{"id":8794,"date":"2020-12-16T14:05:45","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T19:05:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8794"},"modified":"2022-12-14T20:19:33","modified_gmt":"2022-12-15T01:19:33","slug":"ghostwritten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/16\/ghostwritten\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghostwritten."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After reading Utopia Avenue<\/a> <\/em>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<\/a><\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ghostwritten<\/em> is more of a short story novel, with each story connected in some small way with at least one of the previous ones \u2013 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<\/a><\/em>, 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<\/em> doesn’t work, but I definitely had more of a sense that I was reading a short story collection than a cohesive single work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 the same way the Luisa del Rey chapter in Cloud Atlas<\/em> read like a detective story within the larger novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n