Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

What could these nine characters have in common? How could their lives possibly intersect?
1. a cult member who becomes a terrorist and then hides out on a tiny Japanese island.
2. a record-shop geek in Tokyo who falls in love.
3. a British attorney in Hong Kong who becomes involved in a money-laundering scheme.
4. an old Chinese woman who has spent her long life running a tea shack on the mountain trail leading to a Buddhist shrine.
5. a "noncorpum" intelligence who is seeking in Mongolia for a body to inhabit.
6. a prostitute/gallery attendant/art thief in Petersburg who longs to retire to Switzerland.
7. a slacker drummer in London who decides to reform his womanizing ways.
8. a physicist who is hiding out in Ireland because the CIA wants her to create the ultimate weapon.
9. a late-night radio DJ in New York who may soon be a witness to the end of the world.

Trust me, David Mitchell connects all these lives together in multiple and ingenious ways. Indeed, part of the fun of the book comes from spotting the connections.

Each of the nine characters gets his or her own chapter, and all are excellent stand-alone short stories. But taken together, with the inter-connectivity and an overriding theme, they form a cohesive novel. Quite a feat of virtuosity.

What stands out here is the author's ability to write with a different voice for each character. All the stories are first-person, and the narrator in each sounds spot-on perfect, with the possible exception of the Russian woman, who sounded more American to me. It seems almost as if each story was actually dictated to Mitchell, who then became the "ghostwriter."

This was Mitchell's first novel, and he repeated the structure of connected short stories in his later, more famous novel Cloud Atlas. In some ways this book was even more enjoyable to read than his later effort.

The last page of the novel asks the question, "What is real and what is not?" I wonder if Mitchell as a youth read the novels of Philip K. Dick, who in many of his novels posed the same question.

This novel is addictively readable, has characters who are totally believable, provides the reader with some things to think about, and is overwhelmingly clever (perhaps just a tad too much so). Highly recommended.