Weightless Ghost
Robert Harris isn't a bad writer--he's just not a great one. I've read a number of his so-called thrillers (the problem is that they're not that thrilling) and I've always liked them for the atmospherics. Ever since he came up with the wonderful conceit in Fatherland of imagining what Germany would have been like in the 1960s had the Nazis won the war, the point of Harris's novels has always been to use a weak plot to let him dilate on the world around his characters. His subsequent books about Soviet Russia, the Bletchley codebreakers and ancient Rome were all the same: creaky, contrived plots that became an excuse to spend a little time seeing another world from ground level. But The Ghost is a departure. Instead of history we get politics, English politics. Actually, that's not even right. We get political personalities. And that's not nearly as interesting as "time travel."
The Ghost is meant to be a fictionalized journey into the lives of Tony and Cherie Blair. But we don't see much about the characters personalities and learn less about the persons who really made the Blair government tick.
Instead, Harris seems to want to sling mud at Blair and US war on terror. That's fine with me. But it would have been nice to learn something we don't already know. Harris's big revelation is a brief description of water boarding. Now, maybe this was a revelation when Harris set out to write the book. But now it seems a very weak reed supporting a thriller.
Harris's author bio boasts that his books have sold 10 million copies worldwide. That's nice to know. But at the rate he's going, his best work is behind him.
