Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2281 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

The Times
`A master of the intelligent thriller... The Ghost is Harris back on sparkling form'

Sunday Times
`Truly thrilling'

Sunday Telegraph
`Harris has written a remarkable thriller'

Customer Reviews

Tremendous, in my view - but make up your own mind
Rarely these days does one come across a really good book that is also really well edited. "The Ghost" is just right: as in a good whodunnit there is almost nothing that is extraneous to the plot, but it is so page-turningly readable that you don't have time to put the pieces together before the last page hits you like a pick-axe. All you can do is sit dumbstruck and admire the writer's skill in taking you on such a ride.
The reviews of "The Ghost" seem to be split down the middle, with some readers sorely disappointed by Harris failing to live up to past efforts and other reviewers ecstatic at one of the best political thrillers in years. I'm firmly in the latter camp. I could hardly put it down, was riveted throughout and found the ending chilling. It's up there with John Le Carre's best, in my opinion.
But what really makes this story a masterpiece is the stylistic perfection that Harris has achieved. I cannot explain further without spoiling the book, so I will just say that this is an intelligent thriller that left me satisfied on several levels, and one of them was an appreciation for a piece of writing that really works. I do wonder if some of the disappointed reviewers didn't quite "get" the book.
I confess to having approached "The Ghost" rather warily. I'd heard that it was a thinly veiled attack on Tony Blair, who seemed a tediously easy target and in danger of becoming out of date. Also, I'd read two of Robert Harris' others (Fatherland and Archangel) and although I enjoyed them, I found the ending a tiny bit lame in both.
But "The Ghost" knocked my fears for six. It's true that the prime minister in this has some rather obvious similarities with Blair, who Harris apparently used to be pretty close to, but the book in no way relies on the Blair parallel for its success. And you certainly don't need to have a particular view of Blair to enjoy the story.
And my prejudice about Harris' ability to finish well was unjustified. This ties up the loose ends with a flourish and signs off with a touch of genius. It is surely the mark of a really top-notch thriller that you think you can sort of see how it will all fall into place but then the author pulls a rabbit from the hat at the very last moment.

Entertainingly implausible
The narrator of Robert Harris's new novel is a ghostwriter assigned to write the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister. But all is not as it should be; the ex-PM, Adam Lang, finds himself exiled in Martha's Vinyard with a war crimes indictment hanging over him. A previous 'ghost' had died in mysterious circumstances. And what of the shadowy right wing organisations that lurk in the background?

Lang, is a thinly fictionalised version of Tony Blair, a former friend of Harris, and much has been made of this and of other real life charcaters who are meant to crop up in the book. Lang's wife Ruth is said to be Cherie (she's not) and there's meant to be a Robin Cook figure (there's not, really).

I was under the impression that this would be a novel about a former PM brooding over his legacy, but it's actually a decent - if not implausible - thriller. Some of it is far fetched, though never as ludicrous as a Dan Brown book, and it is entertaining and gripping. I read it in an evening.

There are echoes of Graham Greene at times, and the ending was reminisent of Evelyn Waugh's Handful of Dust. The implications of Britain's 'special relationship' with America are laid down in terrifying if not exagerated terms. And while too much has been made of Harris's former friendship with the Blairs, there are flashes of insight that are revealing and amusing.

Not a brilliant work of literature by any means, but a better thriller or beach novel you won't read this year.

Fitting epitaph for the Blair era
I didn't expect to like this half as much as I did - I have long thought of Robert Harris as airport fodder. I'm sorry, I now see that was unfair.

This isn't exactly literature but it's well plotted, well paced and well written. Its fictionalisation is often wafer-thin -- even the revelatory photograph of former prime minister "Adam Lang" is very much like a well-known picture of Tony Blair during his university days.

It's curious that someone so well entrenched within mainstream journalism is prepared to write a book about CIA conspiracies against the British Labour Party - I would have thought this stuff wasn't widely believed beyond the far left. But well done to Harris for writing such a plausible thriller set in this sort of world.