"'It's fixable,' I said, which I suppose it was: Even Hiroshima was fixed eventually."
When the rewrite begins, The Ghost is still able to sustain its tartness. Citing a real handbook on ghostwriting by Andrew Crofts, it demonstrates some entertaining tricks of the trade. A good ghost, for instance, supplies his or her own memories, because the famous person may have been too busy being successful to recall anything. When concocting Lang's childhood appearance in a Christmas pageant, the ghost researches which real pageants were put on in the place where Lang lived as a boy. Then he gives the ex-prime minister a choice of roles. Wise man? Too much. Sheep? Wrong message. "A guiding star?" "Perfect!"
It's a pity that The Ghost can't continue in this entertaining vein. But the price of Harris' marketing wisdom is a trumped-up plot with a timely emphasis on terrorism. While the writing project is under way, Lang is suddenly accused of having authorized the illegal use of British special forces to seize four suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan and turn them over to the CIA to be tortured. Then the International Criminal Court in The Hague considers an investigation.
Lang's memoir is now red-hot in every way, and the ghost finds himself on the trail of clues about Lang's past. The novel's cleverest action maneuver involves the use of an SUVs global positioning system to retrace someone else's travels along this same investigative path.
The Ghost never recovers its dry restraint. It degenerates into a commonplace mystery, a book that its protagonist might have held in contempt when his safety and detachment were still intact. It also insists on the kind of political timeliness that is more apt to become dated than Harris' observations about debased popular culture.
By the time The Ghost has introduced water boarding, spies and a shadowy, Halliburton-like corporate entity, it has undergone a complete sea change from its promising early pages. A ghostwriter might have fixed it, but apparently none was around.
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