Review: The Ghost

The central character of this book is a former Prime Minister, Adam Lang, who has recently resigned. He is an attractive and gifted communicator, as well as being a fine “actor”, but he is essentially a man of little substance.

He has only a slight interest in political life, aside from the opportunities it gave him to achieve celebrity status and gain considerable wealth. His wife, in contrast, is a highly intelligent and effective political operator; in effect the brains behind the partnership.

During his premiership Lang’s main achievements appear to have been the complete subordination of the interests of the United Kingdom to those of the United States, and, as a sycophantic follower of a right-wing American President, the entry into a catastrophic war in Iraq for unconvincing reasons; as a result terrorist acts are now rife including frequent suicide bombings in London, and the UK government has become inextricably linked with American acts of torture.

It is pretty easy to see the apparent similarities between Adam Lang and Tony Blair and this, no doubt, inspired the drive to make the book into a recent film, “The Ghost Writer”, directed by Roman Polanski.

The story is told through the eyes of a narrator; a ghost writer employed by Lang, via various intermediaries, to write his memoirs, after the original writer, Michael McAra, a loyal party aid, mysteriously drowned. The replacement ghost writer is hooked by the large fee and accepts with reservations the terrifyingly short deadline imposed and the excessive security hoops he is required to jump through. He is a somewhat jaded writer of memoirs, which have only a fleeting resemblance to the truth, for a long list of dodgy celebrities and inarticulate footballers. Superficially, the job appears to be a standard commercial proposition and he tackily pitches for it to a room of hard-nosed business men, by promising to “put some heart” into McAra’s rather tedious early draft of the memoirs.

To start with, the plotting is fairly pedestrian, as details are given of the writer’s arrival at the ex PM’s refuge in a desolate and empty Martha’s Vineyard and the reader is introduced to the other members of Lang’s team. The pace picks up, with the news that Lang is potentially facing charges for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, and at the same time the ghost writer sets about following up on his growing doubts about his predecessor’s apparent accidental drowning. An air of political intrigue and conspiracy takes hold, as the ghost writer, in seeking to work out who Lang really is, breaks all the rules, hides manuscripts and deals with real or imaginary security/military personnel. The action revolves round the attempt to track down the last few hours of McAra’s life and discover the meaning behind the disclosures revealed by his extensive research on Lang and his wife.

“The Ghost” works pretty well as a straight forward political thriller with some nods to real life. However, if you are trying to fathom the machinations of the Blair regime and achieve an understanding of UK foreign and domestic policies under New Labour, then intriguing as this novel is, it is not the place to look for the answers.

The Ghost by Robert Harris is available now and you can compare prices on The Ghost.

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