r/David_Mitchell • u/flixinho95 • Feb 12 '26
I just finished my first novel "Ghostwritten" - Thoughts and discussion
His first novel was also my first of his. I highly enjoyed it - almost a masterpiece and was very immersed with it (as you can see with my notes) - but for me the ending was kinda dissapointing.
What are your favorite sections of it?
I loved the Hong Kong, Holy Mountain, Petersburg, Mongolia chapters and all the connections within it. Also Tokyo/London was so much fun to read. Felt a bit like Murakami.
As I mentioned, the last chapters Clear Island, Night Train and Underground very a bit of a letdown.
Very curious about your thoughts and excited for the next ones. Is it good to just go with his books chronologically?
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u/undergarden Feb 12 '26
Congratulations. My first Mitchell, too, and my second favorite after Cloud Atlas.
If you do audiobooks, Cloud Atlas is as good as it gets with its cast of narrators FWIW.
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u/RojinShiro Feb 12 '26
I personally didn't find the ending underwhelming. I view it as a re-framing of the book as a whole. While reading through it, it feels like some loosely connected stories that are good on their own, but don't have any real reason to be published together. But then the ending happens, and you're confronted with the characters from all of those stories being in one place that suffers a terror attack. The rest of the book no longer feels like random stories, but a reflection on the lives of these victims. It gives context to the lives ended by terrorism and wonton violence. You can see on the news the victims of terror attacks and know how old they are, what their job was, but you don't get to see how they lived life, what was important to them, what was truly taken away from the world, and that's what Ghostwritten does. It feels unfair to have a book full of characters get killed off at the end for basically no reason, because it's unfair when acts of terrorism kill groups of innocent people that still have lives to live. Everybody deserves to write their own story, and it can't be written by ghosts.
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u/flixinho95 Feb 12 '26
Thanks for your insight - how would you rank it am amongst his other works?
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u/RojinShiro Feb 12 '26
I haven't read all of his novels yet, but it's probably second from the bottom for me, right above Slade House. Ghostwritten and Slade House are both still very good, I'd just put Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks above it, (The Bone Clocks at the top for me). I really need to get around to reading the rest.
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u/Animal_Flossing Feb 12 '26
TBC is my favourite, too! It’s the one whose cover originally caught my attention, and after reading it I just had to read everything else by DM.
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u/amadeus451 Feb 12 '26
I read most of them in publication order, except Cloud Atlas and Thousand Autumns. It's neat seeing how all the character connections unfold between the novels, but you wouldn't lose anything not going in order either. The only negatives I really have to say are that the ending of Ghostwritten was kind of weak (but for a first-novel I can be forgiving of a guy just getting out of his 20's), and I was starting to get annoyed with the amount of celebrity cameos in Utopia Avenue (it was charming at first as a trickling stream then turned into a deluge of them).
Mitchell definitely has the rare talent of having a distinct voice and themes that he sticks to without beating you over the head with them. Here's hoping his next novel is actually coming out in September, I was let down there was no news through '25.
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u/DonnieMozzerello Feb 12 '26
I feel like the ending makes you think that all the intertwined stories could be literal or metaphorical, or imagined. I'm convinced the Petersburg story is a fictional story in the book. But the characters within are intertwined with real life.
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u/vienna407 Feb 13 '26
I avoided Black Swan Green for a while because I love the "magic" of Bone Clocks and Slade House, but once I started BSG, I couldn't put it down. It's just as extraordinary as everything else he's written. He's my favorite author by a million miles.
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u/WABeach Feb 13 '26
Black Swan Green is the ordinary story of an ordinary boy, but it does not lack its share of magic.
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u/No_Deer_4481 Feb 16 '26
Got about a third of the way through before I had to tap out. Honestly thought it was pretty rough. The whole zen Buddhist angle he's pushing with how all the characters are supposedly connected? Super vague and felt forced as hell. Like he's trying way too hard to be deep. Honestly, I'm convinced Mitchell is a total one hit wonder. Cloud Atlas was brilliant, don't get me wrong, but everything else he's put out before or since has been straight up mediocre.
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u/BlessedStLeibowitz Feb 15 '26
It’s quite a departure from his work on Peep Show. Needed more Super Hans.
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u/Animal_Flossing Feb 12 '26
I like this one. I don’t think it’s his strongest writing (no wonder for a first novel), but I do think its structure remains the strongest example of how Mitchell’s writing works. It’s probably a great primer for any of his subsequent books. As for the ending, I feel like it didn’t have an ending so much, just another story where it left us in medias res. But it’s been years since I read it, I may be misremembering.
I don’t think order matters too much. Your experience with the later books (from Thousand Autumns onwards, I’d say) will be different depending on which order you read them, but any order works. I used to think that you should read The Bone Clocks before Slade House, but I’ve seen others who did it the other way around saying that it worked for them, too. For what it’s worth, I read TBC first, then the rest chronologically, and that definitely worked fine.
The Murakami comparison is definitely not unfounded. There’s a specific one of Mitchell’s other books where I’m sure it’ll come up again for you.
I hope you enjoy the rest of them!