Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Ghostwritten
David Mitchell, 1999, 436p.

David Mitchell's debut novel, composed of nine loosely interconnected stories that stretch across Asia and then towards the west. I read Mitchell's Cloud Atlas earlier this year, which featured a set of six interconnected stories. Where Cloud Atlas's stories were nested, and moved forward and then backwards in time, the stories in Ghostwritten take place in roughly the same time and universe. As in the later work, these stories are connected not just by character and coincidence, but also by themes and ideas. Ghosts appear in all the stories, but in various forms - from literal haunting ghosts to ghostwriters to sleeper agents to... well, no spoilers.

It is hard to talk about this novel without using the phrase "astounding debut." This is a first work by a writer who was just 30 at the time this was published, but his confidence and ambition is stunning. He begins moving through Japan to Hong Kong and then into mainland China, establishing a startling sense of place and building (mostly) compelling primary characters for each segment in relatively short stories (each of the first seven stories are around 30 pages). Ignoring the quality of the writing for a moment, you have to pause and admire the gumption of a debut novelist who starts off with a brainwashed cult terrorist on the run in coastal Japan, seething with disgust for the local masses of unconverted. Anger, fear and rank delusion right from page one, and then we are off across the landscape of the world.

With each section, there is a shift in perspective and sometimes in style and tone, though much less so than in Cloud Atlas, where each section is written in a different dialect and genre. The bulk of the stories could work as interesting standalone short stories, though some of the later stories build a little on earlier stories. The second story was a particular favourite of mine: a stalled young Japanese man in Tokyo has ensconced himself in a record store, surrounded by the jazz he loves, but conscious that this isn't where his life is likely to lead. A very sweet and simple love story sets him back off on a journey again, but I was invested both in the journey and in his contemplative stasis. The fourth story ambitiously attempts a history of modern China from the perspective of a woman running a lone tea shack on the side of Holy Mountain¹, from her despoiling as a girl by a warlord's son in the late feudal era, through the cultural revolution to the modern day.

After five excellent and distinct segments, it was almost a relief to find that Mitchell hadn't sold his soul for unearthly powers. The sixth segment is an underwhelming art caper in Saint Petersburg, Russia which I dragged myself through with some effort. This section lacked the sense of place that many of the others had, and the primary characters largely bored me. The seventh segment moves to London, and while it isn't the strongest in the novel, I perked right back up. Perhaps Mitchell intentionally let his tightness slip here, before the novel starts accelerating towards its gasping conclusion? He has the skill and the balls to manipulate the reader this way, but I somewhat doubt it. I could imagine him jerking the reader around a bit with a referential but implausible story², but I can't imagine him intentionally letting the mood and landscape belly flop.

The connections between stories read more like Easter Eggs than critical to the story; companies and people and stories that pop up and satisfy our need for connection, but don't necessarily inform the plot. And there is something of a major plot arc here, I think, though it is somewhat hard to elaborate. Since the traditional novel forms are eschewed, the reader needs to work harder to grasp at the whole. Because the plot (if there is one) is tangled with the reoccurring themes and ideas, the reader is pushed into thinking more about ideas than activities. Or rather, that was my approach - I think that the structure encourages a deeper reading, but doesn't insist on it. You could stroll through this as a collection of crisp short stories or as character studies.

Overall, I didn't like this as much as I liked Cloud Atlas, but it did feel less ostentatious. In between these two books, he wrote number9dream with some similar choices and themes, which certainly gains a spot on my "to be read" list.

Notes:

1. Apparently Mount Emei, the highest of the Four Sacred Mountains of Buddhism in China.
2. I raise this mostly because he does do something like this in Cloud Atlas, and it worked for me. However, in that case each nested story casts its outer story as potentially fiction and definitely as text or other media, and some of the inner stories critique the outer ones. There isn't that sort of internal interaction with text here, though. Without one section explicitly commenting on another section, which doesn't happen here, I am not sure it makes sense.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

Babel-17
Samuel R. Delany, 1966, 173p.

Rydra Wong (space-captain/poet/linguist) adventures into space in the midst of a galactic war to track down the source of a new, compelling language. This is science fiction that explores linguistics, specifically the notion that language and perception are tightly coupled. What if languages were designed that allowed new ideas to be formed? What if you could design a language that wouldn't just enable certain thoughts, but would indeed require these thoughts? Would languages that didn't include notions of independent first and second person subjects make you anti-social? Modern linguists would likely dismiss this, but people who work with software developers are forced to consider the question more seriously.

Like a lot of hard science fiction from the 1960s, the science being explored has moved on. But the exploration remains interesting because there is depth to both the writing and the universe. The author's background in the humanities means that there are credible cultures and variations in species and location, credible challenges with languages.

On the downside, the background is a bit more rich than the author can sustain, and some of the business around the discorporate beings is frankly silly and offhand. Overall, fresh, interesting and worthwhile short novel that has aged surprisingly well for something that has had the science move on underneath it.

Notes:

1. The edition I have was published back-to-back with Empire Star, another short novel by Delany at the same time. My wife and I both read that story on our 2009 spring migratory bird trip in the back of our camper. My wife reviewed that novel at the time. The two works are quite different, both in style and in universe, but they do connect, in that Empire Star is mentioned as a story written by Rydra Wong in Babel-17.

Solaris, by Stanisław Lem

I waited over a month for my hold at the library to come in, but it was worth it. This is just a lovely short novel. The only translation currently available in print is famously second-class (Polish to French to English¹) and I think in places it shows, but the source material shines through.

Solaris
Stanisław Lem, 1961, 204p²

Our protagonist arrives at a station hovering over the "ocean" planet Solaris, a planet that appears alive, but stubbornly refuses to communicate. The research station is in disarray, with the occupants tormented with what appears to be an attempt by the planet to communicate. Threading through the immediate drama of the personal torment is the history of the discovery and research of the planet, which we encounter through the research station library. This narrative was the highlight of the book for me, a reflective half-satire about science shot through with dazzling imagination and imagery, and a portrait of man's ambition and weakness when it comes to exploration.

The ocean here is my favourite sort of science fiction: a novel, compelling idea that is broad enough to be a metaphor for many things, without being an obvious metaphor for one thing in particular; fascinating on its own, but a gateway to many other ideas. It is almost certainly my notable déformation professionnelle³ talking, but the ocean triggered a lot of thinking about the Internet: like the ocean it appears dispersed, emergent, and largely deaf to human probing and concerns. Some Googling reveals that Lem himself felt vaguely this way about the Internet: "The technology moves forward, however the control of its direction is very weak."⁴ As a specific metaphor, it falls apart, much like it does as a metaphor for the human mind, the universe and many other things. But it prods you along those paths.

A lot of Lem's optimism feels a bit anachronistic now: his future has knowledge in epic, exhaustive surveys rather than today's dirty squirts (redeemed only by situating themselves in the context of a billion other dirty squirts). His pessimism felt astonishingly topical, though, and it nestled immediately with a friendly cluster of like-minded dirty squirts squirming near the surface of my waters.

Notes:

1. The author had expressed disappointment with the translation. Finally a new direct translation has been published, but only as an audiobook, somehow.
2. Pictured is the first edition US cover, my library copy had a dismal 1980s cover.
3. A favourite disorder around my office: déformation professionnelle.
4. See bottom for source and context of quote.

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

Chronic City
Jonathan Lethem, 2009, 480p.

The novel centres on a pot-fuelled and bohemian friendship in a semi-parallel Manhattan. Here a giant tiger (literally? or perhaps lovesick mining gear?) stalks the streets; Marlon Brando is alive or dead or maybe never was? Orbiting the earth is (perhaps) our narrator's fiancee, stranded by Chinese space mines. Can Perkus Tooth, retired columnist and cluster headache survivor come to understand this Manhattan? If he does, can any understanding be transmitted to Chase Insteadman, retired sitcom actor and designated mourner?

Initially disappointed, I am retro-reading this book as a frame for the series of love letters from space that run through the novel. These letters are beautifully written, compelling, and in the end manage to be heartbreaking in three dimensions. The rest of the novel focuses on Insteadman, a consciously cardboard entity. He provides a required frame for the space letters, and the earthbound world around him occasionally sparkles with beauty or wit. I understand that his vacancy is one of the points of the novel, but also sucks too much of the vitality from its bones.

Oddly, this book compels me to read more Lethem, not so much because the journey was engaging, but because the glimpses along the way were so enticing. Trolling around in reviews suggests that there might be works by him that glimmer all the way through. So, Motherless Brooklyn goes into my "to be read", but I would not recommend this as an entry work for Lethem.