I read this with “Goodness, and this was his first novel!” going through my head the whole time. It is a remarkably bold, nay even reckless, piece of writing. Mitchell manages to express the fragmentation of the modern world, and at the same time its connectedness. The fragmentation is characterised by its form, a series of episodes that take us from Okinawa to Tokyo and all points West until in the end we have been right round the world and back to Okinawa. These are not short stories, they do not have a narrative arc within themselves, they form a part of a whole: characters from one episode will re-appear in another, or events in one will have rippling effects further on. The connectedness is sometimes a bit hokum, taking the form of a spirit, which even appears as a body-jumping narrator in one section.
There are issues here that Mitchell resolves much more successfully in his later work, Cloud Atlas. The narratives here are nearly all first person, but there’s little indication of the narrative situation, of where when and why these characters are telling their story, and some of the voices themselves are less convincing, less memorable, less compelling. The linking idea is harder to detect sometimes; in the end the whole thing is a bit like that film Babel, showing how random events in one place can affect apparently unconnected people around the world, but the driving force that forges Cloud Atlas into a whole is too weak to do the job in Ghostwritten. Some parts are very impressive, but others are hard to get through. Uneven.
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