All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published. And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it.
My first indication that The Ghost was going to be closer to the airport-bookstore end of the spectrum than the Le Carré end probably should have been when I saw that Audible had chosen an Americanized title to coincide with the movie adaptation (starring Pierce Brosnan—an actor I find impossible to associate with serious or meaningful sociopolitical inquiry). The book itself struggles to be as cynical as it thinks it is, though perhaps that's more a reflection of the last two decades than of the book's own quality.
I can, albeit faintly, recall a world in which the illegal detainment and torture of four non-combatants would be considered a civil rights violation and a political firebomb large enough to engulf the career of a British prime minister. Now, it feels like the sort of thing that would be buried on the fourth page of an article nobody read but everyone quote-tweeted.
Even setting aside the realism of the politics, there just isn't much substance here. None of the characters are interesting enough to have a personality beyond the three sentences they were assigned at birth. The narrator is exactly as smart or reckless as the scene requires, the charismatic but soulless politico is a cipher, and the wife is—spoiler alert—so obviously telegraphed as a master manipulator that the third-act twists land with a thud. There's a cutesiness in the faux-metafiction of the book's closing that feels dated, if mildly fun, and that's about it.
The book's best asset is its pace and propulsive readability. I finished it in three days, and the leanness of its prose at least leaves nothing lingering in your mouth—better than a bad taste, I suppose. But the best thrillers engage you both viscerally and intellectually; The Ghost is light on both counts, and what little viscera it has hasn't aged well.
★★
