Fuzzy Boundaries

Sad news this week with the announcement of the death of Frederick Forsyth. I can remember when The Day of the Jackal was published in the summer of 1971. It was in term time, and by the time I had realised I needed to buy it, all the bookshops in Oxford had sold out (I don’t know what the original print run was, but obviously not enough). But then term ended, and I went back home to Sussex and found it still available in Chichester. I then spent the next few days anchored to a sunbed by my parents’ swimming pool avidly consuming it.

Until then, Ian Fleming had basically ruled the roost in thrillers, with his James Bond novels. But Forsyth blew straight through what we could call the Bond Supremacy, pitching his book at that fascinating point where fact and fiction meet. Of course, we all knew that de Gaulle was not assassinated in the early 1960s, but we also knew there had been many attempts, most notably by the OAS. So by structuring the novel as the anatomy of a manhunt, he plonked it absolutely onto that fuzzy truth/fiction boundary. The publishers who rejected it on the grounds that “de Gaulle wasn’t shot” were left with egg on their faces as the sales went up and up.

Later, in France for the summer, I made sure I followed the Route Napoléon through the Alps, just as the Jackal did - although he was in a very cool Alfa Romeo Spyder, whereas I was in my not altogether cool Mini.

In the following years, Forsyth wrote a string of other thrillers, all of them - for me, anyway - great reads, but it was the Jackal that rewrote the rules, making it - again, in my view - the seminal thriller of the second half of the twentieth century.  And, remarkably, he wrote the whole thing (approximately 140000 words) in thirty-five days; 4000 words a day.

So thank you, Frederick Forsyth, for brightening our lives; and thank you, Hutchinson & Co for seeing what the other publishers failed to grasp, and putting the Jackal in front of us.

The next thought I have today is also about the fuzzy boundary between truth and fiction, but it’s a lot less complimentary. I refer, of course, to the Spending Review revealed this week by our UK Chancellor of the Exchequer. While in a novel I enjoy the idea that I need to navigate between reality and imagination, when it comes to the public finances, I would rather just stick with reality. Frankly, we have a government which was elected on lies - just compare what they said they would do, in the election campaign, with what they have actually done since. And then think of these things. Debt interest is running at over £100bn annually. The tax burden is the highest ever. Inflation is rising, not falling. Ms Reeves’ claims that the economy is stabilised and strengthening are arrant nonsense; growth is not there, and I doubt she has the slightest clue how to generate it. Ten percent of the population pay 60% of the tax take. Productivity is dire. Over half the population live in households which receive more in benefits and services than they pay in tax. Gilt yields are higher than they were during the Liz Truss episode. And yet Starmer, Reeves and the rest of their gang tell us how well their “plan for change” is going.

Makes me wish I was back in those halcyon days when finishing the Jackal was my main priority.