In Robert Harris' amusingly acerbic new novel, a scribe for hire follows a ghost named Michael James McAra to Martha's Vineyard. McAra is a ghost for one obvious reason - he fell off the Vineyard ferry and drowned - and also for another. He had been cobbling together the memoir of a former British prime minister. Harris calls this charismatic politician Adam Lang, then makes him sound like former British prime minister Tony Blair.
The unnamed narrator is a ghostwriter too, and a cynical one. "We had endured rock stars who believed themselves messiahs with a mission to save the planet," he says of himself and his trusty laptop. "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." So this seasoned pro is the right guy to do a high-stakes job on short notice.
The first part of The Ghost skewers the publishing business for creating and coddling hack memoirists. When the narrator is summoned to his publisher's offices in London, he finds a steel and glass structure "nestled among the pebble-dash housing estates like an abandoned spacecraft after a fruitless mission to find intelligent life."
When he is put through a metal detector, he asks: "Who're you expecting to bomb you? Random House?" But the need for security is no joke. Terrorism is a real factor in The Ghost, if only because Harris (whose glossily commercial novels include Fatherland, Imperium and Pompeii) is sufficiently formulaic and commercial to know that his story needs pretexts for action as well as caustic prose.
The memoir's tall, tweedy editor is a sad casualty of what bestseller-dom has become. "In a happier era," Harris writes, "he would have smoked a pipe and offered tiny advances to minor academics over large lunches in Soho. Now, his midday meal was a plastic tray of salad taken at his desk overlooking the M4, and he received his orders direct from the head of sales and marketing, a girl of about 16."
Even the ex-prime minister understands this new business model. So he won't cancel his book contract and refund his advance on account of a ghostwriter's death. The deal was made in this politician's heyday. He knows he is worth less money now that he's over the hill.
The new ghost is sent to join Lang at the American estate of their billionaire publisher so that they can work in intense seclusion. "No black-shawled women stared mournfully out to sea, waiting for their menfolk to come home," the writer observes about Martha's Vineyard and the widows' walks on its quaint rooftops, "presumably because the menfolk were all on Wall Street." The house affords both the promise of an old-fashioned cloistered mystery setting and an ocean view conveying "the general sensation of being world dictator."
So far, so good. Then along come the stock characters, like Lang's strangely embittered wife and his slinky personal assistant, an overly devoted young woman who looks "as if she worked at a cosmetics counter in a department store and had been obliged to demonstrate all the products at once."
Also on the scene is the lamely written manuscript the dead writer left behind. "This was a crock of nothing," the new hire observes in amazement. "No human being could pass through life and feel so little." Inevitably, the wife asks the new ghost for his opinion, and he replies diplomatically.
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