Day of the Jackal | Frederick Forsyth

Day of the Jackal | Frederick Forsyth | still the best espionage thriller

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Day of the Jackal

	Day of the Jackal Frederick Forsyth Viking Adult, 1971 - 380 pages average customer review:based on 126 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Frederick's Foresight

"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.

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still the best espionage thriller

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.

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One of the the best novels of the century

The day of the jackal without doubt was one the most powerful issues in the seventies . The story is loaded with potent realism and the characters are so well defined that it will be very difficult for you to abandon the reading.
In my personal case , I read it in just one night . Forsyth wrote other brilliant best sellers but this is one of the top winners .
This novel has been adapted to the screen twice , the first entrie directed for Fred Zinnemann (Edward Fox in the role of the Jackal) and the last for Michael Caton Jones (with Bruce Willis as the Jackal) .

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Forsyth's very best...great place to start for first timers

This book is a classic. The story is a classic thriller and fast paced. Forsyth is well known to be a classic espionage writer and this book is a testament of that fact. The story is about OAS(A French terrorist outfit) looking to kill the French President. With 6 previously failed attempts at his life the OAS decide to hire a foreign national to do the job. The story revolves arond how this foreign national(code named:Jackal) plans, prepares to do the job and how the French authorities look to foil the plan. A master thriller, a gripping story, hard to put down and Forsyth is in his own league with this book. A great place to start for first time Forsyth readers.

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Flaws in the Glass

The plot of The Day of the Jackal is flawed in two ways. Early in the story, before he has accepted the assignment to kill de Gaulle, the Jackal flies from London to Vienna, meets the three OAS leaders who seek to employ him and, after agreeing to the assassination, spends the night at an airport hotel before returning to London the next morning. At this stage, well before he had assumed any of his several disguises, he must have travelled under his real name. Soon after the French authorities learned of the plot, they also learned of the meeting in Vienna. Since their suspect was English, why did they not have all passengers from England to Vienna at the time investigated? They would have found the Jackal, under his real name, flying to Vienna on the very day of the meeting.
Secondly, there is insufficient attention devoted to the means by which the Jackal, who supposedly left nothing to chance, planned to escape after the assassination. He had made sure of his escape route from the apartment building overlooking the station forecourt, but where was he to go? How could he leave France, with no further disguises available to him and with a hue and cry after a man answering his description? He had no documentation and, even had he done so, any passport would arouse suspicion because there would be no evidence of his entry into France. His four earlier assumed identities, those of Duggan, Jensen, Schulberg and Martin, were all known to police. There is no mention that he carried his own, genuine passport which, even if he did have it with him, would have no entry stamp for France.

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