#mitchellverse

This is the beginning of my reread of all of David Mitchell’s collected works (which I’ll call the Mitchell-verse from now on). I had some trouble deciding what book to start with, which is part of the beauty of all these books: you can start (almost) anywhere. I could have picked Cloud Atlas, which is the best known, the most “obvious”, for lack of a better word, and has a movie adaptation! I could have chosen Black Swan Green, which is the least complex in terms of themes. A Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet might have also been a good choice: it is the earliest chronologically, the least “Mitchell” book in the Mitchell-verse and is my personal favorite. But I’m going with Ghostwritten. 

The duh reason is because this was first. This was the book that David Mitchell sold to publishers on nothing more than its own merit. He had never published a short story or an essay. And yet so many of the ideas that permeate the whole Mitchell-verse appear here fully formed.

The other reason is more personal. Out of all Mitchell’s books, Ghostwritten is the one I least deeply understand. I want to understand it better, and I want to be able to convey that understanding through writing. I have never written outside of an academic setting before, so this will (hopefully) be a process of growth and discovery.

What does it mean

David Mitchell’s work reminds me a lot of Doctor Who. Part of it is the way their universes are structured: time is a fluid concept, individual episodes or chapters work as standalones and no matter where you start, you will be confused. But I think they’re also united thematically. Doctor Who places a big emphasis on the importance of small actions, redemption and our common humanity. I will argue that David Mitchell’s works do the same. In Ghostwritten *spoilers*, the emphasis seems to be on the fact that we are connected to people we will never meet and that the lives we live can have ripple effects across the whole universe. Over the next couple months I want to explore this theme through a few different lenses.

“The human world is made of stories, not people”

“Everything is about wanting”

“The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.”

See you in Okinawa