Ghost Writer by Robert Harris

Ghost Writer

by Robert Harris, ISBN: 9780099538523, R115.00

Book overview

The stunning new novel from the No. 1 bestselling author of Fatherland;Enigma;Archangel;Pompeii and Imperium. "The moment I heard how McAra died I should have walked away. I can see that now. I should have said, 'Rick, I'm sorry, this isn't for me, I don't like the sound of it,' finished my drink and left. But he was such a good storyteller, Rick I often thought he should have been the writer and I the agent that once he'd started talking there was never any question I wouldn't listen, and by the time he had finished, I was done for." After five books set firmly in the past, Robert Harris returns with a contemporary novel that brings the reader face to face with some of the biggest issues of our time the result is a gripping and genuinely thrilling read.

No preview available - 2010 - 416 pages

 

Reviews from Amazon: 5.0 out of 5 stars The Ghost, 26 Aug 2009 By  J. D. Aspinall (South West England) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    This review is from: The Ghost (Paperback) I thought Tony Blair believed the war in Iraq was a right and just thing. I had this notion because of the unpopularity of the invasion, the millions of protesters against it, and my belief politicians care only for their image and the votes a positive image can offer. In short: if he was willing to lose votes he must believe it was right. I didn't hold this view for long, and my support of the invasion of Iraq didn't last. But I still wondered why, if the policy was unpopular, did a voracious popularity junkie like Blair go along? Alex Salmond of the SNP made a comment which painted Bush and Blair as a couple of cowboys with their "thumbs in the jeans" as they necked a few cold Budweisers "down on the ranch". I don't accept that sort of absurd cartoon (but one can hardly blame Salmond for making it; after all, the less relevant the politician, the more noise they make, like sulky children, throwing tantrums for attention.) But there had to be a reason for Blair's complicity, so what could it be? Robert Harris offers his entertaining theory in The Ghost, and takes a swipe at the wispy façade of Blairism. Adam Lang, Harris's fictional Blair, is using the house of a billionaire publisher to write the manuscript for his memoirs, and he's been using a party aide as his ghost writer until that particular fellow goes overboard into the drink while on the Martha's Vineyard ferry. His replacement, the novel's nameless narrator, flies to the US to take on the assignment. The story is the discovery of what lay behind Blair's blind support of Bush over Iraq and Afghanistan and his head-bowed obedience to any requests from our American friends, from public support of Israel to the use of UK military bases for the CIA planes on "extraordinary rendition" flights. This is a gentle thriller; the plot opens out slowly, and never offers the absurd level of conspiratorial revelations and shenanigans of The Da Vinci Code; this is much smarter and better tailored, with one foot planted firmly in the possible. The urge to create a conspiracy of which Dan Brown would be proud must have been hard to resist for Harris, but resist he does. His lead stumbles across the secret by accident, and digs himself in deeper, it seems, because of the tedium of the task of writing the memoir, and never senses the danger that is walking alongside him with every step, like an assassin on a different plan of reality; (of course, because the narrator fails to sense it, so do we, and even when we do, the threat is not taken seriously until the final page.) This is a fair example of how to do a large conspiracy but still keep it simple and plausible.