Enter Ghost is a 2023 novel by Isabella Hammad, telling the story of Sonia Nasir, an actress of mixed Palestinian/Dutch ancestry, working in London. With her career and personal life at a crossroads, she visits family in Haifa, Israel. Here she meets a theatre director, who persuades her to get involved with a local production of Hamlet.

Hamlet famously recruits a group of players to portray the crime that he suspects his uncle Claudius of committing – murdering his father and then marrying his widowed mother in a scheme to usurp the throne of Denmark. Hamlet tells his actors that the purpose of a play is ‘to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature’.

Mirrors are a thing in Enter Ghost. Sonia mentions them a number of times – in a late night scene when she mistakes a reflection of herself for an intruder, and in the climactic performance of Hamlet, when stress seems to provoke an out of body experience. A mirror reflects you back to yourself without judgement, showing rather than telling, like a good play or novel. But, while a mirror does not judge, nether does it flatter.

Enter Ghost refuses to come to a verdict or ‘take sides’ in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. While apparently told from a Palestinian perspective, we have a clear idea of the social soup which lies beneath the false certainties of national or racial badges. Reading about a person of Dutch Palestinian descent, brought up in London, hassled at a checkpoint by an Israeli soldier who turns out to be from Leeds, you begin to wonder how people find it within themselves to become so bitterly divided. And yet, while the book declines to pass judgement, it does serve to hold up the sort of pitiless mirror that refuses to allow anyone the luxury of fooling themselves. The story culminates with the performance of Hamlet, where a group of Israeli soldiers arrive and then lurk with unknown intent. Are they here to shut the play down? Instead they watch, as Hamlet stages the performance in which he hopes his uncle Claudius will see his own misdemeanours. ‘The play’s the thing in which to catch the conscience of the King,’ Hamlet declares. The soldiers are not judged but they are invited to judge themselves. On this occasion at least, they seem to take the point, and withdraw.

Enter Ghost is more about ideas than action, but there is still excitement, tension and emotion. In particular, I found the production of Hamlet, with the soldiers hovering close by, to be very powerful. This is not an ‘issue’ novel, but neither is it escapism. It really finds a balance between a novel that takes you away, and a relevant book that engages with the world we live in. Enter Ghost is fully deserving of its various prize nominations. Highly recommend.

White Noise is a 1985 novel by Don DeLillo. It describes a period of crisis in the life of Jack Gladney, an American professor, working at a pleasant college campus in the small town of Blacksmith.

The first part of the book describes Jack’s daily life, his work as a leading exponent of Hitler studies, and his home life with his wife, and array of children and stepchildren.

All trouble seems to happen far from the College-on-the-Hill, disasters watched on television, terrible histories studied in rooms beside leafy quadrangles – until an accident at a nearby railway depot involving a cloud of toxic gas, changes Jack’s perspective.

White Noise is about the numerous problems we face in looking at things. At one extreme, there’s low brow news media, and prescient scenes showing rumour and disinformation accompanying the gas cloud crisis. Meanwhile, at the academic end of the scale, we’re asked how a subject like Hitler can be meaningfully studied in a tranquil college environment. An inability to understand the world extends from National Enquirer readers to academics.

In trying to review this book I kept coming back to the idea of ‘the most photographed barn in America’ which is supposed to stand picturesquely in the countryside near The College-on-the-Hill. Jack Gladney and one of his colleagues, comment on the fact that it’s impossible to see this barn for what it is, framed now as America’s most photographed. A book review is similar. White Noise might not be the most reviewed book in America, but it is relatively famous, establishing Don DeLillo’s reputation as a successful writer, winning a place on Time Magazine’s list of best modern novels. A book is tricky to review when it kind of pulls the rug out from under your efforts – suggesting that the more a book is reviewed the less likely we are to really see it – the weight of its reputation changing how we react.

Is this review pointless? I’m in two minds. Considering White Noise was written in 1985, the portrayal of misinformation spreading during the gas cloud crisis did feel forward looking. But the book was for me unnecessarily negative in suggesting that there was no reliable information anywhere. This was misleading in itself. We could include books of biting satire like White Noise in the misinformation category, since satire involves exaggeration, and exaggeration means distortion. Giving in to the idea that reliable information does not exist means accepting truth as whatever gets the most traction on the internet. Still, I don’t want to be negative myself. I did find White Noise an interesting book. It is certainly worth reading as an expression of concerns about trust in information – but I do think it could be seen as an illustration of the problem, as well as a commentary on it.