Some Guy With A Pen

A fantastic start to the day, and summer if it stays, today as the fantastic people at wordlegs.com, Dublin based ezine, have published a poem of mine in their Summer 2012 issue!

This is the wonderful David Mitchell’s debut novel, and I’ve just finished re-reading it. If you know me, or have followed this blog for a while, you’ll know my deep seated admiration for Mitchell.

The ‘gimick’ or ‘selling point’ of the novel is that it weaves a narrative through nine places, and if you’ve read Cloud Atlas you’ll see how he enjoys playing with things like space and time and how to create an interactivity between the narratives.

In Ghostwritten he dazzles with an ability to connect completely different characters, and one of his biggest achievements is making it panoramic. It doesn’t read like a domino effect, A hits B so B hits C, it reads with a 360 degree point of view, showing how fascinatingly unbiased actions, reactions and causality really is.

One thing I noticed on rereading was that he plays around with time - jumping from A to be between a few years; I do not think it’s written in chronological order. Whereas Atlas passes time in its due order, Ghostwritten is like trying to get to the centre of gobstopper, skipping between moments of time throughout the narratives to give it a sense of continuity: we as the reader follow the least confusing path. 

It can be a bit difficult in parts, he requests you to leave a lot of preconceptions and ideals behind, and just go with it - especially the sections starring the noncorpum or the sections where we hear from the Zookeeper: both are beyond our understanding at this point in the book, but if we allow the story to tell itself we may, and altogether have to, come to our own conclusion as it really could be one of several outcomes from within the novel. 

One of Mitchells most impressive stunt, I think, is when that last line in the St. Petersberg section with Margarita Latunsky, and how that one line splinted my head and my heart about what happened. Throughout the story Mitchell had laid miniature hints that perhaps Margarita’s optimistic escapism makes her an unreliable source, we empathise with her, but is that last line technically accurate; the use of one word, “really”, changing it to make it seem like an last desperate grasp at home

The other is how things like the terrorist attack, the Buddha on the Holy Mountain and what happens when Neal Brose finds his way there effect, pop up and ultimately change the future of other characters. Important, if not ultimate, stepping stones in their own lives but it shows the prevalence of chaos theory in modern day. How even the smallest of things can change our lives.

Mitchell’s utter control of language is beautifully acute and right for the character and the plot - one main reason why I fell in love with him as a writer from the very beginning.

I adore this film - it is technically your standard indie comedy but it’s just the perfect kind of film to make a good night of viewing. I love Toni Collette and she does another great job in this film, as did the entire cast actually. They have amazingly original and funny characters to play, and do justice completely.

Most films like this you can see them setting up a plot that’ll pay of later for whatever reason, and although this film isn’t an exception to that rule, it does so in a way that makes it seem fitting, not unexpected but contentedly right.

A lot of laugh out loud moments, and some interesting moments of heart-warming change - such as the Playground scene, and even though the Post-It Storm scene involves CGI which usually seems out of place in an indie film, again, it’s done just well enough to be feasible.

I see Julia Roberts produced this and although I haven’t a clue if she’s done much producing, I felt this was done really well and I’d be eager to watch anything she’ll do in the future.