The Ghost Writer

John Harwood crams multiple puns into the title of his first novel, The Ghost Writer (2004).  In one fell swoop, we're offered the ghost writer as a writer of ghost stories, a ghost writing, and a writer "ghosting" for someone else.  All three meanings turn out to be relevant for the plot.  If only that plot were better constructed!

To be more precise, the novel functions as long as you don't think about the main plot and, instead, concentrate your attention on the inset tales of the supernatural.  These tales are purportedly the product of the late 1890s and early twentieth century, and while they are not precisely pastiches, they all bear just-recognizable homage to authors of the period; attentive readers will note allusions to Henry James (The Turn of the Screw turns out to be important), M. R. James, J. S. Le Fanu, and Oscar Wilde, among others.  Moreover, Harwood trots out a number of favorite supernatural tropes, including magic paintings, a creepy living doll, unlucky inheritances, and what appears to be a vampire, all of which he puts in the service of thwarted (or threatened) sexuality. 

The tales all focus on obsessive love; some involve spectral revenge for sexual betrayal and abandonment.  All of them, however, have ramifications for the course of the main plot, often reappearing in the guise of apparently random allusions (e.g., "The Lady of Shalott") or feelings (e.g., vertigo).   And, of course, the main plot is about a very misguided obsession, of which more anon.  "Seraphina" and the unfinished "The Revenant" are both trompe-l'oeil tales, in which paintings avenge their artists: the magic painting in "Seraphina," beautiful at a distance but an increasingly ugly mess of paint splotches when viewed at close range, hypnotizes and destroys an unfaithful aristocrat; less pleasantly, the "Drowned Man" in the longest tale, "The Revenant," which toggles back and forth between youth and age, similarly hypnotizes the cruel and/or unfaithful men who come under its thrall.  By contrast, two of the tales--"The Gift of Flight" and "The Pavilion"--feature women who escape literal or figurative erotic enslavement; in both cases, the women are trapped in relatively unpleasant situations (a bad marriage, poverty) and offered what looks like an easy escape (a passionate affair, a wealthy husband), but their nightmarish experiences push them back into the world of hard choices. 

In effect, "The Gift of Flight" and "The Pavilion" represent the road our narrator, Gerard, has not yet taken, but must choose if he wishes to survive.    The Ghost Writer's main plot operates, at first glance, according to supernatural logic: the event dreamed or read slowly but surely manifests itself in "real" life.  Borders collapse between the waking world and dream-time, the world of life and the world of text.  (E. F. Benson's "The Room in the Tower" [1912] is one of the creepiest short stories I've read in this vein.)  In his early teens, Gerard (an Australian), is recruited as a penpal for the crippled Alice Jessell, who has lost her parents in an automobile accident.  Gerard becomes deeply obsessed with Alice, spending the next two decades in thrall to her letters--much to the dismay of Gerard's mother, who seems to fear contact with England.  Why ever could that be? An apparent clue lies in the ghost stories written by Gerard's great-grandmother.  In the novel's final section, Gerard--now in his mid-30s--pulls up stakes after his mother's death, returns to England, and discovers the truth about both Alice and his mother's Dreadful Secret.

Now, here's the problem.  Gerard, to put none too fine a point on it, is stupid.  This is not garden-variety stupidity, mind you, but full-blown idiocy. We are asked to believe that Gerard really spends over two decades being passionately in love with a woman he has never met or even seen in a photograph.  Never mind that Gerard is supposedly intelligent, never mind that Alice's letters aren't especially interesting (they're by far the weakest writing in the book), and never mind that Gerard isn't otherwise an unreliable narrator.  Harwood is not yet good enough at psychological motivations to plausibly explain why Gerard becomes so fixated on his mystery girl; when Gerard throws a quasi-temper tantrum after all is revealed, it's difficult to sympathize with his plight.  Surely being in thrall to his mama doesn't quite clear everything up? Similarly, Gerard's response to what he discovers about his mother feels strangely muted; one would think that, under the circumstances, a somewhat stronger reaction would be in order.  (Incidentally, the very Stephen King moment at the end feels out of sync with the rest of the novel.)  This isn't really a bad novel, and the inset ghost stories are effectively creepy, but Gerard's plot is too fragile for its own weight.