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Friday 5 September 2008

The Spectator’s Notes

The Spectator’s Notes

You can tell how much you are enjoying a book by your anger when you lose it, unfinished. I was halfway through Robert Harris’s new novel, The Ghost, about the ghostwriter of the memoirs of a British prime minister strikingly like Tony Blair, when the book vanished. Next week, it came back from the laundry (unwashed), having been swept up with the sheets. Now I have finished it. It is, among other things, a powerful essay on the horror of modern fame. At the end, whatever you think of the Blairs, you cannot help feeling how vile is the world in which we force our public figures to live, with its at-your-feet/at-your-throat media, its heavy security, and the attempt to fight political battles in the courts. Here is the scene when Adam Lang (the Blair figure) walks out of his hotel in New York: ‘The bodyguards opened the doors and his broad shoulders were suddenly framed by a halogen glow of light. The shouts of the reporters, the fusillade of camera shutters, the rumble of the Harley Davidsons — it was as if someone had rolled back the doors to hell.’

It is well known that old people have a different attitude to the telephone than the young. This is partly because they were brought up in an era when each call was very expensive and the Bakelite instrument stood, upright and solid, in a cold and public bit of the house. There was no incentive to chat. What is less easy to explain is the fact that so many old people put the phone down without saying goodbye. When younger people do this they are being deliberately rude. But I notice that many of the most courteous old people — the late Bill Deedes was an example — have this habit. What is the reason?

More articles from: Charles Moore | this section

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