Norman Mailer's ability to render the minutiae is astonishing. He writes like he's seen and done it all, and for the first two hundred pages I was having enough fun to cancel my plans for the weekend. The book starts with the main character, CIA agent Harry Hubbard, racing back to the titled island cottage of his godfather, CIA bigwig Hugh Montague. The CIA are on the land looking to assassinate Hugh, and Harry is going to rescue Hugh's wife Kittredge, with whom Harry has fallen in love.It's saucy stuff, and Mailer has a good amount of fun deliberately bouncing between the steely realism of CIA history, and the racy drama of a spy potboiler.It's disappointing, then, when the story doesn't go anywhere. It reads as though Mailer spent so much time reading books about the CIA (he even lists a lengthy bibliography of his sources at the back of the book for you to peruse) that he has rewritten them all with himself at the centre as his own imaginary spy, and conceivably chalks it up as 'fictional creative non-fiction novel'. What happens, then, is that the characters are limited by the true events in history. The characters never converge and alter their state of affairs through any plot, they all just seem to stand there and bear witness to history. Once a significant historic event takes place, the characters are plucked up by Mailer's fingers and plopped down somewhere else for the next historic event to take place.Not to mention, every male character is eye-rollingly misogynistic to the point of being two-dimensional. Every CIA operation is compared to a sex act, and every female character's importance in the story is relative to how much they are subject to men's sexual impulses.At the end I felt very much like the internet meme of Michael Bluth in Arrested Development opening the bag labeled "Dead dove, do not eat".A Norman Mailer book about the CIA? "Well I don't know what I expected."
This novel is wide-ranging story of Cold War CIA activity in which historical facts rest upon a foundation of imagined interpersonal and organizational dynamics. I so enjoyed Mailer's keen insight into human relations (and the subject matter is itself intriguing) that I absolutely couldn't put it down. For instance (on p. 971!), his protagonist observes: "If I had commenced my work in liaison on the assumption that I was a connective principle, a conjunction, so to speak, I had by now decided that I was but a semicolon,installed to keep the elements in some kind of relation, well apart." These are the words of Herrick Hubbard, a fair-to-middling CIA agent who spends the story cast about on the waves made by agents (in every sense of the word) more sophisticated, ambitious, and interesting than he. I found myself turning the pages not so much to find out what would happen to him but to learn what new revelation of the human condition (in the context of espionage) I would see through his eyes. To serve this purpose, an inert character like Hubbard seems a perfect choice. It was occasionally jarring when Mailer's voice rang so clearly from Hubbard's mouth (could someone as shallow as Hubbard really be so attuned?), but this is a quibble. More of a complaint was that the main female character, Kittredge, was a specter. Her feminine foibles seemed grounded enough in reality, but of all the nutty things everyone else in the story was up to, she was the only person who was out of her mind. I got over it, but it bothered me. This is not recommended reading for people with a short attention span or who don't like to work a little (e.g., to read a few sentences over a couple of times), but it is a fascinating read.
What do You think about Harlot's Ghost (1992)?
Mailer, check.Too long, check.Creaky structure, check.Weird pseudo-psycho theorizing, check.Obsession with buggery, check.Tin ear for female characters, check.BRILLIANT, check.Yes, brilliant. Mailer's CIA novel, through to the Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis, and Kennedy assassination. 1200 pages, give or take (who's counting at this length?). No minimalism here. This man knew how to breathe deep, to write expansively, to be outrageous, to give the finger to the so-called distinctions between fiction and fact, to imagine his way into that uptight wannabe-machismo world of "intelligence" (the quotation marks inordinately well deserved). In Le Carre, they always seem to know what they're doing. That's the real fiction. Mailer demonstrates in great detail exactly how screwed up they were (and are). True, he was often an ass, but what a splendid one. I'm sorry he's not around any more.
—Lesley Hazleton
Wow, finally finished. 8 weeks in the making but it was worth every page. Although this book is utterly boring in the "action" sense of the word, Mailer has a strange sense of making anything interesting and difficult to stop reading. The man could retype the phone book and it would be a hit. I do find several things curious. The most prevalent being that I'm not quite sure why it was titled Harlot's Ghost, as it is that Harlot's character is not only fairly secondary despite his character's und
—Mike
I was going to start by saying that this book isn't for everyone, but it occurs to me that the only real barrier for most people would be the absurd length. Other than the patience necessary to deal with the length and breadth of this novel, I think that most people would enjoy it at least, if not be totally intrigued by it. This book is basically the fictional memoir of a lifelong CIA man -- Harry Hubbard, the son of a CIA officer, the godson of another, and a career-long CIA officer himself once he comes of age. The story starts at the end, with Harry finding out about the death of his godfather/mentor/ex-husband of his wife, then goes back into the memoir that he had been writing for his entire career, which takes up the majority of the book, before finally returning to where the book started. There are moments of excitement (particularly during the lead up to the Bay of Pigs invasion) but the parts that I liked the best were the more day-to-day activities, such as Hubbard's meetings with his agents in Uruguay and Miami. The book is obviously well researched and contains many actual historical figures (including some very famous ones like JFK, RFK, Frank Sinatra, Howard Hunt and Sam Giancana, but also a whole lot of other CIA people that, were it not for the handy list of characters at the end which notes which people are real, I would not have realized were actual historical figures). Though I'm sure that time and technology have changed the way the CIA operates since the time covered by this book (the 1950s-early 1980s) I still found the day to day operations and relationships fascinating. Norman Mailer's writing is on point as usual, with many turns of phrase that floored me but without being overwritten. This is the type of book that no one other than Mailer would have even attempted but certainly no one else would have pulled it off as well.
—Lee (Rocky)
