed me with its scope and Mitchell's impressive ambition, so I gave it:

8/10