“Then the angel took the traveller to another room.
So in spite of there being enough food for everyone, everyone was hungry. They were trying to feed themselves, but of course they couldn’t – the spoons were too long, and the food kept falling off. Each guest had a very long silver spoon, as long as a man is tall. In the centre was a table piled with sweetmeats. The angel opened one door, and in it was a room with one long bench running around the walls, crammed with people. “A traveller went on a journey with an angel. This was my favourite, a depressing condemnation of the existence of altruism: Nonetheless, there are a few pieces of thoughtful wisdom littered throughout. While Cloud Atlas focused on one major theme (power), Ghostwritten has a hundred little morals elbowing each other out of the way for stage time. But there’s a myriad of other themes present: destiny, desire, responsibility, identity, globalism, helplessness… the problem is that there’s far too many of them, and they’re expressed rather clumsily. This didn’t impress me much – it’s been done before and is somewhat gimmicky. The major one would seem to be the connectivity of the world, how everything we do has repercussions and how we are all linked together. Likewise, some plots are stronger than others I was naturally more invested in the Irish physicist on the run from the CIA who makes a last stand in her hometown than I was in the thoughts and feelings of a jazz store clerk with a crush on a customer. and Ireland, and these locations are portrayed more vividly than the others – particularly Petersburg, which didn’t sit right at all with me.
There are nine stories in total, some better than others. Petersburg and to the thousand of little rooms, attics and offices of London. Whereas Cloud Atlas is a voyage through time and space, Ghostwritten is merely a voyage through space, taking us from the busy subway of Tokyo, to the empty deserts of Mongolia, to the gloomy streets of St. In the same style as Cloud Atlas, this novel is a series of short stories or novellas that have wildly different settings but are linked through multiple connections, sometimes large and obvious, sometimes small and subtle. Naturally eager to read the rest of his works (of which there aren’t many), I started with Ghostwritten. Ghostwritten is the first novel by British writer David Mitchell, who also wrote the Booker-nominated Cloud Atlas, a book I read earlier this year which I loved to a degree words cannot express. Ghostwritten by David Mitchell (1999) 436 p.
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