'The Ghost Writer' by Jonathan Harwood
Apr. 16th, 2009 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesBefore the war, it was common practise for famous authors to try their hand at the occasional ghost story, often with great success (Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan being two fine examples.) Yet nowadays, horror has become such a ghettoized genre that it's rare to find authors from the literary mainstream dealing with horrific supernatural themes. So I was very excited when I found a copy of John Harwood's novel The Ghost Writer in my local second-hand bookshop. It's Harwood's first novel and has clearly been marketed at the general reader, as opposed to the horror buff, and it has an intriguing premise.
We follow a boy named Gerard through his childhood and teenage years in the blank, charmless dormitory town of Mawson in Australia. In the company of his distant, self-effacing father and mysteriously neurotic mother he endures a daily diet of extreme boredom relieved by just two things: his discovery of a secret photograph of a beautiful woman in Victorian dress, hidden in his mother's room, and his burgeoning romance with a young British pen-friend named Alice Jessel, an orphan who has lost the use of her legs. As the years go by, Gerard slowly uncovers more and more hidden remnants of his mother's former life in England, and finds out that he has a grandmother named Viola who wrote ghost stories after unearthing some manuscripts and magazines in the house. His mother does her best to keep him from the secrets of her past, only revealing that one of these stories 'came true'. Eventually, the 20-something Gerard visits Britain to track down Alice and meet her in the flesh, in spite of her insisting they must not yet meet, and when he arrives in London the two mysteries in his life slowly begin to converge...
I found this novel immensely readable, and in parts very enjoyable, though it's not devoid of flaws. One thing that drew me to the book was it's epistolary nature - the first-person narrative of Gerard's life is interspersed with letters to and from Alice, e-mails, and of course the ghost stories themselves, in an appealing scrap-book fashion. The measured, reserved prose should delight lovers of pre-war fiction; this is not a book that needs to raise its voice. The way the ghost stories slowly seep into the real world is cleverly handled, and it will appeal to fans of meta-fiction as Gerard begins to realize that his own existence may also be controlled and shaped by an external 'author'. However, I can't quite bring myself to think of it as a truly successful novel, even though it seems to have received nothing but approval from critics. Reviewers of The Ghost Writer have lavished especial praise on Viola's ghost stories, believing them to be astute pastiches of Victorian tales that are even worthy of being published in their own right.
Sadly, I don't think that's true. For me, none of the stories have that final polish, that extra degree of pizazz you'd expect to find in a proper ghost story, and I don't even think they're convincing pastiches either. Many of the themes and images are jarringly modern - even allowing for the fact that Viola could've been breaking new ground - and the simple uncluttered language used is far closer to Edwardian than anything a Victorian would write. Even the best of these tales read as a sort of cut-and-shunt job, though only one of them is actively boring and they do offer the odd frisson. In allowing the fictional reality to dominate the last third of the novel, Harwood also neglects the scenes in Gerard's real life, which become at times paper-thin in terms of plot and characterization. The latter is especially weak in the second half of the novel, and for me, Harwood fails to make Gerard convincing. We learn that he has been saving himself romantically and sexually for Alice for his entire life before coming to England to quest after her, as if this were the most normal thing in the world for a teenage boy to do. In fact, it's the sign of an obsessive and highly unusual mind, but Harwood never tries to grapple with Gerard's awkward psyche; we are left to suspend out disbelief if we can. The odd, stilted and rather sickly written exchanges between the teenage Gerard and Alice never really provide the necessary motivation for his acts either.
The Ghost Writer is also notable for the sheer volume of literary references stuffed into its pages, with Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw coming foremost, and plenty of allusions made to Poe and Dickens. Some people love this sort of thing, but I soon tired of these little tricks, which struck me as clever-clever and a lazy way of imbuing the text with meaning. Ultimately, Harwood fails to deliver the sort of ending you'd expect from a novel with such a promising beginning. What he does deliver is very strange indeed, and certainly disturbing, but the final scenes have the air of a cop-out.
Still, The Ghost Writer is a novel that aims high, even though it doesn't quite live up to the expectations raised by the fascinating subject matter. It's definitely worth reading if you like the darker side of the Victorian and Edwardian ages and enjoy a plot that's full of startling twists and turns. If you need any further convincing, there are quite a few reviews of this book online (unlike much of the stuff discussed on this community!), and my favourites were James Bradley's piece in The Age (an Australian literary magazine) and this little blog article, which has some interesting things to say about the novel's relation to genre fiction.
We follow a boy named Gerard through his childhood and teenage years in the blank, charmless dormitory town of Mawson in Australia. In the company of his distant, self-effacing father and mysteriously neurotic mother he endures a daily diet of extreme boredom relieved by just two things: his discovery of a secret photograph of a beautiful woman in Victorian dress, hidden in his mother's room, and his burgeoning romance with a young British pen-friend named Alice Jessel, an orphan who has lost the use of her legs. As the years go by, Gerard slowly uncovers more and more hidden remnants of his mother's former life in England, and finds out that he has a grandmother named Viola who wrote ghost stories after unearthing some manuscripts and magazines in the house. His mother does her best to keep him from the secrets of her past, only revealing that one of these stories 'came true'. Eventually, the 20-something Gerard visits Britain to track down Alice and meet her in the flesh, in spite of her insisting they must not yet meet, and when he arrives in London the two mysteries in his life slowly begin to converge...
I found this novel immensely readable, and in parts very enjoyable, though it's not devoid of flaws. One thing that drew me to the book was it's epistolary nature - the first-person narrative of Gerard's life is interspersed with letters to and from Alice, e-mails, and of course the ghost stories themselves, in an appealing scrap-book fashion. The measured, reserved prose should delight lovers of pre-war fiction; this is not a book that needs to raise its voice. The way the ghost stories slowly seep into the real world is cleverly handled, and it will appeal to fans of meta-fiction as Gerard begins to realize that his own existence may also be controlled and shaped by an external 'author'. However, I can't quite bring myself to think of it as a truly successful novel, even though it seems to have received nothing but approval from critics. Reviewers of The Ghost Writer have lavished especial praise on Viola's ghost stories, believing them to be astute pastiches of Victorian tales that are even worthy of being published in their own right.
Sadly, I don't think that's true. For me, none of the stories have that final polish, that extra degree of pizazz you'd expect to find in a proper ghost story, and I don't even think they're convincing pastiches either. Many of the themes and images are jarringly modern - even allowing for the fact that Viola could've been breaking new ground - and the simple uncluttered language used is far closer to Edwardian than anything a Victorian would write. Even the best of these tales read as a sort of cut-and-shunt job, though only one of them is actively boring and they do offer the odd frisson. In allowing the fictional reality to dominate the last third of the novel, Harwood also neglects the scenes in Gerard's real life, which become at times paper-thin in terms of plot and characterization. The latter is especially weak in the second half of the novel, and for me, Harwood fails to make Gerard convincing. We learn that he has been saving himself romantically and sexually for Alice for his entire life before coming to England to quest after her, as if this were the most normal thing in the world for a teenage boy to do. In fact, it's the sign of an obsessive and highly unusual mind, but Harwood never tries to grapple with Gerard's awkward psyche; we are left to suspend out disbelief if we can. The odd, stilted and rather sickly written exchanges between the teenage Gerard and Alice never really provide the necessary motivation for his acts either.
The Ghost Writer is also notable for the sheer volume of literary references stuffed into its pages, with Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw coming foremost, and plenty of allusions made to Poe and Dickens. Some people love this sort of thing, but I soon tired of these little tricks, which struck me as clever-clever and a lazy way of imbuing the text with meaning. Ultimately, Harwood fails to deliver the sort of ending you'd expect from a novel with such a promising beginning. What he does deliver is very strange indeed, and certainly disturbing, but the final scenes have the air of a cop-out.
Still, The Ghost Writer is a novel that aims high, even though it doesn't quite live up to the expectations raised by the fascinating subject matter. It's definitely worth reading if you like the darker side of the Victorian and Edwardian ages and enjoy a plot that's full of startling twists and turns. If you need any further convincing, there are quite a few reviews of this book online (unlike much of the stuff discussed on this community!), and my favourites were James Bradley's piece in The Age (an Australian literary magazine) and this little blog article, which has some interesting things to say about the novel's relation to genre fiction.
