The Day of the Jackal

The only bad thing I can say about Day of the Jackal is that just about every other espionage/thriller novel that I have read since then has paled in comparison. Forsyth's novel moves at a steady pace, shifting its focus between an enigmatic assassin and the French police inspector who is doggedly pursuing him. The journalistic writing style shuns sensationalism for fly-on-the-wall realism, and indeed one of the pleasures of Day of the Jackal is the voyeuristic look into the underworld it provides. While Day of the Jackal makes no attempt to tackle great themes of "literature," it succeeds so well in entertaining the reader that it belongs on the shelf next to Ernest Hemingway or Jack London rather than certain contemporary writers whose contributions to this genre suffer in comparison.

"The Day Of The Jackal" features a plot you know is going to fail, a protagonist who you never know much about other than he's up to no good, and a henpecked hero looked upon with contempt by most of his superiors. The Bond lovers who made up this novel's key audience back in 1971 must have scratched their heads. But they kept reading. So will you. Ian Fleming had his James Bond take on outsized supervillains in blurry circumstances that only slightly approximated real life. Forsyth took Fleming's Anglo love for the good life and attention to how-things-work detail, and transported it to a real-life setting, part travelogue, part "what-if" hypothesis. He named real people, used real issues, and presented in utterly passionless style a story that sells you on its utter verisimilitude. Forsyth doesn't go much for humor: a trip by the assassin Jackal to a gay bar is about the closest to a chuckle we get; a politically incorrect one to be sure. He throws in some nice descriptions: "The heat lay on the city like an illness, crawling into every fibre, sapping strength, energy, the will to do anything but lie in a cool room with the jalousies closed and the fan full on." But for a first-time fiction author, Forsyth isn't trying to sell you on his lyrical brilliance. He just moves you from one scene to another with minimum fuss, a deeper brilliance given he was a struggling writer with no track record with this sort of thing. Spy fiction was never the same after "Day Of The Jackal" came out. It became less a thing of fantasy, more a thing of life, because Forsyth proved that such an approach not only could work but work better than the Fleming approach. Even the movies' Bond adapted to it over time, for better or worse. One thing not talked about much that first-time readers will likely get is "Day Of The Jackal" is at times a brutal book, unsparing in its detailing of government-directed torture, of casual murder, of the mass of luckless shadow people with their missing limbs and mildewed medals in which evildoers are able to move, unobserved by the hoi polloi. Reading it for the first time in boarding school, I was taken aback at how harsh a world I lived in, that things like this could go on. Read today, after 9/11, it's almost quaint in that respect. But it's never a nice book. In fact, the casual nastiness is part of its perverse charm. First and last, this is a ripping good yarn, well told with a wealth of lived-in detail. You get the feeling Forsyth, struggling as he was, traveled every yard of the Jackal's long trail before setting it all down. It's not the only great book Forsyth wrote, "The Odessa File" came a year later, and he's shown flashes of his old form in the decades since. But "The Day Of The Jackal" began the art of spy fiction as we know it today; more than 30 years on, it's still the gold standard.

This remains Forsyth's best book, doubtless because it is the most subversive. Readers (at least Anglophone readers) end up actually willing the "Chacal" to succeed in his efforts to shoot de Gaulle, and as we follow the Englishman through Italy and France, there even seems to be a raison d'etre to the succession of ad hoc, cold-blooded murders he commits. While the work is pure fiction, the historic context (OAS right-wingers seething at de Gaulle's 1962 withdrawal from Algeria) is fact. For many years this book had the honor of being one of the few novels faithfully translated into film (the 1973 Edward Fox flick rivalled Maltese Falcon in its fidelity to the text) but all that changed with the botched 1998 Willis remake. Actually, the assassin character is so quintessentially English, and the subtext so wonderfully Europhobic, any attempt to translate the plot to a North American context was doomed.

Day of the Jackal is not just Frederick Forsyth's best book; it's the best book in it's genre. A political killer code-named "The Jackal" is hired to assassinate Charles De Gaulle, president of France. He is the best, not appearing on any police file. But through one small twist of fate, the French authorities learn of this plot, and set Claude Lebel, their best detective to find The Jackal. From there, the race is on, and Forsyth gives the reader front-row seats. He has created a sizzling rivalry between the cold-blooded assassin and the one policeman talented enough to stop him, and the suspense never lets up. Through deception, betrayal, and luck, Lebel tracks the killer throughout Europe, ending in the climactic assassination attempt itself. Based on true events, the obvious outcome doesn't take away from the thrill of the chase. This is the book that set the standard for others to try and follow

The only thing I regret about The Day of the Jackal is that I saw the movie first, so I knew basically what the storyline was before I ever picked up the book.However, what kept my interest up in reading the book was Forsyth's constant attention to intricate details, fascinating details that really painted the picture a lot more fully and clearly--and without giving away what was going to happen. And let's not forget the basic characters of the book--they were quite realistic in their thinking and in their actions based upon that thinking. The mark of a great author, at least as far as I see it, is the ability to create such realistic characters and not have to resort to contrivance to make a point.I touched on this a bit earlier, but I don't want to forget to mention specifically about the way Forsyth expertly kept the suspense building until the climactic point near the end.I could go on, but I would be giving away specific plot details by doing so.I strongly recommend for anyone to read this book. I can virtually guarantee that (s)he will not be disappointed in the least. Whether the reader's main interest is history, suspense, or just a good story doesn't matter.