The Ghost Writer

When I was in elementary school, we were shown a movie one day in the cafeteria about a little girl who was a ghost (and who was very much attached to her doll) and a little boy. The plot of the movie has long since faded from my memory, but I do remember how wonderfully creepy and sweet and sad the story seemed.

I blame this movie for the number of ghost stories I read as a child, though this has decreased as an adult. For an adult, it's very rare to come across a good ghost story that is eerily unsettling; authors tend to use the ghost as a crutch, or the ghost gets in the way of the story.

I just finished The Ghost Writer by John Harwood, though, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The main story arc follows a man named Gerard from childhood until his early 30s. This story is interrupted by short ghost stories which Gerard's grandmother wrote. The ghost stories, of course, illuminate themes in the main story arc and help the main story along. While this is Harwood's first novel, he is an experienced writer, and it shows. The story set up is very complicated, but he brings the pieces together nicely.

One of the most interesting things to me about this book was that the short ghost stories sounded like they were written by a different person. The book, except for the short stories, is told in a first person narrative, in the tone of a slightly despondent, modern man. The ghost stories have another feel altogether — they are crisper and old fashioned (in the context of the book, they were written from the turn of the century though the 1920s). The illusion that there was more than one author is convincing.

The book itself is probably best described as a thriller. There are a lot of plot shifts that caused me to go back and re-read earlier passages, to see where that first clue or red herring was laid. The Ghost Writer is a very clever book and a great choice for a lazy reading day.