We saw and enjoyed Polanski’s The Ghostwriter this evening. It is based on Robert Harris’s novel, The Ghost. I am a great admirer of Robert Harris. For a long time he was a successful and respected television and newspaper journalist and a non-fiction writer. Then, in 1992, his ingenious thriller novel Fatherland was published and its deserved success enabled him to retire and become a full-time author. Besides the same age (both born in 1957), he and I have something else in common: he wrote the first biography of Neil Kinnock, in 1984, and I wrote the last one, in 2001. Harris’s Prime Minister in The Ghost, Adam Lang, is admittedly modelled on Blair, but as a fictional character he also has some of Kinnock’s characteristics: it was Kinnock whose family originally came from Scotland, for example, and it was Kinnock who fell in love with the beautiful Glenys, as she distributed tracts at Cardiff University. As to the film, it is good, but there are loose ends and inconsistencies in the plot and these are precisely in those parts of the story where Polanski abandoned Harris’s original storyline. Ewan McGregor is brilliant as the ghost writer and Olivia Williams is excellent as the former Prime Minister’s manipulative wife but – I’m sorry – whenever I see Pierce Brosnan now I think of Mamma Mia!
Funny, I still think he was the best James Bond.