Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #204 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 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

Desperately dull and highy implausible. The ghost here is Harris himself, once upon a time he wrote good thrillers.
An extraordinarily inept book from a previously sure-footed writer. A ghost-biographer, thinly and unconvincingly characterised, is suddenly drawn into a politcal furore as former British PM Adam Lang, whose memoirs he is ghosting, becomes embroiled in a Hague investigation into war crimes. The action unfolds with laborious slowness, most of it on Martha'a Vineyard, where Lang and his small entourage are holed up. The story has the virtue of first person simplicity but rapidly degenerates into feeble wish-fuflilment with the narrator suddenly becoming a central speech-writer for the former PM (after having just met him!), before enjoying an entirely unconvincing bout of sex with the former's PM's wife. Even that is capped by a ludicrous episode where a jammed SatNav directs him to the CIA villain's lair. The truth finally appears on page 331 where he admits: "It was like a Feydau farce, each new scene more far-fetched than the last." Exactly. In 'Archangel' the twist was dazzling and scary, here it is laugh-out-loud stupid. You can only assume that the author's rage against Tony (or Cherie) Blair has paralyzed his literary judgement. And the moralizing doesn't even work as an anti-war polemic for, as we move further into post-Blair Britain, most of this feels as if it is from another age.

A Very Addictive Book!
This book grabbed me from the start. The auther got the balance just right. The story is about politics, but there isn't so much that I said, "stop preaching and more the plot on", as I have done with other books. It's not full of overcomplicated plot lines, but just enough to make me care about what was happening, or was about to happen.

However, I just enjoyed it as a thriller, and didn't get hung up by similarities with real life characters. The fictional one were good enough.

Seeing it all through the eyes of a ghost writer is an original approach, and has made me look at factual biographies in a different light. Using a satnav as a key to developing the plot was also a touch of genious, and made me laugh more than once!

Enjoyable workmanlike thriller
It's another assured effort from Robert Harris, though one which does promise a little more than it delivers. Perhaps this is largely due to the ambitious subject - a semi-fictionalised account of Tony Blair (in the book, Adam Lang). The story follows a ghostwriter who is to write Adam Lang's memoirs, which we can more or less read to be Robert Harris trying to understand a man he once admired and was charmed by, but now finds vaguely abhorrent and mostly incomprehensible. Much like the rest of us, I suppose. The ghostwriter enters the life of Adam Lang at a time when he is being investigated by the international court for war crimes, and events soon spiral, developing into an unravelling conspiracy.

It's unputdownable. The conceit of the book is done well, so much so that it it is hard to see Adam Lang and not picture Tony Blair in your head, the same with Cherie Blair who becomes Ruth Lang in the book. The problem for me is that I felt the book pulled its punches a little. Robert Harris gets Lang/Blair spot on - the consumate performer, difficult to pin down politically. The War on Terror issue is the main one on hand in the book, for which we would all like some answers. But little else is touched on, whic I found disappointing. I am sure there are any number of domestic issues we would like exploring too - Blair's relation to his own party for one, which always seemed a little contradictory. His insistence with bringing targets and private business into the public sector; the increasing gap between rich and poor. There are a large number of controversial issues, none of which are explored in this book. It's just not that political a thriller.I would still recommend it to anyone who wants an enjoyable read, though.