Ghostwriting and Spectrality in Robert Harris’s The Ghost

A critique of Tony Blair’s collaboration with George W. Bush in the War on Terror, Robert Harris’s The Ghost (2007) goes beyond its topical subject by exploring the connections between ghostwriting and spectrality. The unnamed protagonist of Harris’s novel is a professional ghostwriter who, after being commissioned to revamp former Prime Minister Adam Lang’s memoirs, becomes enmeshed in various forms of spectrality. While isolated with his hosts in a fortress-like compound on Martha’s Vineyard during the island’s bleak off-season, the ghostwriter experiences the Uncanny firsthand. In the end he compiles a 160,000-word book, not realizing that with the project’s completion he is signing his own death warrant by writing a work about the pursuit of truth. The novel’s coda differs from that of Roman Polanski’s 2010 film adaptation, but Harris’s narrative captures the universality of literary Gothicism.