GHOSTS


Ghosts tells the story of the ripple effects that the death of George Viviani has on a varied group of people: his wife and daughter; the girl he had travelled from Ayr to Glasgow to visit; the strange young man who watches Claire from the windows of his flat; Harry McCabe, the taxi-driver who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when George died; and Cheyne Tully, the ghostfinder contacted by Harry when his taxi started to turn icy cold.

The interactions between these disparate characters are sometimes sad, sometimes whimsical, sometimes humorous.  Nobody is quite sure whether George is somehow influencing events from beyond the grave, least of all Tully, who eventually admits to himself that he does not understand what has been happening in the Viviani household.

The book is written in a literary style influenced by the worldview technique used by Roberto Bolano in 2666. The reader is deliberately taken down the future byways of relatively minor characters, even though they do not always have any direct bearing on the central theme of the story. And - in theory at least - the idea is that you should enjoy reading Ghosts as much for the way in which it is written as for the story it tells.  It is deliberately left unclear as to whether there have been supernatural events mixed up in the interactions between the characters: each reader can come to their own decision based on the descriptions of events.