Ghostwritten.

After reading Utopia Avenue this summer, I realized, with some help from readers, that I was missing out on quite a bit of the context because I hadn’t read enough of David Mitchell’s previous work. His first novel, Ghostwritten, introduces several people who’ll pop up again in his later books, while also introducing what I assume is the first appearance of one of his noncorporeal Horologists.

Ghostwritten is more of a short story novel, with each story connected in some small way with at least one of the previous ones – sometimes just by the detail of a character appearing in the background of one and becoming the protagonist of the next, sometimes more significantly. That made it feel much more like a tuneup for Cloud Atlas, where he weaves six separate novellas together but is more effective at making them all feel like parts of the same tome. That’s not to say Ghostwritten doesn’t work, but I definitely had more of a sense that I was reading a short story collection than a cohesive single work.

That story where we meet what I assume is a Horologist is probably the book’s best-written and most interesting, as the narrator is a spirit who can take over a person’s brain and can jump to another person with a touch. The spirit is in Mongolia, and ends up in someone who’s on the run from the secret police, so the whole chapter has a spy-story vibe that isn’t present elsewhere – the same way the Luisa del Rey chapter in Cloud Atlas read like a detective story within the larger novel.

One other oddly compelling story in the book is set on a tea shack on Mount Emei, one of the four sacred mountains in Chinese Buddhism, in a tale that spans almost the entire life of its main character. Beginning when the shack owner is just a young girl, the narrative follows her through regime changes, social upheaval, and multiple razings of the shack that require her to rebuild. There’s a powerful undercurrent of perseverance and acceptance, consistent with the tenets of that religion, demonstrated by her resilience in the face of what could have become crippling defeats.

The first and the penultimate stories in Ghostwritten revolve around a doomsday cult that launches a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, very much like the actual 1995 attack by the cult Aum Shinrikyo that killed 12 people, which was chronicled by one of Mitchell’s stated influences, Haruki Murakami. While the events, and ultimate confusion over what’s real in the depiction, make a useful framing device for the other stories within the novel, the translation of a real-world terrorist attack in such stark terms felt almost exploitative, especially given the extent of Mitchell’s imagination on display elsewhere in the book.

Perhaps reading Ghostwritten out of order, after reading what is widely considered his best book (Cloud Atlas) and two more written after that one (Slade House and Utopia Avenue), takes away some of its power, as I was left with the impression that I’d read a strong debut that hinted at better things to come but also felt uneven and in some ways unfinished. The concluding two chapters are especially unsatisfying, one because it’s an unsuccessful attempt at an experimental style, the second because it blows up (pun semi-intended) most of what came before. Had I read this first, I probably would have compared it to the rookie season of a player I thought would become a star but hadn’t shown it all in year one – say, George Springer in 2014. Now I’m biased because I know Mitchell can do so much better, and already has.

Next up: I just finished David Wondrich’s Imbibe!, a history of the American cocktail, and am almost halfway through Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police.

Milkman.

Anna Burns became the first Northern Irish writer to win the Man Booker Prize when her third novel, Milkman, took the honor in 2018. It’s an experimental novel, atypical for Booker winners, that reads like a more accessible Faulkner, and combines a story of the Troubles with the staunchly feminist narrative of its 18-year-old narrator for a result that is unlike anything I’ve read before.

Characters in Milkman go without names, including the narrator, a young woman who walks around with her head in a book and is literally and figuratively oblivious to the internecine warfare occurring around her, as well as the titular milkman – well, both milkmen. The milkman of the title isn’t actually a milkman, but rides around in a white van as if he were one. He’s in his 40s, associated with a local paramilitary group, and stalks the narrator while ensuring that everyone in their tightknit, gossip-ridden community knows that she is his, to the point where others, including her own mother, assume that she’s indeed having an affair with this dangerous, older man. There’s also a real milkman, whose role becomes apparent as the novel progresses; ‘maybe boyfriend,’ whom the narrator has been seeing for a year, who’s obsessed with cars, and whose life may be endangered by not-really Milkman; Tablets girl, who runs around poisoning people, including her own sister and eventually the narrator, but everyone seems to just take it as part of life; the boy the narrator calls Somebody McSomebody, who also tries to threaten the narrator into becoming his girl, which ends rather poorly for him in one of the novel’s few scenes of actual violence; and far more.

Burns layers a story of personal terror inside a story of the societal terror that affected Northern Ireland for decades. The narrator’s life is turned upside down by this unwanted attention from a man she barely even knows, but whose reputation in the community is enough to scare her and to convince everyone else she’s submitted to him willingly (even though she never submits to him at all). When the Milkman stalks her, he also inducts her, against her will, into a theater of the absurd that mirrors reality from that time and place, where violence split Catholics and Protestants, where any official authority was seen as essentially Ours or Theirs, where an act that shouldn’t merit a second thought, like going to the hospital, would be fraught with political and social implications. She’s suddenly seen to have taken sides, and even finds herself the unwitting beneficiary of the fear others have of the paramilitaries, which further underlines for her how potent the impact of this one man’s attentions towards her are.

Burns also surrounds her narrator with families who’ve been hurt by the violence in the community, directly or indirectly, including the one mother who, by the end of the novel, seems to have lost her husband and every one of her children to direct violence, related accidents, or suicide. The narrator’s father is dead when the novel opens, while her mother is a tragicomic figure who is convinced her daughter is a sinner, who believes every rumor she hears about her daughter (some from ‘first brother-in-law,’ who is both a gossip-monger and a creep), and who goes into hysterics over every bit of innuendo, which the narrator never wants to even acknowledge because it merely prolongs the agony.

Milkman is still quite funny and even hopeful in parts among the litter of tragedies and the ever-present specter of the stalker, although we do learn at the start of the novel that he’ll die before it’s over. The narrator’s third brother-in-law, while a peculiar man himself, takes on a protector role over his young sister-in-law, as does Real Milkman, whose interest in her is a side effect of his romantic interest in her mother. There are also signs of intelligent life amidst the gossips and harridans, including the “issue women,” a group of seven residents who embrace feminism when one hears of it in town and starts up a local women’s group in the backyard shed of one of the members (because her husband wouldn’t allow it in the house).

Of course, this is all set against the ever-present backdrop of the Troubles and you don’t need to know much at all about that conflict to appreciate Burns’ depiction of the effects of the sectarian violence on this particular neighborhood. Burns draws and redraws the picture of this time and place with swirling, inventive prose, in paragraphs that go on for days, often putting unlikely vocabulary in the mouths of her characters – esoteric or archaic words, or even words she’s just made up – to provide further much to the narrative. It’s not as difficult as Faulkner or Proust, but shows the influence of those early 20th century writers at the same time, both in a technical aspect and in how Burns uses her experimental sentence structure and vocabulary to contribute the reader’s sense of unease.

I’ve only read a few of the contenders for this year’s Booker but can at least understand why this novel won. It also feels like the third straight year where the prize has gone to a novel that does something different, as opposed to the prize’s history of going to literary works that still adhere to the traditional form and intentions of the novel. I could imagine this novel seeming abstruse to readers outside of the UK, given its setting during the Troubles, but that’s merely the backdrop for a rich, textured story that is as relevant today (with its #MeToo similarities) as it would be to a reader of that time and place.

Next up: A little light reading, Albert Camus’ The Plague.