John Harwood, The Ghost Writer
In The Ghost Writer, Gerard Freeman, a young boy living in Mawson, Australia, discovers a photograph of a woman, dated 1949, along with a manuscript, in his mother’s bedroom. When she discovers that he has been prying, she becomes very angry and beats him. She is an overly protective mother, very worried, thin and drawn, as though life has been a trial for her. Gerard lives a very claustrophobic existence in his home, and the only friend he has is Alice Jessel from England, whom he met through an organization named Penfriends International. Alice is crippled after a car accident that killed her parents, and even though she and Gerard fall in love, she does not want to meet him as long as she is in a wheelchair. She keeps him waiting, delaying a first meeting he awaits very eagerly…
After finding the photograph, further research (some in his own house in Mawson, some in England where his mother lived when she was young) reveals manuscripts; Victorian ghost stories written by his great grandmother Violet. As the story progresses and Gerard becomes an adult (Alice still procrastinates their meeting), we realize that one of these stories is a key to Gerard’s mother’s past. Slowly, the mystery unravels until the final climatic revelation. The Ghost Writer is strongly inspired by Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. It is about the danger of fantasizing one’s life instead of living it, and how literature can literally shape one’s life. The reader has to admire how craftily Harwood interwove the short stories and the main story…
My main problem with The Ghost Writer was with its ending, and reading the various reviews on amazon.com, I see I am not the only one. Did I miss something? I got the final twist, the who/why/how-dunnit, but a little chronological reconstitution of events would have been nice, mostly when the story spans over so many years. Anyway, I liked The Ghost Writer despite its flaws and I intend to read Harwood’s next novel The Séance…
Rating: 3,5/5
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