The Ghost Network

A couple of weeks ago, on a book discussion forum, I complained that feminist mystery novels didn’t seem to really exist: great mystery novels, in the traditional sense, usually ended up being Problematic in some way, and novels that were generally acceptable to a liberal-minded reader tended to fail as mystery novels. Someone suggested in response that I might like this novel.

That suggestion came, to be fair, with a warning that The Ghost Network doesn’t tread standard mystery novel ground. As I read it, I wondered frequently about its proper genre. Ostensibly, it traces back over the lives of two missing women, searching for a clue as to their fates through interviewing their associates and following their movements around the American midwest. In the process, it burrows down into the now-fairly-obscure Situationist movement in mid-20th-century France; muses on the nature of pop stardom; explores the nooks and crannies of the Chicago rail network; and introduced me to the quite odd (to me) sexual habits of people who are aroused by architecture. The whole thing coalesces into a kind of hyperinflated pastiche of themes and ideas reminiscent of the musical-within-a-musical in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge*.

One of the missing women is a pop superstar, clearly modelled on Lady Gaga, who disappears in the middle of a tour and is never heard from again. The book begins as an exercise in long-form journalism, with its author attempting to make sense of her disappearance. In time, the author also disappears, leaving his notes to a former student. Both obsessively footnote the text, in a way that would have driven me insane if I’d been reading a hard copy (I eventually gave up reading all of the footnotes even in the hyperlinked ebook format). The people they interview are witnesses from opposing anarchic groups; if they weren’t white, they would certainly be called terrorists. As a reader, it’s tempting to sink passively through all these layers of subterfuge and wait for a final revelation to make sense of it all, like a kind of literary hypothermia. (Loath as I am to dwell on my own cleverness in developing that simile, hypothermia is also a recurring motif in this novel.)

Mercifully for me and other lazy readers, there is an epilogue that makes it all clear for us, at least assuming the epilogue isn’t also a tissue of lies. Not that clarity equals satisfaction. The solution itself is fairly obvious by the time we get there, but being narrated by the text’s “editor”, has a different tone to the rest of the novel. As pastiches tend to be, the bulk of the novel is seductive and colourful, inviting the reader to mistake edifice for substance (much like its protagonist’s music videos); the ending comes with a dose of emotional realism that brings the text back to earth and re-contextualises the actions of the main players as selfish and somewhat puerile. It’s a pretty technique; I’m glad I don’t read many novels that pull the rug out from under me the way this one did, but once in a while it does make for an interesting change.

This is not, ultimately, a mystery novel in the traditional format. But there is an extent to which it scratches the same itch – most notably, in the way it forces you, on reaching the end, to immediately flick back to the beginning and re-read the same text in a different light.

*Spectacular Spectacular, for those who remember.