Why does a capable British prime minister abandon his nation’s own foreign policy and tag along on the misadventures of a hapless American president? Author Robert Harris, from England, ponders that mystifying question in an insightful novel, The Ghost (2007, Simon and Schuster, 335 pages).
By the final pages, a reason emerges. Maybe it’s unconvincing, but dollars to donuts, it’s no stranger than a similar scenario in real life.
Retired national leader Adam Lang has left London for wintry Martha’s Vineyard in the U.S. A political aide, Michael McAra, plans to help with the great man’s memoirs for which a publisher had advanced millions. But McAra falls off a ferry and dies.
“So it was an accident?”
“Accident? Suicide?... Who’ll ever know? What does it matter? It was the book that killed him.”
Then doors open for the book’s protagonist and narrator, the Ghost. No phantom, he’s a new ghostwriter sent to finish the Lang manuscript.
“The handrail was only waist-high, and for the first time I appreciated how easily McAra might have gone over. I actually had to brace myself to keep from slipping…. The line between accident and suicide isn’t always clearly defined. You could kill yourself without ever really making up your mind. The mere act of leaning out too far and imagining what it might be like could tip you over.”
The narrator has worked with sports and show-biz celebrities before, but never a big-time politician. He tries hard to settle down to work.
“I turned on the desk lamp and took my laptop out of my shoulder bag. We had traveled a long way together, that laptop and I. We had endured rock stars who believed themselves messiahs with a mission to save the planet. We had survived footballers whose monosyllabic grunts would make a silverback gorilla sound as if he were reciting Shakespeare. We had put up with soon-to-be-forgotten actors who had egos the size of a Roman emperor’s, and entourages to match. I gave the machine a comradely pat.”
Then political foes conspire to charge Lang with war crimes. “What’s been done in this so-called war on terror is illegal under international law, just as much as anything that happened in Kosovo or Liberia. The only difference is we’re the ones doing it. The hypocrisy is nauseating.”
But Lang retorts: “I don’t condone torture, but let me just say this to you. First, it does actually produce results – I’ve seen the intelligence. Second, having power, in the end, is all about balancing evils, and when you think about it, what are a couple of minutes of suffering for a few individuals compared to the deaths – the deaths, mark you – of thousands?”
Although often somber, the narrator shows pleasing flashes of humor. For example, as he arrives at a publisher’s office:
“A notice board in the foyer announced that the terrorism alert was ORANGE/HIGH. Through the darkened glass I could see the security men in their dingy aquarium checking me on a monitor. When I finally got inside, I had to turn out my pockets and pass through a metal detector.
Quigley was waiting for me by the lifts.
‘Who do you expect to bomb you,’ I asked. ‘Random House?’ ”
Harris has written other successful books, such as Imperium, Pompeii, Archangel, Enigma and Fatherland. A veteran of TV and newspaper work, he knows how to plow through political brambles.
The Ghost lags at times, but its parallels to reality make it difficult to set aside.
Approval rating: 65 per cent.
For more information: www.simonsays.com
(March 23, 2008)
ARCHIVES
|
