Ghostwritten
Authors: David Mitchell
David Mitchell’s
GHOSTWRITTEN
“Ghostwritten
is a marvelous puzzle. It takes time to fit together the disparate pieces, but patience in this case pays off handsomely. Once assembled, the story hums with significance.”
—
The New York Observer
“Every one of these pages deserves and demands to be read and re-read.
Ghostwritten
is an astonishing debut.”
—
The Independent
(London)
“To complement its heady themes,
Ghostwritten
is also elegantly composed, gracefully plotted and full of humor.… [It] recall[s] Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in its emotional scope and its ambitions. Like the great Russians, Mitchell makes us feel that more is at stake than individual lives, although it’s by individual lives that pain and loss are measured.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“Mitchell deftly sketches each character to such a compelling extent that you become totally immersed … His nine characters and their random but fateful interactions provide a playful, suspenseful foray into our ever-shrinking world.”
—
Entertainment Weekly
“An intricately assembled Fabergé egg of a novel, full of sly and sometimes beautiful surprises.… In an era in which much literary fiction is characterized by unearned ironies and glib cynicism, it’s hard not to be impressed by the humanism that animates Mitchell’s book.… Worth a dozen of the morally anorexic novels that regularly come down the pipe.”
—
New York
“Reminiscent at times of DeLillo, Murakami, and science fiction, especially in its continual probing of what is real and what is not, this book remains very much its own thing.… It is a thrill to read a piece of fiction this engrossing, challenging, urgent, and ultimately, so very new.”
—
Booklist
“An astounding novel.”
—Tibor Fischer
“Unlike so many of the chroniclers of the twenty-first-century pastiche—an industry dominated by ad men and feature-writers, not novelists—Mitchell has set out to craft actual characters, not archetypes. The result is a dazzling piece of work.”
—
The Washington Post
“Gripping and innovative.…
[Ghostwritten]
serve[s] to illustrate the strange interconnectivity of the modern world and the improvisatory nature of fate.”
—
The New York Times
“Boundless, fully imagined … the best modern novel I have read for some time.”
—
Express on Sunday
“Mitchell has written a testament to just how far a little nerve, a lot of talent, and an airplane will take you.… A novel that wends from Okinawa to Mongolia to Petersburg, as well as visiting the more traditional literary haunts of London and New York, has to be commended for its geographical audacity alone.”
—
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A daring novel, uniquely structured and just as uniquely compelling.”
—
The Denver Post
“David Mitchell’s first novel is a firework display.… The assurance and panache are truly remarkable.… This is a remarkable novel by a young writer of remarkable talent.”
—
The Observer
(London)
“[Mitchell’s] detail boasts the quiet and proud precision which makes his Englishness no surprise.”
—
The Seattle Times
“This is one of the best first novels I’ve read for a long time.… I read a proof of this on a transatlantic flight. When I got off in Atlanta, I couldn’t put it down. I pulled my luggage in one hand along corridors and escalators, and held David Mitchell’s last chapter up to my nose with the other. I finished at the carousel. It seemed appropriate. And it’s even better the second time.”
—A. S. Byatt
GHOSTWRITTEN
Ghostwritten
, David Mitchell’s first novel, was awarded the
Mail on Sunday/John
Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best book by a writer under thirty-five. His second novel,
Number9Dream
, was short-listed for the Booker Prize as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2003, David Mitchell was selected as one of the Best Young British Novelists by
Granta
. His most recent novel,
Cloud Atlas
, was published in 2004 and nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He recently returned to Britain from Japan, where he spent several years, and now lives in Ireland.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER 2001
Copyright © 1999 by David Mitchell
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain in 1999 by Hodder and Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline PLC. Originally published in the United States by Random House, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
SIMON AND SCHUSTER
: Excerpt from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” from
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
, Revised Second Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1983, 1989 by Anne Yeats. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon and Schuster.
WEATHERHILL, INC
.: Two haiku from
Mountain Tasting
by Taneda Santoka, translated by John Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Weatherhill, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Mitchell, David (David Stephen).
Ghostwritten: a novel / David Mitchell—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PR6063.I785 G48 2000
823′.92—dc21 99-044063
eISBN: 978-0-307-42602-4
Author photograph by Gary Latham
v3.1_r1
FOR JOHN
… And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring?
Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
Thornton Wilder,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
OKINAWA
WHO WAS BLOWING on the nape of my neck?
I swung around. The tinted glass doors hissed shut. The light was bright. Synthetic ferns swayed, very gently, up and down the empty lobby. Nothing moved in the sun-smacked car park. Beyond, a row of palm trees and the deep sky.
“Sir?”
I swung around. The receptionist was still waiting, offering me her pen, her smile as ironed as her uniform. I saw the pores beneath her makeup, and heard the silence beneath the Muzak, and the rushing beneath the silence.
“Kobayashi. I called from the airport, a while ago. To reserve a room.” Pinpricking in the palms of my hands. Little thorns.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Kobayashi …” So what if she didn’t believe me? The unclean check into hotels under false names all the time. To fornicate, with strangers. “If I could just ask you to fill in your name and address here, sir … and your profession?”
I showed her my bandaged hand. “I’m afraid you’ll have to fill the form in for me.”
“Certainly … My, how did that happen?”
“A door closed on it.”
She winced sympathetically, and turned the form around. “Your profession, Mr. Kobayashi?”
“I’m a software engineer. I develop products for different companies, on a contract-by-contract basis.”
She frowned. I wasn’t fitting her form. “I see, no company as such, then …”
“Let’s use the company I’m working with at the moment.”
Easy. The Fellowship’s technology division will arrange corroboration.
“Fine, Mr. Kobayashi … Welcome to the Okinawa Garden Hotel.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you visiting Okinawa for business or for sightseeing, Mr. Kobayashi?”
Was there something quizzical in her smile? Suspicion in her face?
“Partly business, partly sightseeing.” I deployed my alpha control voice.
“We hope you have a pleasant stay. Here’s your key, sir. Room 307. If we can assist you in any way, please don’t hesitate to ask.” You? Assist me? “Thank you.”
Unclean, unclean. These Okinawans never were pure-blooded Japanese. Different, weaker ancestors. As I turned away and walked toward the elevator, my ESP told me she was smirking to herself. She wouldn’t be smirking if she knew the caliber of mind she was dealing with. Her time will come, like all the others.
Not a soul was stirring in the giant hotel. Hushed corridors stretched into the noontime distance, empty as catacombs.
There’s no air in my room. Use of air-conditioning is prohibited in Sanctuary because it impairs alpha waves. To show solidarity with my brothers and sisters, I switched it off and opened the windows. The curtains I keep drawn. You never know whose tele-photo lens might be looking in.
I looked out into the eye of the sun. Naha is a cheap, ugly city. But for the background band of Pacific aquamarine this city could be any tentacle of Tokyo. The usual red-and-white TV transmitter, broadcasting the government’s subliminal command frequencies. The usual department stores rising like windowless temples, dazzling the unclean into compliance. The urban districts, the factories pumping out poison into the air and water supplies. Fridges abandoned in wastegrounds of lesser trash. What grafted-on pieces of ugliness are their cities! I imagine the New Earth sweeping this festering mess away like a mighty broom, returning
the land to its virginal state. Then the Fellowship will create something we deserve, which the survivors will cherish for eternity.