David Mitchell - Ghostwritten

[Freewheeling Andy]

This is Mitchell's second novel, shortlisted for the Booker prize. Some people ahve suggested it's his weakest, and his homage to Murukami. I think both criticisms are slightly unfair.

 

On a basic level this is the story of a young boy on a quest to find his missing father. It's interweaved with a Yakuza crime tale. It's certainly the most Japanese of Mitchell's novels, almost exclusively set in weird, seedy, shiny, glossy, fractured Tokyo. But as Mitchell was a native of Tokyo when writing it, it doesn't seem like that dissonance you get from not native's placing characters in scenery that's unfamiliar to the author.

 

The story of Miyake is interweaved, in each of the 9 (actually 8, for reasons that become clear) chapters/dreams, with different fragments - either from a world war two log book; or from Miyake's own imagination; or from dreams; or writings.

 

The playfulness with the structure, along with the strength of the characters, makes this brilliant.

 

All the more so because the hero-protganist is not a hero, his heroism comes from being basically mundane and normal, and he doesn't realise. This isn't the implausible genius of the James Bond style thriller - but then, I suppose, he doesn't save the world.

 

I absolutely loved this book. I was browsing through some Amazon reviews, and it seems some people really dislike the ending. They're all wrong. How can a book that's all about dreams and the boundaries between reality and dream have anything other than an ambiguous ending (better still, it's an ending that you're not quite sure is ambiguous, although it probably is).

 

Wonderful. If I gave stars to my book reviews, David Mitchell's books would get them all.