What Really Makes a Hyperlink?

If forced to choose between Ali Smith's Hotel World and David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, as far as "hyperlinked" stories are concerned, I think that I'd pick Hotel World.

Ghostwritten for me was very weakly and tenuously interconnected between one vignette to the next, and the chapter where all the stories collide simply wasn't enough of a payoff for me. While I did enjoy wondering when the previous character(s) would pop up in the next chapter, I found that I was more driven to spot it like Where's Waldo than actually engaging in the text, and I don't think that's good enough. This was particularly frustrating in the transfer from St. Petersberg to London, where the character you were expecting to pop up, Margarita Latunsky, wasn't the character mentioned. I was much more interested in her and the FBI agent, than I was with the offhand mention of John the painter.

I felt that Ali Smith did a much better job of weaving the characters and story lines together to create an interconnected novel. Perhaps that is the point of David Mitchell's novel, that we are only barely connected to the world around us at any given time, but based on the second to last chapter, and the apocalyptic feel of it, I expected it to end up being much more "We Are the World" and less  "99 Red Balloons."

Smith's direct connection between one character to the next not only made the text feel more cohesive, but it also played up the concept of interconnection much more strongly. Yes, her novel is contained to one small town in England, but the concept of hyperlinking is still present. Though Mitchell makes the novel more global, he fails when it comes to finishing the package. I felt let down to spend so much time in different character's heads, and then never really see or hear from them again, except in passing. I found I cared more for the backpackers who popped up multiple times than I did for anyone else, and there were several more compelling characters to care about. Smith uses her characters much more directly, and even centers the novel around Sara Wilby, though not everyone is aware of the circumstances of death or even that she existed. By having the character from the previous chapter interact with the one in the following, I felt that the novel was more successful in terms of taking separate lives and combining them into the one life of the World Hotel.

Mitchell does have some truly admirable skillsets, namely how very different and strong the voices of the different characters are and how each section feels like a different genre. However, I don't feel that he is as good at picking up, or even creating, disparate threads of narrative and braiding them together in one story, as a hyperlinked text might imply.