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The Ghost Writer John Harwood Books

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The Ghost Writer John Harwood Books

What a delicious book! Where does one begin? There are so many layers to this intricately woven story of mystery, suspense, longing, loss, greed, disillusionment and revenge wrapped up in fairy tale and gothic horror. John Harwood works in elements of Biblical symbolism and spiritualism current for the period, tied neatly into themes of angels and demons (?), good vs. evil, hope vs. despair, belief in the supernatural and the afterlife, all of which helped this reader interpret the "abrupt" ending. The great thing is, even if this reader is way off base, it's ok because the ending allows a lot of wiggle room for interpretation. That's ok. I have spent more time reflecting on this book than almost any other I've read. It has challenged me to reflect and reread, reexamine and reinterpret. In other words, synapses are firing and new connections are forming. This book is brain food. John Harwood is clearly intelligent and well read; he challenges the reader to self-educate, sprinkling lists of titles and authors throughout the book like seeds in a garden. Other than the ones I have previously read, I look forward to adding these titles to my ever-growing repertoire of consumed literature. I loved The Ghost Writer from beginning to end but it is not a book for beginners. If you have never before read gothic fiction, you may want to at least start with Henry James's, "The Turn of the Screw" before attempting this one. I hope to read many more John Harwood books. Anxiously awaiting publication of next novel. Keep them coming!


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The Ghost Writer John Harwood Books Reviews

"The reading room of the British Museum is not, I think, the first place in which most of us would seek refuge from a consuming grief, especially not in winter, when fog creeps into the great dome and hangs like a damp halo about the electric lamps. Nor are ones fellow readers always the most desirable company, some being less than fastidious in matters of dress and personal cleanliness, whilst others, seemingly on the verge of madness, conduct whispered conversations with phantoms, or crouch motionless for an entire afternoon, glaring at the same unturned page. Others again lie sprawled in attitudes of abandoned despair or exhaustion, snoring away the hours with their heads pillowed upon priceless volumes until the attendants come to turn them out. There are of course many industrious souls deep in concentration or copying busily, so that the dome seems to echo, at times, to the faint sound of a hundred nibs scratching in unison, but to a troubled mind that sound can too easily suggest the fingernails of prisoners clawing upon stone."

So begins "The Gift of Flight," one of four stories within the story of John Harwood's debut novel The Ghost Writer. Devotees of the nineteenth-century ghost tale will perhaps recognize in this passage the conversational tone and light social comedy of M. R. James, but "The Gift of Flight" evolves into an allusive, suggestive psychological tale more reminiscent of the other James, or perhaps of other classical practitioners as Onions and de la Mare. In the final analysis, fictional author "V. H." is no narrow pastiche of a particular style, but a voice all its own, credibly nineteenth century but with the timeless quality of all great ghostly fiction.

I begin with the stories inside the story because they are slightly more accomplished and resonant than the main narrative of The Ghost Writer. But in a way this is a false distinction, as the interplay between the levels of fiction creates much of the off-kilter mood that renders this superficially uneventful novel so compulsively readable. The Ghost Writer is the story of Gerard Freeman, the Australian son of an English mother whose dull life is enlivened by two things his relationship-by-correspondence with a wheelchair-bound English girl named Alice, and his curiosity about his mother's past on the beautiful family estate she fled for reasons she refuses to elaborate. The novel's opening sequence, juxtaposing Gerard's experience of his hot, dry, insect-ridden Australian hometown with his image of the delicate beauty of the English countryside, amply demonstrates Harwood's gift for generating atmosphere on classicist terms, with simple but elegant images and without linguistic pyrotechnics.

To give away too much of the plot would be to deny the reader the experience of its gradual unspooling. Suffice it to say that Gerard quickly discovers a connection between the fiction of V. H. and his mother's hidden past. In addition to being fine ghost stories in their own right, these pieces, which make up just under half the novel's length, capture the ways in which autobiography is transformed at a certain remove into fiction, and create a powerful set of recurring images. It's not only V.H.'s reworking of personal history that causes those images, however; unnatural and seemingly impossible coincidences will suggest to the attentive reader that some subtle supernatural force is at work, and make the ghost stories part of the larger narrative rather than entertaining diversions from it.

It must be said that certain aspects of the plot will become obvious to an attentive reader before Gerard begins to suspect them; the book employs a particular device that can hardly be kept from raising audience suspicions (he said vaguely). Nonetheless, Gerard is more than a hapless hero, and he combines other pieces of the puzzle as rapidly as the reader will. The last two-fifths of the novel, in which a, abandoned mansion of the traditional variety makes a pleasantly spooky appearance, are the sort of thing that demands to be read in one sitting, and the final sequence, in which long-standing expectations are confirmed, manages to attain supernatural heights of eerieness despite superficially non-supernatural events. No fan of the period ghost story or of historical family mysteries should miss The Ghost Writer, which is that rarity of rarities a perfectly-crafted debut.
Stories within stories...page after thrilling page, puzzle pieces all around you....this book is brilliant! There wasn't a moment when I felt bored. There was only the excitement of knowing more, discovering what lay beneath the obvious. I really felt like I truly experienced this gothic horror right along with each character. Each blade of grass is described with great detail, lending itself to heighten the experience.

I was thoroughly engrossed every step of the way. If you are in the mood for a gothic page turner, this one is for you. It's truly got it all. It's well written, a finely layered story, with not a stone left unturned, not a moment left to chance.

The main story itself was fantastic , but the stories underneath, well, they had me fascinated. It all tied up neatly at the end, leaving me frightened and wishing for more!
What a delicious book! Where does one begin? There are so many layers to this intricately woven story of mystery, suspense, longing, loss, greed, disillusionment and revenge wrapped up in fairy tale and gothic horror. John Harwood works in elements of Biblical symbolism and spiritualism current for the period, tied neatly into themes of angels and demons (?), good vs. evil, hope vs. despair, belief in the supernatural and the afterlife, all of which helped this reader interpret the "abrupt" ending. The great thing is, even if this reader is way off base, it's ok because the ending allows a lot of wiggle room for interpretation. That's ok. I have spent more time reflecting on this book than almost any other I've read. It has challenged me to reflect and reread, reexamine and reinterpret. In other words, synapses are firing and new connections are forming. This book is brain food. John Harwood is clearly intelligent and well read; he challenges the reader to self-educate, sprinkling lists of titles and authors throughout the book like seeds in a garden. Other than the ones I have previously read, I look forward to adding these titles to my ever-growing repertoire of consumed literature. I loved The Ghost Writer from beginning to end but it is not a book for beginners. If you have never before read gothic fiction, you may want to at least start with Henry James's, "The Turn of the Screw" before attempting this one. I hope to read many more John Harwood books. Anxiously awaiting publication of next novel. Keep them coming!