It is a remarkable structure, carried through with great elan and confidence. I finished the novel before it occurred to me that I ought to have been marking interesting passages. Mitchell’s ground plan, of succeeding stories building up into an unpredictable whole, is one which many young novelists now find attractive; Ali Smith’s Hotel World and Rachel Cusk’s The Lucky Ones, both splendid and influential novels, resort to a pattern which looks superficially like a series of short stories. Mitchell’s novel, however, is structured in this way not because of a particular aesthetic flavour, but because the material of the novel and its subject actively demand it. Unusual as the form is, it is one perfectly suited to the work, and you are persuaded that it couldn’t have been done in any other way.
It’s not quite a perfect novel; sometimes the speed of events gets out of hand, and the narrative becomes confusing. The story about the publisher is given in a deliberately tiresome and rather unfunny voice, and Mitchell seems to be enjoying himself a little too much for the reader’s endurance. The long middle story is powerful and beautifully written, extracting jewels of phrasing from the debased and chaotic dialect of the remote future; but for once one was reminded of other books which have done something very similar with more power, notably that great book, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. I didn’t feel that Mitchell had really concentratedly constructed his dialect, and once or twice it lost conviction. More seriously, perhaps, nothing in the book does anything to dispel a tiny, nagging worry I had about Ghostwritten; that, marvellous and dizzying as the multitude of voices were, I had very little idea by the end of a characteristic Mitchell turn of phrase. Having read three of his books, and having admired all of them greatly, I still couldn’t say that I could identify a page of prose as Mitchell’s; I can’t quite imagine what it would look like.
That, I think, hardly matters; this book is so rich in its passionate inauthenticity, you would be a fool to ask Mitchell to become a more ordinary novelist. It is very rare to come across a novel so ruthlessly planned, and yet so unconfined by its formal decisions, so unpredictable in its direction, so convincing even at its strangest, so capable of doing anything to serve its extraordinary ends.
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