Culture Shock:Recent novel 'The Ghost' adds to the litany of fiction about Tony Blair that has changed our sense of the real man, writes Fintan O'Toole
When he referred to Tony Blair, Gerry Adams called him, in his Belfast accent, "Tony Blur". It was, however inadvertent, a perfect encapsulation of that smudgy quality of Blair's: the way he could turn both charm and conviction on like a light, the way his accent would change depending on the context, the way he could go, without missing a beat, from being Bill Clinton's best mate to George W Bush's staunchest global ally. It is that very quality that accounts for the way Blair has almost vanished from political consciousness after a decade in power and, simultaneously, re-emerged as a fictional character. If you read Robert Harris's entertaining new thriller The Ghost, what strikes you is not so much that the ex-prime minister Adam Lang is closely based on Blair, but that both figures seem almost equally invented. Whereas the long tradition of the roman à clef gave us fictional characters who we knew to be actually real people, we now have, with Harris, real people who are actually fictional characters.
What's happened is that our experience of the "real world" has changed. Over the last two decades, the arts of manipulation, of image-making, of soundbites, of spin, have become inseparable from our understanding of power. Those arts are not in themselves new, but, more recently, the public has caught up with them. We know we're being manipulated, even while it's happening. We read politics as fiction, but still get caught up in the plot.
At one level, this process reached its height in the Clinton years. Joe Klein's novel Primary Colors, with Clinton thinly disguised as Jack Stanton, was published anonymously, and therefore assumed to be the work of an insider. Within a broadly accurate account of the 1992 Clinton campaign, it dropped a number of salacious sexual details that were read as the stuff that the political elite knew about but wouldn't tell. And this in turn affected real events. Once you had read it, it became, at some semi-conscious level, part of what you "knew" about Clinton. It conditioned you to believe that most of what was later thrown at Clinton - Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky and the rest - must be true.
What followed was a surreal intertwining of politics and fiction, as the literary agent Lucianne Goldberg persuaded her friend Linda Tripp to secretly record her conversations with Monica Lewinsky and the whole thing took off into a strange new world of batty conspiracies, wild narratives and book deals.
What's happened with Blair is less dramatic, but in some ways more profound. Clinton was, after all, a player in his own strange story. There was still a basis of truth in the whole Byzantine affair: he did have sex with that woman. Blair, on the other hand, moved very suddenly but almost completely into the realms of fiction. And it happened in a very odd way. At one and the same time, Blair's actual credibility was collapsing over Iraq (the new lexicon of "dodgy dossier" and "sexing-up"), and the credibility of actors portraying him was rising rapidly. Michael Sheen was so convincing as Blair in Stephen Frears's 2003 film The Deal, that almost all any of us "know" about the pact between Blair and Gordon Brown comes from that drama. By the time Sheen again played Blair for Frears in The Queen, it was is if we were really seeing the same man a few years on.
This process has now gone further - from Blair being played by actors in real events to Blair in a parallel universe, where things that have not actually happened seem equally true. Robert Lindsay, who played Blair in A Very Social Secretary - based on John Prescott's affair with Kimberly Quinn - in 2005, popped up at the start of this year in The Trial of Tony Blair. It gave us Blair in a few years' time, writing his memoirs but facing a trial for war crimes at the International Criminal Court.
Now, this scenario has itself becomes the basis of Harris's novel, as if Blair's trial is now a "fact" that can be played with by novelists.
Though somewhat trapped within the conventions of the thriller, Harris's novel does draw not so much on his one-time closeness to the inner circles of New Labour as on his previous life as a non-fiction writer. Harris wrote brilliant books on the control of the reporting of the Falklands war and on the Hitler diaries forgery, so he has an acute sense of the construction of reality in both the media and politics. At its best, The Ghost brings all of that to bear on Blair and pushes the fiction to the point at which he comes to seem no more than a cypher, a made-up character in someone else's story.
It is a strange fate for someone who has been a player in world history until a few months ago. But perhaps it is not an unfitting one. The skilled political actor now exists in the performances of actors. The master of spin is now being spun. The man who invaded a country on the basis of an invented narrative is now prey to other authors' fabrications. It used to be that reality bit back. Now fiction does as well.