FFB - The Ghost

Robert Harris’ best-seller The Ghost (2007) gripped me from beginning to end. And what a beginning: ‘The moment I heard how McAra died I should have walked away. I can see that now.’

Mike McAra was the political friend and ghost writer of Adam Lang, Britain’s former prime minister. Sadly, McAra’s body was washed up on the American coast. So the unnamed narrator gets the job; it pays well, after all. He felt a slight unease about taking over from the dead man: ‘But I suppose that ghosts and ghost writers go naturally together.’

From that foreboding start, we get sucked in to the claustrophobic millionaire’s holiday home in Martha’s Vineyard, where the narrator meets Lang and his wife Ruth, the devoted fixer, Amelia and assorted bodyguards.

 

The style is deceptively easy, laced with humour, and the odd dash of cynicism and irony. The fictitious publishing company who paid the advance is Rhinehart. It ‘consisted of five ancient firms acquired during a vigorous bout of corporate kleptomania in the nineties. Wrenched out of their Dickensian garrets in Bloomsbury, upsized, downsized, rebranded, renamed, reorganised, modernised and merged, they had finally been dumped in Hounslow…’

The book is set very close to 2007, when Al Qaeda terrorist bombings are not only a real threat, but actual occurrences. There are questions being asked about the extraordinary rendition of four British citizens from Pakistan to Guantanamo Bay, and the use of waterboarding to torture prisoners. The ex-PM is accused of committing an illegal international act, namely authorising the abduction of those four men. So he is being hidden away in Martha’s Vineyard in order to complete his memoires. [Echoes resonate even now, as British so-called IS terrorists are vaporised by a drone’s missiles.]

‘Heathrow the next morning looked like one of those bad science fiction movies set in the near future after the security forces have taken over the state. Two armoured personnel carriers were parked outside the terminal. A dozen men with Rambo machine guns and bad haircuts patrolled inside…’(p41)

Harris is a good observer, giving us splendid description and can turn a good phrase. For example: ‘New England is basically Old England on steroids – wider roads, bigger woods, larger spaces; even the sky seemed huge and glossy.’ (p48) Another excellent example: ‘… passed a marker buoy at the entrance to the channel swinging frantically this way and that as if it was trying to free itself from some underwater monster. Its bell tolled in time with the waves like a funeral chime and the spray flew as vile as witch’s spit.’ (p50)

And he’s not without his humour, either: The bar ‘was decorated to look like the kind of place Captain Ahab might fancy dropping into after a hard day at the harpoon. The seats and tables were made out of old barrels. There were antique seine nets …’ (p95)

 
Insightful writing, too. Read this passage – ‘… it’s curious how helicopter news shots impart to even the most innocent activity the dangerous whiff of criminality.’ – and wonder about the heavy-handed police raid on Sir Cliff Richards’ house, which happened several years later than the publication of this book.
 
Writers too will empathise with the narrator, for obvious reasons: ‘Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, it’s too cold…’ (p180)

Those excerpts give you a little flavour, anyway. The Ghost is well written, in turns amusing, witty, thoughtful and incisive concerning the corruption of power. Despite the fact that we know there wasn’t a prime minister called Adam Lang, his wife Ruth etc., the first person narrative manages to suspend disbelief.

 
If you enjoy the drip-feed of tension rising towards paranoia, then you’ll appreciate this skilfully written novel.

Some of the paperback’s review quotes seem adrift. ‘An unputdownable thriller about corrupt power and sex…’ – the sex is minimal and not graphic in the slightest: the door stays closed.

‘Guaranteed to keep you awake and chuckling after dinner.’ – Does the reviewer usually sleep during dinner? It has many amusing asides and one-liners (as hinted at above), but it isn’t a comedy.

‘… satirical thriller…’ – The thriller elements are minimal, and only evident towards the end. It’s more psychological suspense up to that point.

 
‘Truly thrilling.’ – No, it isn’t. It is tense, however, and most convincing, with an excellent twist at the end.

Highly recommended.

Book Review - The Happy Warrior

To all intents and purposes The Happy Warrior can be regarded as a graphic biography. It tells the life story of Sir Winston Churchill from birth until 1955. He died in 1965.

A full-colour page was printed on the back cover of the Eagle comic each week from 4 October 1957 up to 6 September 1958. The text was by Clifford Makins and the artwork was by Frank Bellamy.

This slim book collects the full story as published, all 62 pages of it, though it has been slightly reduced in size from the original comic dimensions. I was pleased to get hold of a copy as it has been out of print for many years; reprinted 2014.

To accompany the graphics there is an introduction about the Eagle and its place in British culture, plus a 5-page commentary by Richard M. Langworth, CBE, who sketches in several historical points that were not included in the graphic narrative.

What is remarkable is the amount of detail and information Makins does include in what is, essentially, a war story – Churchill fighting in Cuba, Omdurman, South Africa and of course his tenure as war-time Premier. 

Churchill was not unstinting in ensuring that it was his allies, but most especially his countrymen who deserved the thanks for delivering Great Britain from defeat:

‘This will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it, and if I found the right words you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue. It was a nation and race dwelling all round the globe that hade the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar. I also hope that I sometimes suggested to the lion the right places to use his claws.’

The title ‘The Happy Warrior’ is taken from William Wordsworth’s poem of 1806. And of course Churchill was not strictly a man of war, though that seems to be the impression. He said, ‘Much as war attracts me and fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations – I feel more deeply every year – and can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms – what vile and wicked folly and barbarism it all is.’

 

Frank Bellamy was born in 1917 and died too soon, in 1976, aged 59. Besides the superb artwork of Churchill’s story, he illustrated The Shepherd King (the Story of King David, 1958-59), Fraser of Africa (1960-61), Heros the Spartan (1962-63) and many Dane Dare, Pilot of the Future episodes, all for Eagle (1959-60), before moving on to other projects, notably the black-and-white Garth newspaper strip for the Daily Mirror (1971-76).

 

Clifford Makins was born in 1924 and died in 1990. He wrote a number of comic strips with Frank Bellamy, was deputy editor of Eagle and took over editorship and finally left to become sports editor of the Observer. He co-wrote a cricket murder mystery Testkill with Ted Dexter (1976).