Staff writer Contemporary writers love to skate between different genres, styles and settings. And "Ghostwritten," the first novel by Englishman David Mitchell, is filled with such formal trickery. It is a sequence of apparently discrete stories, strung together by the protagonist of one popping up on the fringes of another. It is also a brilliant study of causality and the interconnectedness of things.
The book opens with the crazy musings of a Japanese cultist, Quasar, holed up in Okinawa. His hand still hurts from being trapped in the doors of the Tokyo train he filled with poison gas. And he is shocked and amused by the uninitiated, living in ignorance of the meteor homing in on Earth to bring Armageddon and the reign of the guru, His Serendipity.
Blind faith alters Quasar's sight. He takes his orders from a spider in his hotel lavatory bowl ("The Guru has an impish sense of humor") and the chapter (section? story?) closes with him seeing heaven's approach in the night sky as clouds ink out the stars.