Feeling the need for something brainless yet racy, something with inch-high gold letters and words like protocol in the title, I snuck into to the boyf’s office and pulled this off the shelf. It’s the new Robert Harris novel, the second I’ve read, and on balance I prefer it to the first, Pompeii. Somehow it’s easier to go along with a lot of old nonsense about impending disaster and plots that shake the very foundations of blah blah when they take place in the modern world. Shoehorn them into first century Italy and you lose me.
Anyway, having got that off my chest, on to The Ghost. Hmm. Well, I said ‘prefer’ but that’s about as far as it goes. About halfway through, I was telling the boyf what a great page-turner the book was and how much I admired Harris’s craftsmanship. I waxed lyrical about his ability to write sparingly and to build tension. All this is true but it means little in the absence of a decent plot. What’s the point of turning pages if all they lead to is, well, a dénouement so anticlimactic it devalues the whole book?
The Ghost is the narrator of the novel: a ghostwriter of celebrity autobiographies and a character so inconsequential he doesn’t even have a name. His predecessor having drowned, he is being paid a fortune to redraft the memoirs of Adam Lang, erstwhile British PM and a dead ringer for Tony Blair. So far so good. Lang is holed up on Martha’s Vineyard with his wife, Ruth, and long-legged PA, Amelia, when the shit hits the fan – he’s being investigated by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged crimes in The War Against Terror. Suddenly he’s big news and the only thing stopping our Ghost from cashing in is his conviction that there’s more to his predecessor’s death than meets the eye. Thus begins the unravelling of Lang’s life which culminates in the distinctly underwhelming dénouement mentioned above.
I’ve since read the hype about The Ghost: how Harris stopped work on his next Roman thriller after Blair’s resignation in order to rush it out; how Ruth is Cherie and the out-of-favour minister who shops Lang to the ICC is Robin Cook. If this is indeed the case then all I can say is they needn’t fear for their reputations. This might be a page-turner but with such a damp squib for an ending, and indeed such a daft plot throughout, it’s hardly gonna change the world – contrary to what the inch-high gold letters and overblown blurb would have you think.
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