The Ghost Writer
by John Harwood
A review by Laura Miller
You could label some elements of John Harwood's ghost story hokey: It's got veiled
specters, accursed paintings, a big old deserted house with a sinister basement.
But like one of those gifted cooks who can somehow turn a can of tuna and a handful
of rice into a savory dish, Harwood knows how to spin shivers and nerves out of
unpromisingly familiar material. The Ghost Writer is the first-person account
of Gerard Freeman, who spends his 1960s boyhood in a remote Australian town plagued
by millipedes and red dust, his father distant and his mother scared of her own
shadow. The only time her apprehension lifts is when she's telling Gerard tales
about Staplefield, the stately English country house where she grew up with her
beloved grandmother Viola, an exotic realm of chaffinches and hawthorn hedgerows.
But even her stories dry up when she catches her son snooping in a secret drawer,
where he discovers an old literary journal containing a ghost story written by
someone called V.H. and a photograph of a beautiful, unnamed woman.
All this nostalgia and mystery pretty much guarantees that Gerard will get the
yen to visit England, and when he becomes pen pals with Alice -- an elusive English
orphan whom he imagines to be a pre-Raphaelite-style beauty -- the die is cast.
After his mother's death, when Gerard has become a quiet, recessive young man
feeding off his own longings for faraway things, he heads back to the old country,
searching for Staplefield and Alice. A series of short stories, written by Viola
and published in various obscure reviews decades earlier, becomes part of the
trail. At least one-half of The Ghost Writer is made up of Viola's rich,
supremely spooky yarns, all of which seem to involve young men who are martyrs
to love and victims of supernatural forces. The stories are obscurely entwined
with the fate of Gerard's mother, whom he suspects of having been involved in
a terrible crime. On her deathbed, when Gerard asks her about Viola's stories,
his mother will only tell him, "One came true."
The Ghost Writer has a patchwork quality reminiscent of A.S. Byatt's
Possession;
each of the several voices (Gerard, Viola, Alice) is entirely distinct, as if
the novel were assembled from documentary evidence. Byatt is only the most subterranean
of allusions, however, for Harwood weaves many overt literary references --
most notably to Henry James' Turn
of the Screw -- into his book. This isn't just postmodern cleverness; in
fact, it isn't postmodern at all. Instead, the technique shows Harwood's keen
understanding of how alternating the prosaic with the unreal can create a pervasive
creepiness. It's as if by reading about James' haunted (or mad) governess, Gerard
invites a similar fate. The heady, story-drugged atmosphere of Viola's tales
melts into Gerard's fairly rational account of his quest, and where the two
blur together is exactly the sort of place ghosts come from, the borderline
between dream and waking.
Gerard's investigation of his mother's past takes him deep into a thicket of
fact, fiction and lies that might be someone's attempt to hide her guilt, but
might also be a trap. Harwood's plot is intricate -- it may leave you puzzling
out the finer points of the various twists on your own after you follow it breathlessly
to its conclusion -- but what lingers are Viola's tales. Some are more inventive
than others, particularly a story set in the Reading Room at the British Museum
that gives a whole new meaning to the expression "a foggy day in London
town." But all of them have a hypnotic quality that oozes out beyond the
solid structure of Harwood's plot and in the end envelopes it. By the last page,
all the loose ends have been tied up, but that aura of the uncanny still clings
to everything. As with all the best ghost stories, you're left feeling that
the truth about what happened can never finally be pinned down.
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