Michael Mason

The Ghost Writer is Philip Roth’s best novel yet. Certainly it is his most ingenious. But this familiar way of putting things may contain a mistake, a mistake which is part of the subject-matter of Roth’s book. ‘Best novel yet’ implies a future of prosperous activity which may be barmecidal. The novelist-hero of Henry James’s story ‘The Middle Years’ is amused by the view that his latest novel is ‘the best thing he has done yet’: it ‘made such a grand avenue of the future’. This story is alluded to in detail in The Ghost Writer and is structurally as well as thematically related to it. James’s title is lightly parodic. It is meant to bring into question the habit of mind which goes on perceiving each of a novelist’s mature productions as belonging to an interim or provisional stage of his career. James’s hero dies soon after the publication of ‘the best thing he has done yet’. His middle years abruptly become his last period.

The publication of Jailbird in Britain is oddly well-timed. The hero of this novel, Walter F. Starbuck, joins the Communist Party before the war while still at Harvard. Later he becomes a civil servant, and in 1949 is investigated by a Congressional committee on Communism. After the hearing he is simply demoted, but in his testimony he mentions the Communist affiliations of a former friend who is now a prominent politician. This friend is eventually imprisoned. Both men are universally calumniated as ‘traitors’ – Starbuck because he testified against his friend, and the latter because he was un-American.

Why has the Blunt affair generated so much callous humbug? Two highly regarded spy novels of recent years – The Human Factor and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – are based on the idea of a ‘mole’ in the British Intelligence services. In neither book does any particular opprobrium attach to treachery. The emphasis is on personal ties rather than national ones (which are implied by both authors to be something of a fake). In Greene’s novel especially, the pains of being a spy, and above all the wretchedness of the separation from home and love which follows exposure, are memorably evoked. These books have been read by many people, and they are additionally famous in televised and filmed versions. Their reputation is certainly due in part to the sensible, convincing stand they take on treachery. But the British public has more humanity at its command for the phantoms of Greene’s and Le Carré’s imaginations than for the flesh-and-blood Anthony Blunt. In these days his name seems scarcely to be perceived as denoting a fellow human being. The letters BLUNT in the headlines have become a kind of mantra of hatred.

A reader who has some acquaintance with Garcia Marquez is almost bound to approach a new novel by him with certain questions about connectedness in mind. There is first of all the issue of the connectedness of his career: which resolves itself at once into questions about the origins of, and successors to, the extraordinary One Hundred Years of Solitude. The commanding presence of this novel has inevitably given the earlier work something of the character of an overture (especially for the English reader, for whom this material has mostly become available since the novel’s appearance), while the more recent writing has generally been assessed for adequacy as a sequel. Then there is the matter of the internal connections in Garcia Marquez’s fiction. There are recurrences of certain characters, events and places: Colonel Aureliano Buendia, Jose Montiel, the Treaty of Neerlandia, Macondo, Manaure. What do these recurrences amount to? Should we even pay attention to them?