ABSTRACT
David Mitchell’s novel Ghostwritten is constructed out of nine stories set in Okinawa, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Holy Mountain in China, Mongolia, Petersburg, London, New York and Clear Island in Ireland respectively. Mitchell creates and retains discrete story blocks whilst at the same time weaving connections between them that challenge, without destroying, their distinctness. Mitchell’s writing creates – is in fact still creating – a storyverse. It is world building of the most ambitious and impressive kind, across and through texts, with a recurrent cast populating that world and repeated themes haunting it. Mitchell’s storyverse is built out of his short stories, as well as his novels which are themselves ‘compounded short stories’. Mitchell’s novel, Black Swan Green is carefully structured with one story for each of the thirteen months of the narration’s duration. In this relative simplicity, it might at first appear to be the least indebted structurally to the short story form.
