Robert Harris is an eminent British novelist, known for his historical thrillers Fatherland, Enigma and Archangel as well as a series set in Ancient Rome. But in 2007, The Ghost turned up unexpectedly, out of the blue. Upon the resignation of Tony Blair, Harris - a former political editor of The Observer newspaper - immediately began to work on the book. In 2010 it was turned into a film starring Ewan McGregor as the Ghost and Pierce Brosnan as the ex-Prime Minister, but how did the novel itself turn out?
Blair resigned on June 24. The first edition of the book was published on September 26. So it should be said from the outset that if this book was written very quickly, as the dates seem to indicate, it certainly doesn't show - and that's a compliment. I am ever so slightly dubious that the entire novel could have been conceived, written, rewritten, edited, prepared, promoted and published in that time - after all, in Chapter Two we are told that it normally takes at least four months for the publisher's end of the process. But that's not really the issue here - it just means that what we have is an astonishingly directed novel, with no extrenuous segments or language. This is definitely Harris' tightest work to date.
It is impossible - for this reader at least - to read the book without being constantly reminded of Tony Blair. This is no coincidence. Adam Lang is almost a direct lift of Blair from the real world onto the page, right down to the "wild" days at Uni (Blair played rock guitar, Lang acted) - with similarly wild hair. Both attended Oxbridge, both had lightning-fast promotions through Parliament, both began their terms as beloved but ended as despised. Lang does not actually appear all that much throughout the book, probably less than half the total pagecount. While this may initially seem odd, given that it is his memoirs the Ghost is writing, as the reader progresses it soon becomes clear that the layers of mystery and curiosity surrounding Lang aren't really about Lang at all. The plot is - as in so many thrillers - much bigger.
And it's with Lang that the only real problem with the book lies - the fact that he, and by extention the entire book, are so entrenched with Tony Blair that it is impossible to seperate the two. Fiction relying on real life is of course the norm - Harris himself could hardly have written Enigma without the Second World War, or Fatherland without Hitler. But in those novels one was able to seperate your mind from what you know to be the facts of real life for the duration of the book. With this one, you never can - Blair hangs like a spectre over every page, diluting the pure thriller and escapist attitude one would normally have while reading.
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And as for that revelation at the end, that Lang was being unwittingly controlled by agents of the CIA throughout his entire career ... well. The initial reaction is that it couldn't possibly happen. But given a greater amount of thought, it's actually quite plausible - and would certainly explain a lot of Britain's foreign policy over the last thirteen years. This isn't a conspiracy theory in the vein of Dan Brown - this is entirely possible in today's world, and all the more frightening for it. Added to this is the fact that we do not learn, until the very last page, that the entire novel has been the Ghost's own memoirs, of a sort. And that if we are reading them, then he is dead. We - like our narrator - have not taken the threat truly seriously until this point (the Ghost's major concern when he returns home is leaving a car in an airport park for too long). It's a mistake that costs him his life - and leaves us with an unsettling feeling when we close the covers.
Where then does The Ghost rank in Harris' catalogue? Personally I still prefer Archangel, but only because that dealt with Russia and Stalin, twin obsessions of mine. If you're looking for an excellent, plausible, and thought-provoking thriller, you could do a lot worse than The Ghost.
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