Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #209339 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.com
The Cornish prayer: "From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!" is an appropriate invocation when reading The Ghost Writer, John Harwood’s debut novel. It is a rousing good ghost story, with many twists and turns, rather like taking apart a Russian matryoshka nesting doll.

Gerard Freeman, at age ten, sneaks into his mother's room and unlocks a secret drawer, only to find a picture of a woman he has never seen before, but one that he will find again and again. His mother discovers him and gives him the beating of his life. Why this excessive reaction? She is a worried, paranoid, thin, and fretful type with an "anxious, haunted look." By tale's end, we know why.

Phyllis Freeman, Gerard's mother, was happiest when speaking fondly of Staplefield, her childhood home, where there were things they "didn’t have in Mawson [Australia], chaffinches and mayflies and foxgloves and hawthorn, coopers and farriers and old Mr. Bartholomew who delivered fresh milk and eggs to their house with his horse and cart." It's the sort of childhood idyll that the timid and lonely Gerard believes in and longs for. He strikes up a correspondence with an English "penfriend," Alice Jessel, when he is 13 and a half, living in a desolate place with a frantic mother and a silent father. She is his age, her parents were killed in an accident and she has been crippled by it. She now lives in an institution, whose grounds she describes as much the way Staplefield looked. They go through young adulthood together, in letters only, thousands of miles apart, eventuallydeclaring their love for one another.

Interwoven with the narrative of Alice and Gerard's letters are real ghost stories, the creation of Gerard's great-grandmother, Viola. At first, they seem to be scary Victorian tales of the supernatural. Then, we see that they have a spooky way of mirroring, or preceding, events in real life, off the page. Gerard comes upon them, one by one, in mysterious ways, but clearly something, or someone, is leading him. The stories seem to implicate his mother in some nefarious goings-on, but the truth is far worse than Gerard imagines.

Any more would be telling too much. Turn on all the lights in the house when you settle down with this one, and plan to spend a long time reading because you will be lost in the story immediately. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly
Sly nods to spooky literary spinsters—Henry James's Miss Jessel and Dickens's Miss Havisham—set the tone for this confident debut, a gothic suspense novel with a metatextual spin. Gerard Freeman grows up on the windswept southern coast of Australia in the late 20th century with a controlling mother strangely silent about the details of her childhood in England. His only solace is steadfast English pen friend, Alice, to whom he confides everything. What was Gerard's mother, Phyllis, hoping to escape when she left England? The protagonist slowly pieces together his mother's past with the aid of short stories written by his great-grandmother, Viola. These cunning tales, filled with supernatural occurrences and séances, are seamlessly embedded in the main narrative, offering Gerard—and readers—enticing clues into his troubled family's history. After Phyllis's death, her newly liberated son travels to England, hoping to learn more and to pursue elusive Alice. As he searches through the country house his mother inhabited long ago, Gerard finds past and present fusing in horrifying fashion. In the hands of a lesser novelist, sustaining several plot lines might have been difficult. But the novel links textual investigation and sublimated passion, building to a satisfying, unexpected ending.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Once, while wandering the aisles of a chain bookstore, I came across copies of Philip Roth's first Nathan Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer, shelved carefully in the "horror" section between books by Anne Rice and Dan Simmons. The irony was delicious. A "literary" novel had been consigned to the ghetto of genre based on its title, echoing the critical mindset that, because of their dubious subject matter and popular appeal, novels about the supernatural can't breach the great wall between entertainment and literature.

Now, a like-titled first novel by John Harwood is the latest in a long line of books to challenge this hoary proposition. Harwood's The Ghost Writer is stealth horror, gliding past the radar of genre courtesy of clever construction and an estimable publishing house. It helps, of course, that Harwood is not American but Tasmanian-born, writing from a distant shore -- and that his novel is an homage, a Victorian ghost story that honors the likes of Dickens and Henry James. It also helps that Harwood has written a smart, stylish and mesmerizing book.

The Ghost Writer spans some 20 years in the life of an Australian naif, Gerard Freeman, the only child of a suffocating mother and a null father. Raised on fanciful tales of his mother's youth at an English country manor, Gerard succumbs to an existence guided entirely by fiction. When not doting on his mother or working at the local library, he devotes his time and emotions to an impossible romance -- with a paraplegic pen pal in England, whom he courts with written words but never meets. This "invisible friend" -- and, in time, "invisible lover" -- is named Alice Jessell, evoking the spectral governess of James's The Turn of the Screw.

Gerard's fate is sealed by the novel's second page, when, at age 13, he unlocks his mother's bedroom drawer and discovers the photograph of an enigmatic young woman: "I felt I knew her . . . calm and beautiful and alive, more alive than anyone I had ever seen in a picture." Hidden with the photo is a weathered journal of arts and letters (dated 1898, the year Collier's published The Turn of the Screw); its pages include a ghost story written by Gerard's great-grandmother Viola Hatherley.

This story and three others are "reprinted" in The Ghost Writer, along with diary entries, letters and e-mail messages, as the novel -- like Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Bram Stoker's Dracula -- evolves into an epistolary mosaic. The ghost stories are its centerpiece, however, and make up fully half the book, subverting publishing's well-known aversion to story collections.

Harwood shows formidable talent for channeling past masters -- not only James but also J. Sheridan LeFanu, Oscar Wilde, M.R. James and the wickedly feminine intrigues of Marjorie Bowen. He revels in the sense of the impending that is often lost in contemporary horror and understands that anticipation may be more terrifying than revelation.

Elegantly paced and delightfully macabre, these tales celebrate the Victorian school and its obsession with the past's authority over the present, the thin line between affection and obsession, the glimpse of the lurid from the corner of the eye. Viola's stories, like Gerard's life, are haunted by fractured romance and frozen images -- a vision, a painting, a photograph -- that challenge "reality" with the possibility of a supernatural realm that is by no means divine.

When his mother dies after revealing that one of the stories "came true," Gerard is a 35-year-old nobody, still smitten with his unseen pen friend but finally free to confront the mysteries of his family's past. Spurred into action by Viola's final tale of love, betrayal and cruel vengeance, he hastens to England, where the elusive Alice is succeeded by a new correspondent, Miss A.V. Hamish -- an anagram for the vengeful Miss Havisham of Dickens's Great Expectations. She presides over a finale loaded with Victorian tropes: a veiled woman, a decaying country house, hidden passages, timbers that seem to bulge, revelatory pages torn from texts, diabolical machines and even a Ouija board.

There's a disappointing inevitability to the affair, complicated by Gerard's unending gullibility: He's worse than a teen extra in a slasher film, stumbling toward a dire epiphany with such eager ignorance that Harwood is forced to describe him as being driven by a "disembodied, sleep-walking sensation." But perhaps that's an apt fate for those who believe too strongly in fiction: to become a character in someone else's story.

"There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book," Oscar Wilde observed. "Books are well written or badly written. That is all." He could have been assessing the supposed distinction between entertainment and literature.

The Ghost Writer is well written, to be sure. Whether it's "merely" horror fiction doesn't depend on its title or its subject, and certainly not on where bookstores choose to shelve it. After all, as Henry James wrote to his friend H.G. Wells shortly after The Turn of the Screw was published: "The thing is essentially a pot-boiler and a jeu d'esprit." Sometimes "pot-boilers" have a strange way of turning into literary classics.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

I can't understand the glowing reviews
Maybe it's because I'm not a horror afficianado or expert...but I just couldn't get this book done with fast enough..not because I was horribly addicted to it..no, I just wanted to get the experience over with and move onto a better book as soon as I could...

The premise? A young boy finds a mysterious picture of a relative who turns out to be his grandmother in his mother's drawer one day while snooping around and she catches him red handed. A strained relationship is the result of this little voyeuristic fancy between the mother and son. A mother who seems to have no past since moving away from her native england to Australia which is where they currently reside at the begining of the book.

The young boy, who doesn't have many friends (and it's no wonder why as you get to know how overbearing his mother is during his formative years) happens upon a mailing from a pen pal service...in turn he starts to chat up a little girl in a wheelchair...she becomes his 'invisible lover' over teh course of many years...already I could tell where that was going...BUT, I won't spoil anything..

During the course of the book, the boy (who turns into a man as the book's timeline progresses) discovers more about the woman in the photograph and finds excerpts of her old ghost stories that she had published during her lifetime..

This is where I have a major problem with the book..there's several instances where these entire short stories are featured. I have no problem with that. What I had a problem with is that only one story really had ANYTHING to do with the main story of the book. The rest had nothing to do with the boy's story or fleshing out the character of the woman in the photograph whatsoever..

But the biggest problem I had with the book is the ending. Which, and I can tell from reading a few other reviews here (some of which were from people who liked the book), makes absolutetly NO SENSE AT ALL. I read the last chapter several times, the last few pages in particular and I still had no idea what the author was getting at.

I don't mind a good horror book or ghost story. In fact, I enjoy them as much as any other genre as long as they're written well..but this one just left me with that 'wow, I wish I had read something else instead' feeling..

Great Read
The author takes a very creative approach to telling this tale. It is a story within a story within a story. I especially enjoyed the description of the many houses and the clues left along the way. Very clever indeed.

When We Dead Awaken
There have been so many revivals of Victorian genre novels in recent years that it gets hard to keep track of them, or to separate the gold from the brass; this tribute to the great ghost fictions of the nineteenth century by the Australian first-time novelist John Harwood is certainly one of the best. Very cleverly Harwood decided to write a series of ghost tales set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries written in the style of the great ghost writers of the period--Sheridan le Fanu, M. R. James, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant--and then built a frame narrative around it of a boy growing up in Australia trying to come to terms with his mother's haunted past. The denouement of the frame narrative is not hard to see coming, but part of the fun is the dread it awakens in you (ghost stories, after all, depend upon mounting horror and trepidation--surprise endings tend to ruin that effect). But the best things of all here are the excellent interpolated ghost stories, which are marvelously creepy and inexplicable (particularly one of the last ones, "The Pavilion"). They remind us again that ghost stories work best not as novels but as tales, wherein we can experience the pleasure of fear for intense brief periods.