B0nnie's Reviews > Ghostwritten

The 'G' on my keyboard barely works. I keep typing host for ghost. But that's all right - hosts and ghosts are the point in Ghostwritten. A similar problem could have given me ghost-ridden, which this book is (there's even a Caspar) yet it's the hosts here that are the most interesting, not the ghost surfing.

Mitchel's characters are real - the man knows how to write, as I found out in Cloud Atlas. There, the connection between the characters is metafictional. In Ghostwritten it is metaphysical. However, the whole overarching theme of ghostwriter puts a foot in that other door, as a sort of containing device.

Who but a writer would use ghostwriter as a metaphor for the metaphysical? Writers: the people who give us books. If only non-writers could write. But...they can...! and that is why ghostwriters exist. It's a big industry - for instance the ghostwriter for Hillary Clinton's memoirs received a fee of about $500,000 of the book's $8 million advance. In fact probably all books written by the famous are ghostwritten. Cookbooks, guides, self-help books too. Medical papers. Nancy Drew.

Oh please let Chronicles, Vol. 1 and Just Kids be the exceptions!

Ghostwritten has ten chapters, nine places, and many remarkable characters. Their lives intersect directly and sometimes just by a bare feather's touch. The plot is can be explained like this totally spoilered summary:

A mad religious fanatic sees himself in a baby's eyes and phones a jazz guy to say that his dog needs to be fed and this causes the jazz guy to run to Tokyo and be noticed in a restaurant by an unhealthy man who is screwing his maid (her grandmother had been raped and had a baby and that old woman talks to a tree: the tree ends up as a baby girl) and later there's a comet which has nothing to do with Eve and the Serpent by Delacroix [a fictional painting] being stolen from the Hermitage, nor the gunfire, nor the unhealthy man's wife moving to London because she can't have a baby even though there's a ghost baby in their apartment, so she screws a guy who's a ghostwriter, whose girlfriend had had a baby several years earlier, and that same guy saves the life of a physicist who also once had a baby but damn, babies turn into teens before you can say Jackie McLean (or Miles Davis, Kenny Burrell, Chick Corea, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, or Herbie Hancock - all mentioned by the jazz guy - see Ian's review for the whole list and a better review too) but the physicist does know the three laws of robotics - and uses them wisely - however those rules can be circumvented ever so easily, damn, as we learn from a DJ (he has a baby too - it's about 8 years old) by his giving bad advice to a gizmo machine that seems to be a sentient satellite with powers that can make others give up the ghost...and possibly all ghosts.

Just read it.