Day of the Jackal | Frederick Forsyth | And an Exciting Day It Is!

Day of the Jackal | Frederick Forsyth | Not Free SF Reader

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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

The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man.

One man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose mission is so secretive not even his employers know his name. And as the minutes count down to the final act of execution, it seems that there is no power on earth that can stop the Jackal.

And an Exciting Day It Is!

Fictional books about the hired assassin can be broken down into three basic tiers. From bottom up, there are the bad ones, the good ones, and, alone at the top, there is THE DAY OF THE JACKAL. Frederick Forsyth started his career off with a bang as sharp as any shot by the Jackal himself, an assassin paid half a million dollars to knock off Charles de Gaulle, President of France.

In the Jackal, Forsyth creates quite possibly the leanest killing machine on the printed page. Far from killing indiscriminately, the Jackal kills those he is paid to kill, and those poor saps whose deaths are necessary to achieve the final goal. Nothing more and nothing less. His grey eyes study the target as a scientist studies the dissected squirrel in the laboratory, approaching his job with pure, cool professionalism.

French Intelligence, having picked up on the plot to hire the Jackal, puts a detective on the hunt. The cat-and-mouse game that follows is exceptionally well sketched, with the Jackal keeping just a step (sometimes half a step) ahead of the police, all the while keeping his eye on the prize and planning methodically for the kill.

False identities, false leads, inside men, they're all here. The interrogations are so taut that one can almost smell the cigarette smoke filling the room. And the climax? Really good. THE DAY OF THE JACKAL lifted the standards for the political thriller and it is a standard that has rarely been matched even to this day.

Also worthwhile: No Comebacks (Macmillan Reader), also by Forsyth

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Mythological assassin vs detective.

Mythological in the sense that he has a fancy name tying in to the history surrounding that particular assassin.

In this case, some perhaps not so nice people want a French leader removed, and haven't managed it themselves, so they bring in an outside expert.

On the other side is a detective trying to track him down.

An excellent example of tense spy thriller writing of the time, by one of its foremost proponents.

4.5 out of 5

Not Free SF Reader

Mythological professional killer vs detective.

Mythological in the sense that he has a fancy name tying in to the history surrounding that particular assassin.

In this case, some perhaps not so nice people want a French leader removed, and haven't managed it themselves, so they bring in an outside expert.

On the other side is a detective trying to track him down.

An excellent example of tense spy thriller writing of the time, by one of its foremost proponents.

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Archetypical page-turner

This is a very entertaining book, enjoyable for anyone interested in modern Western politics and "espionage," without the need for precise historical accuracy.
Forsyth's novel is pure fiction with a heavy dose of generally accurate non-fiction context. The setting is the unsettled political climate of 1963 France under De Gaulle. For a Western democracy, France was (and had long been) a politically unstable nation with a fidelity for its government that was as faithful as the legendary lust of the Frenchman (another myth . . .). Anyway, Forsyth's fiction is based on a plot to assassinate De Gaulle as promoted by the rebels in his army who are bitter about his abadonment of the Algerian colony. The rebels hire a shadowy professional British assassin who insists on working alone, and for big dollars. To stop him, the best of French intelligence is devoted to a continential manhunt to find a man who has not yet committed any crime to investigate and who is otherwise unknown to everyone in the world (including the rebels who hired him). The rest is a great story presented masterfully by Forsyth.
This was a first work for Forsyth, and one can see where the writing could be better at times, but the plot and presentation are generally great. Forsyth's method is journalistic (fitting to the journalist that he was), and the tone is often like listening to Jack Webb's "Dragnet" or William Conrad voicing-over on "The Fugitive." For the most part, the facts are presented coldly, and at first this was a distraction. Later in the book, I realized that Forsyth was gradually, in his method, building characters who are just as rich as any in "pop" literature. For instance, the stolid details of the Jackal's dressing and lunching habits were, I thought at first, mere details to fill the imagination. In fact, Forsyth was presenting, without explicit comment, a picture of this mysterious man as one who so enjoyed the "finer" things and the jet-set lifestyle that he would do and risk anything for the wealth that he needed to support his desires.
I read this book in the summertime - it is that kind of book - the perfect companion to a lazy day with iced tea or a late night with the air conditioner. A classic in the modern spy genre.

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Well crafted assassination plot

The Day of the Jackal is set during the 1960s and tells the story of a professional hitman hired to assassinate the president of France, Charles de Gaulle. The assassin is given the codename "Jackal" by his employers, hence the name of the book. The bulk of this novel is given to a detailed description of the Jackal's preparation for the assassination as well as the French government's attempts to identify and stop him.

Frederick Forsyth has an unusual style of writing that is very clean and sparse in his use of language, but also highly detailed and meticulous in terms of plotting. It's obvious that he did a great deal of research before writing and every page of the novel reads as though it is describing real places and real events. His style has often been described as similar to journalism, and that's not a bad comparison.

The closest thing to a weakness that I would cite is that this is not a character driven novel. While the characters are far from cardboard cutouts, neither are they lavished with a great number of moments that reveal emotional depth. But this book is not meant to be a melodrama or character study, it's a plot driven novel that does an excellent job of laying out a fascinating story while slowly building suspense until the climax. In reality, there was no notable weakness at all, this is a very well crafted novel that I highly recommend.

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