The Ghost Writer: A Novel

Robert Harris makes one feel like he is sitting in your living room telling you a story. His characters and locales are richly painted and one can identify with them. This is the second Harris novel that I have read.

The only thing better than Harris writing pure fiction is Harris writing a historical novel like his recent, The Officer and the Spy about the Dreyfus affairs.

Excellent summer reading. If you enjoy reading British mysteries, then "The Ghost" is a must read. It almost has an air of "film noir" that maintains your interest throughout. I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending, however, guess I just wanted more. I will look for other novels by this author.

The Ghost is Robert Harris' best to date, and that is really saying something! The experience of a ghost writer for a recent prime minister keeps you enthralled right up to the last surprising page. And talk about being relative to the present! I would recommend this book to anyone, but take care. It is hard to stop reading it.

{SPOILERS}
I like Robert Harris. I have read two of his novels and one of his non-fiction books. I also have just bought from the store another two of his novels. Indeed I liked this book too.

But it suffers from a glaring defect. There is no crime in this crime story.

The plot begins with the mysterious death of another ghost writer. In any other mystery this would later be shown to have been a murder. Not here. The death of the first ghost was reported at the time to have been an accident and apparently it was an accident. There are a number of complications along the way but these are all red herrings.

The author character is running for his life at the end and may have been murdered or he may just be cagey. He is running, but is he running from anyone sinister or is he, as the other characters believe, just paranoid?

So we have a murder mystery without any real murders. Well yes, but there is the terrible political crime that the ex-Prime Minister character (Tony Blair) is so anxious to hush up. What is this terrible secret? Lane (Blair) coorperated with the United States in dealing with terrorists. That's it.

In real life Harris knew Tony Blair but came to disagree with his foreign policy vis-a-vis the US. In real life Britain as well as Western Europe have relied heavily on the US for much of their defense. Europe has refused to fund its own defense forces for decades. The US funds and mans a defense umbrella. We ask for very little in return but apparently even a little diplomatic cooperation between British special branches and the US CIA is too much for Robert Harris. So he builds his plot around the idea that the Prime Minister's wife works for the CIA. Somehow this doesn't seem so horrible to me. I'm sure to have Britain reliant of the US hurts the pride of an Englishman, but I'm not English. It doesn't bother me at all.

If the ex-Prime Minister was indeed married to a CIA agent, I'm sure everyone in MI-5 (or is it MI-6?) would have known about for decades. How could they not?

A lot of the ghost character's outrage is focused on the possibility that the Muslim terrorists were waterboarded. Again this doesn't seem much of an outrage to me. Terrorists are not protected by the Geneva Convention. There really isn't a crime here. The revelation about Lang's(Blair) complicity with waterboarding would be only a political embarrassment.

Harris seems to be one of those faint hearted Brits who fret about inconsequentialities. His mistake in this novel is that the interrogation of terrorists isn't a crime or at least isn't much of a crime.

One of the rare instances where the novel and the movie adaptation are in near accord. In spite of knowing the details firsthand, the novel was so thrilling from cover to cover that I read it in 2 hours.