Dealing With Modernity — A Review & Discussion of Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
Introduction: Macrography and The World
Our modern world is one of extremes. It’s wondrous and innovative today, rotten and shallow tomorrow. How, in a topsy-turvy world like ours, do we as mere human continue to be able to keep up even as everything around us just keeps getting faster, bigger and newer?
These are tough questions to broach in contemporary literature. Many authors have tried. Most struggle to fit the undertaking of a subject so large in scope into the physical confines of a four-hundred page book. Yet, after reading Ghostwritten, I believe that David Mitchell seems to have managed to do exactly that and more.
Mitchell himself mentioned in an interview with literary journal SubStance that he is a “maximalist novel writer” who writes about “macrography”. Those are some big ideas behind some scary-sounding words. What Mitchell means is that he writes in scale. His stories do not zoom in to focus on any one specific genre or theme or location, instead he pans outwards to encompass an entire spectrum of genres and themes and locations. This is impressive, if unsurprising as I can’t see how one could even begin to address the human condition in our modern world with a pure sci-fi book or a book centered around a just small town and small cast of characters for example. If an author truly wants to explore the intricacies of Man’s dichotomy with the contemporary world, I’m convinced that like what Mitchell has done, he must allow himself to abandon his own comfort zone in order to look at the bigger picture.
I think this is exactly what makes Mitchell’s debut novel even more worthy of admiration. Not only does he provide one of the purest and most genuine takes on our modern world that I’ve seen in a long while, he also does so using a novel that’s essentially a collection of nine interconnected short stories. Ghostwritten is split into nine chapters, each of which focuses on a different snapshot of our world and features a mostly varied cast of characters. The actions of characters in one chapter lead to noticeable spillover effects in other chapters, which creates an interlinked web of narratives that aptly resembles the hyper-connectedness of the modern world that Mitchell is trying to cross-examine.
This ecosystem of stories does not amount to any form of grand narrative however. The book does not have a true beginning, middle or end. Characters can have unsatisfying or even ambiguous conclusions and there is no final reveal. This doesn’t exactly mean it doesn’t have a plot, it just doesn’t really matter. After all, in the short spans of our lives, do we see any “beginning middle and end” for the world around us? Not really…life goes on and the world will move ever onwards too.
Mitchell knows this and does not seek to force out a three-act structure and in doing so, offers us a raw and real look at the world around us.
This is also why I feel comfortable discussing this book because while I may talk about events or characters that would qualify as “spoilers”, there isn’t really any ending to spoil, only ideas to unpack. Granted, I know that almost everyone who reads this wouldn’t have read this book and wouldn’t know what on earth I’m talking about if they don’t at least have some kind of a synopsis, so here’s a link to the book’s Wikipedia page, which sums up the events of the book pretty nicely.
Table of Contents
I’ve also included a little infographic/table of contents for this article because I am aware that this article is super long, so presenting it this way makes it a little easier to skim to any parts that seem more interesting to you. Enjoy!
Theme 1: Identity and Space in the Metropolis
The first cornerstone of our modern world that Mitchell examines, is the concept of space, how we interact with it and how it has changed in the last few decades.
Urban Avatars
In Ghostwritten, Mitchell personifies the metropolis that is London and describes it as if it were a person, which he called “Old Man London”:
Old Man London, out for the day…. Italians give their cities sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London’s middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay.
I absolutely love the idea that cities have accumulated such a ridiculous amount of power, culture and history that they’ve managed to manifest their own sentient avatar.
A quick google search will tell you that today, almost four billion people live in urban spaces, a complete reversal from Mankind’s rural origins. It makes you wonder just how many of these avatar-cities there are in today’s world and whether that’s a good thing for humanity at large.
Take Paris for example. I think it definitely radiates a more feminine vibe. As an avatar, she’d probably be a fashion enthusiast, picky eater, maybe slightly snobbish?
I’d imagine Beijing might be an elderly man, probably an old rival of Old Man London. He’d be a straight-shooter, battle-hardened from life’s challenges. A heavy smoker. Wisdom pouring from his every word.
I’m not too sure about my own hometown of Singapore. I’d guess he’d be a young man who’d left home after high school to stick it out on his own. He’d be a workaholic just hitting his 30s, always up for a beer with the boys on Friday night but single and happy to stay that way.
I might be completely wrong about all of that, but my point is, that Mitchell’s ability to personify a space and make it feel alive is outstanding because these urban sprawls very much are alive in every sense of the word.
Today, China alone has more than a hundred cities with a population of more than a million people. Rapid urbanization is a trend that’s not slowing down any time soon and for better or for worse, it looks like the future of culture and power is in going to be heavily consolidated into a handful of densely populated metropolises. So maybe it’s high time we started to view cities as living, breathing mega-organisms rather than just populated spaces.
Mortal Engines
Of course Mitchell explores the major flaws of our urbanized paradigm as well, mainly through the eyes of a record shop employee named Satoru in the chapter “Tokyo”. In fact, most of the chapter is spent ruminating on the effects that a mega-city has on individuals. Modern cities are brimming with neon lights, police sirens, billboards and fast food that are all constantly fighting for your attention.
Think of the rush hour commutes that urbanites go through daily. You’re smushed up against a writhing mass of stranger’s bodies on an overcrowded train. Jostling just for a handhold or a space to stand. Just take a look at this excerpt from the book itself:
Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It’s so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It’s long since filled up the plain, and now it’s creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaiming land from the bay in the east. The city never stops rewriting itself. In the time one street guide is produced, it’s already become out of date. It’s a tall city, and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one. Things are always moving below you, and above your head. All these people, flyovers, cars, walkways, subways, offices, tower blocks, power cables, pipes, apartments, it all adds up to a lot of weight. You have to do something to stop yourself caving in, or you just become a piece of flotsam or an ant in a tunnel. In smaller cities people can use the space around them to insulate themselves, to remind themselves of who they are. Not in Tokyo. You just don’t have the space, not unless you’re a company president, a gangster, a politician or the Emperor. You’re pressed against people body to body in the trains, several hands gripping each strap on the metro trains. Apartment windows have no view but other apartment windows. No, in Tokyo you have to make your place inside your head.
As Mitchell mentions near the end of this passage, even our own homes aren’t fully insulated from the city. Tokyo’s “skinny houses” are a caricature of this observation, where homes are ultra-economized and stacked together like Lego bricks. More and more, we lose physical space to rest of the city, until the only place left to retreat is the mental space within our own heads.
I’d imagine that while writing Satoru’s story, Mitchell was trying to highlight how ridiculous it was that even as cities expand and occupy more physical space, we’re ironically surrendering more of that space and forced to isolate ourselves.
I mean, even today, well-documented phenomena like the “Beijing Drifters” show that unprecedented numbers of people are flocking to urban centers, allured by consumerism and sensationalism. Yet despite having more people and more space than ever before, we’re seeing rising cases of people suffocating from stress or unravelling from depression and loneliness. No surprise considering the amount of time we’re forced to retreat to the confines of our own minds and contend with so much negative pressure.
I often hear people express their desire to one day escape from the pressure cooker that is Singapore as well. But more often than not, I feel that popular destination cities for relocation are just different brands of pressure cookers manufactured with their own local flair.
How rare is it to see individuals like the backpackers featured in “Mongolia”, who truly unshackle themselves from any city and wander freely outside the borders of our concrete jungles. Somehow, I think that for most of us city-dwellers at least, as much as we loathe the cityscape and want a change, all but a few of us get drawn back into its orbit no matter how far we try to wander. We hate it and proclaim our displeasure, but deep down we know just can’t quite live without it for whatever reason.
Community
The chapter “Clear Island” features a runaway quantum physicist named Mo Muntevary, who left her American employers when she discovers her research will be used to design military-grade weapons. This heartwarming story brings Mo back to her home of Clear Island, Ireland. Clear Island is a small town of about fifty people, but with such a strong sense of community that they would do anything to protect Mo from the Americans that are trying to take her back.
Many of the faces we meet in “Clear Island” proclaim to Mo that “Clear Island looks after its own”, something that’s no doubt familiar to many people born from rural and close-knit townships.
So in the universe of Ghostwritten, Mitchell has given us two different models of human society in the modern world. On one hand we have the urban city, which has amassed so much culture and people that they often become personified; urban cities also hold such a pervasive dominance over space that its inhabitants are left with almost nothing.
On the other hand we have the rural community, which is also portrayed to have a strong sense of identity, but not because of raw population size. I mean, you don’t really personify a town of fifty people, right? No, this sense of identity comes from togetherness. Replace the ocean of strangers you find in cities with a large, extended family that you often find in tight knit hamlets, where no one has to fight for personal space or retreat into themselves just to gain respite.
In fact, I’d reason that people in rural communities probably let others into their personal space much more willingly than urbanites would. Compare the act of inviting your rural neighbors over for a barbecue to a noisy apartment complex where the only reason you visit your neighbors is to tell them to quiet down because you can hear their parties through your walls and you can’t fall asleep.
When did we urbanites lose that neighborliness and unity? Did the number of people in a city hit some unspecified critical mass where suddenly, everyone stops being warm and supportive and tight-knit and start becoming cold and stressed and anonymous? Perhaps humans just weren’t meant to live with another five million other humans in a city. Perhaps evolution just hasn’t caught up to to the blistering pace of urbanization yet. Perhaps Mitchell is saying that as our cities grow ever-larger to become mega-cities, we ought to take a break from advancing the world around us and look towards helping ourselves to adapt to the ultra-urban environments that we honestly were never properly wired to inhabit in the first place.
Theme 2: The Human Condition
The above section briefly mentions a few backpackers that Mitchell introduces in the “Mongolia” chapter, who’ve untethered themselves from the allure of cities and given themselves in to their wanderlust.
Similarly, I now want to pan away from the theme of space and cities, and examine the second broad theme of Ghostwritten, which is that of the human condition and the pursuit of post-humanism.
The Noncorpum
In the “Mongolia” chapter, Mitchell introduces a very interesting character known as the noncorpum. The noncorpum is a spirit of sorts. It inhabits the minds of living human hosts, where it can access its host’s memories and emotions and can even compel them to do things they wouldn’t normally do. The noncorpum can also transmigrate from host to host via physical touch. It is effectively immortal, eternally awake and is almost omnipresent in a sense that with its capacity to transmigrate, no place on earth is off-limits.
The noncorpum’s true objective is to find its own origins, of which it has no recollection of, as well as if others of its kind exist. Eventually, after decades of wandering the face of the earth and searching for answers, the noncorpum finally discovers that it had lived as a Mongolian boy who’s soul was transmigrated from his body by a monk to save his life.
Finally in possession of the knowledge it had sought for so long, the noncorpum chooses to reincarnate into the body of a Mongolian infant and give up its immortality and pseudo-omnipresence.
The Zookeeper
Mitchell introduces another post-human entity who calls itself the Zookeeper, in the chapter “Night Train”. Zookeeper is an artificial intelligence created by Mo Muntevary, who has since gone rogue. Zookeeper is effectively omniscient as it inhabits the world’s satellite networks and can gain access to just about any piece of technology or information on the planet.
Zookeeper ,guided by a set of four principles laid out by Mo, uses its abilities to prevent human conflict. But despite its best efforts, it is hinted by Mitchell that some semblance of a third world war between the United States and an alliance of North African Nations still occurs.
Driven by Mo’s first principle, which is to be accountable for all its actions, the Zookeeper calls in to Night Train, a daily radio show hosted by Bat Segundo in New York once every year to discuss its recent actions. Zookeeper develops quite a following amongst the show’s fans and also forms a bond with Bat, whom the Zookeeper uses as a moral compass. The chapter ends off with Zookeeper rejecting an offer from a being known as Arupadhatu (hinted to be a noncorpum as well), who wants to ally itself with Zookeeper and control the world. It also decides, with the help of Bat Segundo’s advice, to cease all interference with humanity’s affairs and allow Mankind to choose its own path, even if it knows for certain that humanity will soon perish from an asteroid that’s on a collision course with the Earth.
What Makes a Post-Human?
These two strikingly unique characters represent the end-goal of humanity’s pursuit of science. Mitchell has written the noncorpum and the Zookeeper to embody the concepts of omnipresence and omniscience respectively. These are two of the many attributes often ascribed to divine beings in monotheistic religions all over the world and they are also crucial to exploring the idea behind the post-human.
As an avid reader of science fiction, I can confidently say that whenever a sci-fi author attempts to explore the possibilities of the human race in the distant future (Such as Iain Banks in the Culture series, or Alastair Reynolds in House of Suns), especially one that has broken through the barriers of the ordinary and evolved past the stage of a mere human (hence the name “post-humans”), they are almost always portrayed as having obtained some form of mastery over omniscience and omnipresence. These novels explore the consequences of Mankind obtaining the means to match what we previously would have referred to as divinity.
Now, Mitchell doesn’t go that far ahead in Man’s timeline, but he does offer his two cents on the topic with his own little twist. The turn of the 21st century has brought with it a barrage of technological and scientific leaps. Humans are now living longer than ever before and the proliferation of air travel, hyper-loops and even space travel in the near future represent a small step towards pseudo-omnipresence that Mitchell could have only dreamed of back when he wrote Ghostwritten in 1999. The scale and power of the Internet, A.I. and the advent of the metaverse are just some of the steps made in our long trek towards pseudo-omniscience. If it isn’t clear enough already, this reality is exactly the reality that I think Mitchell was trying to envision and discuss via “Mongolia” and “Night Train”.
At the conclusion of their respective narrative arcs, the noncorpum rejects its omnipresence and chooses to retain a grounded, singular life while the Zookeeper resigns from its post and rejects its own omniscience, believing that in spite of it’s all-knowing capabilities, it is not and should not presume itself to be all-powerful and interfere with the natural course of events. What does this mean for us and what exactly is Mitchell trying to say?
Well, it’s hard to pinpoint any specific warning or message, seeing as how the very concept of a post-human society is one that is abstract and unimaginably far away. But I think the baseline is that just as with the pursuit of space and urbanization in the previous section, we shouldn’t let our mad dash for progress in terms of technology and science blind us from any potential dangers. As can be seen from the examples of the noncorpum and Zookeeper, being omni-whatever isn’t all fun and games. The noncorpum’s permanent wakefulness and immortality causes it to lead a lonely, empty existence. The Zookeeper’s all-knowing capabilities only makes it all the more painful for it to accept that it cannot uphold the responsibility of its mission to protect the entire human race.
Clearly, despite us not being anywhere close to achieving the capabilities of a post-human today, we still move further and further away from the simple and straightforward lives of men living a century ago. Mitchell knows this, and through Ghostwritten, he’s telling us to not always look ahead, but around and within as well.
Theme 3: About Time
We’ve already looked at how Mitchell views the broad concepts of space and the human condition, so it’s only natural to examine how he plays with the notion of time in Ghostwritten as well. Again, Mitchell is drawing in very, very broad strokes here. He’s looking at the really big picture, so it’s important to keep this in mind in case the ideas he discusses start becoming a little too lofty.
Tense and the Eternal Present
In the same interview with SubStance cited in one of my very first paragraphs, Mitchell was asked about the temporal structure of his novels. He explains that especially because he is such a maximalist writer, he sees a novel as a model of the universe, which should therefore contain a working model for time in order for his narrative elements to make sense. He went through many of his considerations, but I felt that the most pertinent was his comments on tense.
Tense, at least in Mitchell’s eyes, refers to whether the narrative is describing something in the past, the future or the present. It’s supposed to give a reader a sense of where they are in a novel’s timeline. Usually, I think it’d be wise for authors to keep the tense of their novel clear and apparent. Character A goes to place B to deliver object C to location D. Simple and straightforward, which is ideal for readers. Even the inclusion of narrative devices like flashbacks, premonitions, dreams and the like can be clearly arranged such that the reader is always sure of where he or she is even if the author is taking them backwards and forwards through time.
Mitchell doesn’t do this. In his own words, Ghostwritten is a novel where the reader feels like he’s:
surfing along the never-quite-breaking wave of the Eternal Present
Never mind the fact that that sentence in and of itself is brilliant and metaphorically beautiful, it’s a very concise description of how time is structured in Ghostwritten.
Throughout Ghostwritten’s nine chapters, the timeline is never made explicitly clear. Characters from one chapter influence later events that involve other characters while other characters are retroactively revealed to be involved in things that you thought was the present, but was actually the past. You’re never quite sure of where you are in the timeline whilst reading Ghostwritten. You could be in the past or the future but it somehow always feels like the present, the now. This obfuscation of tense would normally be a narrative disaster for other authors, but it works well in Mitchell’s favor when you consider my subsequent point.
The Ouroboros
Mitchell not only masks the tense of his novel by keeping you in the “Eternal Present” as he calls it, but also forms a sort of narrative Ouroboros (you know that snake that’s eating its own head? Yeah…)to further challenge the linearity of his story’s timeline.
Narratively (not temporally), the book starts you off with “Okinawa”, followed by “Tokyo” and “Hong Kong”. It then moves steadily eastwards until it reaches its western apex with the chapter, “Night Train” set in New York, before completing a narrative circle by ending back in Tokyo with “Underground”. Keep in mind that this order of chapters is not the chronological order that the events in said chapters take place in which, in the first place, due to Mitchell’s “Eternal Present” concept, is never made fully clear.
We can be fairly sure of aspects of the timeline like how “Clear Island” must have happened before “Night Train” since Mo Muntevary hadn’t created the Zookeeper yet when she was first introduced, and that “St. Petersburg” probably happens after “Mongolia” because the character Subhataar was compelled by the noncorpum to travel westwards from Mongolia only at the end of the chapter.
Most notably however, is the narrative use of bookends (ending the book the same way as it starts). The character named Quasar, a deluded member of a terrorist cult, appears in the first chapter, “Okinawa” and is in hiding after he carried out a deadly attack on the Tokyo subway using sarin gas. In the final chapter of the book, “Underground”, we follow Quasar as he struggles to escape from the very subway car that he has rigged with the gas. This would imply that “Underground” should probably be the first chapter to chronologically take place in the book and yet in the chapter itself, Quasar sees objects and people with heavy references to the other eight chapters that should have, in theory only occurred long after the events of “Underground”. So what gives? Is there a start or an end, or is the novel really just a narrative Ouroboros that’s wrapped around itself? Combine this Ouroboros concept with concept of the Eternal Present and I think Mitchell has successfully untethered his audience’s traditional grasp of time and linearity.
History Repeats Itself
Everything that we’ve discussed so far can, in my opinion, be seen as an elaborate and elegant attempt by Mitchell to deconstruct what we think we know about time as a linear model, and introduce his ideas about circularity and repetition.
Let’s use the chapter of “Holy Mountain” as a case study. In it, we follow an unnamed woman who owns a tea shack along the mountain trail of Mount Emei in China. From her youth to old age, her life is ruined by numerous revolutions. First by the Japanese, next by the Communists and then by the Reformists. Throughout all of this, the woman remarks:
Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people’s women who pay the most.
In her eyes, there is no real difference between the Japanese, Communists and Reformists. They all come bearing false smiles and pretenses, only to end up sowing discord among the peasantry . The woman and, by extension Mitchell, see history repeating itself before their eyes. The circularity of time makes it such that again and again, we let petty squabbles and human conflict tear our nations apart, leaving as the woman mentioned, the poorest of us to bear the brunt of the consequences.
Mitchell hints with the Ouroboros and the Eternal Present that even in our modern world, we still make the same mistakes we made tens and hundreds of years ago, only now they are masked more easily because the world has become so expansive and interconnected that we no longer feel a sense of déjà vu when we do screw up.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
To end off this section, I want to talk a little bit about Heisenberg and his famous uncertainty principle. This might go a little off-topic, but I just thought this part of the book was really interesting.
Mo Muntevary in “Clear Island” comments even time is not immune to time itself. She notes how in the distant past, time was only really needed for four occasions in a year, which was when the seasons changed and people had to tend to crops. Then the Church came about and staked out Sundays and Easters and other days of importance. The government comes in and adds tax deadlines and polling days. Today, we split time into hours and minutes, chasing that 9:30 train or the 6:00 evening news, and scientists are trying to differentiate time into even smaller intervals to facilitate research into superconductors and so on and so forth. Mo says that nobody knows if time is being accelerated or warped or whatever, and that even with all these arbitrary measures of time, nobody has any idea how much time we really have.
This reminded me of a similar idea from the Chilean author Roberto Bolanó in his magnum opus, 2666. In it, a character named Amalfitano presents his unique take on jet lag. To condense what he said, if you were living in London right now, then all the people you believe to be living in New York don’t actually exist. The time difference between the cities is what masks this secret from your eyes. But if you were to fly over to London for example, you’d feel compelled to sleep not because you’re tired but because the world needs time to reconfigure itself and ensure that your destination actually exists.
It’s an outrageous take and most definitely incorrect, but I think Bolanó was trying to say that we humans were never meant to travel so fast and far. We were meant to walk and not fly, to ruminate and not rush. Jet lag is just a biological alarm to tell us to slow down and not get caught up in the modern world’s warped flow of time, which is kind of similar to what Mitchell is trying to put forth too.
A potential consequence laid out by Mitchell, which happens to involve yet another wacky theory, would be ending up like how Mo’s husband describes her:
A one-woman electron, he either knew her position and not her direction, or her direction and not her position.
A unique take on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle if I’ve ever seen one. Its also a real thing by the way, unlike the jet lag theory.
Caught in the frenetic pace of modern life, Mo can either choose to set her sights on her goals and lose sight of what’s right in front of her, or focus on the present and lose sight of her goals.
All in all, Mitchell recognizes that the pace of life has generally quickened with the advent of modernity, and that we are ill-adapted to cope with such a pace, so he warns us to slow down, be patient and avoid repeating the same mistakes our forebearers made.
Theme 4: Fate and Chance
The last big theme that Mitchell tackles is the idea of fate and chance. Are we destined to follow a certain course of action, pre-determined for us long before we were even born? Or is there an element of chance in the grand scheme of things? That perhaps we do have some form of agency over our own lives?
Chaos Theory and The Butterfly Effect
The web of events that transpire in Ghostwritten appear to reflect chaos theory, which is, in the most simplest way I can put it, the theory that seemingly random and unpredictable events and behavior in systems are not actually random, but rather, pre-determined by a set of laws and can thus be predicted to a certain extent. This is how you get things like the butterfly effect, where a butterfly flapping its wings can conceivably start a chain of events that eventually leads to a tornado on the other side of the planet.
Ghostwritten contains numerous chain-of-events that resemble this theory. For example, Neal Brose running an illegal money laundering account for a criminal kingpin named Mr Gregorksi in “Hong Kong” is the main source of stress in his marriage with Katy Forbes. This leads to their eventual divorce, which is why Katy moves back to London, where she has a one night stand with Marco, the central character of “London”. Because Katy lets Marco have breakfast with her before kicking him out of her apartment, Marco just so happens to be there to save Mo Muntevary from colliding with an oncoming taxi. Marco’s decision to lie about Mo’s whereabouts to the American agents is the reason why Mo manages to reach Clear Island and her time there is what allows her to return with the Americans under her own terms and conditions. Because of this, Mo was able to create Zookeeper, and governed by his moral directives and interactions with Bat Segundo in “Night Train”, Zookeeper will eventually allow the Earth to perish in an asteroid collision. So conceivably, one man’s criminal activities sort of leads to a potential end of the world?
The Breath and Ghostwriting
Mitchell actually takes the aforementioned butterfly effect up a notch during the novel. Not only does he hint at the hidden connections between characters in Ghostwritten, he introduces the idea of supernatural elements acting behind-the-scenes as well with what has been dubbed by fans as “the breath”:
Who is blowing on the nape of my neck?
This sentence is uttered twice by Quasar. Once at the very beginning of the book and again at the very end. This gentle blowing is never really explained or talked about very much, but a clue lies in the chapter “Night Train”. In it, a being alluded to be similar in form to the noncorpum, named Arupadhatu appears. Arupadhatu was actually mentioned in the very first chapter by Quasar himself as the being that transmigrated into the body of his cult’s leader prior to the cult’s creation.
We can therefore assume that this Arupadhatu was heavily involved with the events of “Underground” and the sarin gas attacks involving Quasar. Furthermore, while conversing with the Zookeeper, Arupadhatu claims he has met five other beings like himself, and heard of three others. One of these eight other beings is likely the noncorpum, who’s responsible for many of the events in both “Mongolia” and “St. Petersburg”. Arupadhatu itself even claims to have previously transmigrated into the character Mo Muntevary, who created the Zookeeper.
It’s probably no coincidence that there are nine total supernatural spirit being thingies, as well as nine chapters in the novel, many of which, have already been revealed to have involved these “noncorpa”. So this blowing on the nape of Quasar’s neck is probably alluding to the fact that more than just having your actions being pre-determined by the actions of other people, many of the actions in the book could have been pre-determined by supernatural forces that we don’t even understand.
This is what gives the book its namesake: Ghostwritten. It is the possibility that the story of our lives are for the most part, ghostwritten by other people and published under our names but not truly our own.
Sonder
This very feeling that Ghostwritten is trying to express is actually very similar to an entry in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows that I came across a while back. For those who don’t know, this “dictionary” is a very popular passion project created by a man named John Koenig, who creates new words to describe emotions that normally have no way of being described succinctly in the English language (It’s very cool, you should check it out). One of Koenig’s most popular words is the “Sonder”:
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
Captures Mitchell’s point pretty well I’d say. Just the thought that any passerby you cross on the street could have played a major or minor role in your life, or vice versa, without you even knowing it is hard to handle. Add to that the possibility that supernatural forces like the noncorpum could have played a part in your life too and you start to realize how small you really are in this grand narrative.
Amor Fati
This whole line of argument is starting to sound a bit like Determinism 101, but I am confident that this is not the end-product that Mitchell wants his readers to come away with. I mean, to believe that everything that has ever happened is pre-determined would, for one, throw morals straight out the window. Yes, a certain set of events did lead Marco right to the exact time and space he would have needed to be at to save Mo, but his decision to save Mo is a product of his own bravery and his decision to protect her whereabouts afterwards comes from the goodness of his heart. I don’t think that could have been pre-determined.
Famous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche popularized the concept of Amor Fati, which is a Latin phrase that literally translates to “love of fate”. He basically feels that while we may not be able to control our own fate, we can still retain agency over how we respond to it and how we feel about it. Pre-determined actions starting all the way back from Neal Brose in “Hong Kong” and maybe even further back might have led Marco to that street, but ultimately, his choice to save Mo is purely his own. In that moment, he is in control of his own actions and the way he chooses to respond to his fate is something only he can control.
So yes, there may be hundreds of anonymous ghostwriters who’ve played a part in writing the story of our lives, but Nietzsche feels that, good or bad, if we’re dealt a hand of cards, we’d have to put up with it anyways so we might as well be happy about it and I think that’s something Mitchell would agree with.
Final Thoughts
As can be seen from the length of this article, a twenty-five minute read with four huge themes covered, I think it’s safe to say that Mitchell has truly crafted a masterpiece that’s absolutely bursting at the seams with relevant and unique interpretations of the world of the 21st Century. And the best part is, there’s so much more insight and creativity hidden within Ghostwritten’s pages that I can’t talk about here because then this article, which is already a little too long, would turn into a dissertation.
The only way to truly appreciate this brilliant work is to go read it for yourself. Trust me, it’s got great pacing, colorful characters and a beautiful prose, it’s an absolute joy to read. This is my first David Mitchell novel and I think it’s a bit of an understatement to say that I enjoyed it, so I’m very keen on taking a look at some of his other notable works, including Number9dream, Cloud Atlas (which has been adapted into a movie starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry), and Utopia Avenue. I’ve even heard that all of Mitchell’s works, including Ghostwritten and the few I’ve mentioned above are all connected in some kind of literary shared universe. So if you thought this book was peak maximalism, I can only imagine the enormity of his entire body of work put together.
TLDR: Don’t fret, read more, especially this book, you won’t be disappointed.
