Book Review: Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell (1999)
This was David Mitchell’s debut novel. As this blog shows, I am a fan of his and have decided to read his remaining works in the order in which they were published. At the time, this book must have been a great taster of what was to come from the author, having a style and structure similar to his later novels that I’ve already enjoyed. Characters also show up here who we get to know better in more prominent roles in his stories that were yet to be written. The plot jumps from person and place, with the fate of each having an unknown influence on the other characters and scenarios in the book. The death of an expat lawyer in Hong Kong, for example, leads to the collapse of a finance company, causing the demise of a plot to steal masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Death, in fact, is a feature of the narrators of the individual sections of this novel, either causing death or reaching death or having death inflicted upon them, living with a ghost, or even not ...