Frederick Forsyth's ‘Jackal' is back in 2025

Mint

21 hours ago

I first read Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal 25 years ago as a college student, longing for a pick-me-up while I was struggling to write an essay on the 18th-century poet, John Dryden. It was just the antidote I needed against the endless rhyming couplets and iambic pentameters, the roll call of fops and dandies, that were fogging up my brain.
Not quite an avid reader of thrillers then or now, I was surprised to find myself not only hooked to the pace of the action but also rooting for the hero, an unnamed assassin who goes only by the moniker of ' the Jackal." I wanted him to succeed in his mission to kill the controversial and divisive French President, Charles de Gaulle. Only much later did I realise that the 'target" had already died of natural causes a year before the novel was published in 1971. That knowledge put an ingenious spin on the masterful game of suspense and disbelief that Forsyth, who died last month at the age of 86, was playing with his readers.
In a tribute to Forsyth's genius published shortly after his death on 9 June, the celebrated thriller writer Lee Child made an astute observation about the unique appeal of The Day of the Jackal. In writing this book, his first, Forsyth showed the reader that 'the how question was as powerful as who," as Child put it. 'He created a year zero thriller that reset the whole game."
Recently, after I watched (and mostly enjoyed) a new adaptation of the novel for TV (starring Eddie Redmayne in the lead), I decided to pick up Forsyth's book again after all these years to see if, and how, it has aged. Reimagined for a 21st-century audience, with advanced gadgets and technology that make espionage and crime mightily sophisticated these days, the TV show substantially departs from Forsyth's plot, which, on a reread, felt clunky and occasionally dense.
The Jackal, circa 2025, is fit and cunning like the one his creator put on the page in 1971. Except now he is armed with state-of-the-art weapons and ammunition (the entire show is a thirst trap for gun lovers). He is adept at striking deals on the dark web, an expert in creating disguises and aliases. He has a stash of fake passports in a secret vault and access to thick wads of cash, in a wide range of currencies, that enables him to fly off to anywhere at the drop of a hat. What's more, he doesn't hesitate to use sex as bait, even when it involves seducing another man. In short, he is James Bond gone rogue, and woke.
Whereas Forsyth took great pains to depict the planning of the murder from its inception and the political storm that enabled it, the show's focus is squarely on the Jackal, who is just a seasoned mercenary. He already knows the best gunmakers around town, and his knowledge of artillery, thanks to his army background, is phenomenal. In this sense, the show reinvents the question of 'how"—the one which impressed Child so much when he read Forsyth's book for the first time at the age of 18. What it also does, somewhat clumsily, is give the Jackal a back story that lends psychological depth to his character. In spite of the poker face he puts on, he is, we learn, a family man, with a Spanish wife, who has no idea of his real identity, and a loving father to a toddler.
Redmayne's Jackal is also far more self-reliant than his earlier incarnation. Instead of depending entirely on experts in his trade, people who live in the shadows, he knows enough about coding 3D printers to co-create the right gun for his job. He doesn't require external agents to help him put on make-up to make himself unrecognisable to the authorities. Alexander Duggan, the alias that Forsyth's Jackal steals from a dead child, is given a quirky twist in the reincarnated version, too. Above all, the pace at which he works is lightning fast, thanks to all the fancy tech that wasn't available to his predecessor. No wonder the prose that once seemed to be flying off the page felt rather congealed as I read the book this time.
Divergences apart, the emotional pull of the novel, as well as the show, remains as potent. The Jackal's big target in the show is a billionaire tech bro, who has decided to make penance and release a software that would expose the dirty dealings of the rich all over the world. Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla), guided by an inscrutable good angel, wants to turn the world into a better place for the future generations, even at the cost of his fortunes, while his rich friends want to eliminate him, and his software.
The assassin's previous victim in the show is a right-wing politician in Germany, so it's not as if this new assignment is influenced by any ideological learnings. There is no motivation for him to do the job other than the staggering fee he had been promised. And so, he embarks on it with a fearsome precision, moving with a stealth that would put a cat to shame, developing a plan that defies even the tightest security cordon in the world. (When Ulle Charles Dag takes his morning swim, for instance, a group of bodyguards swim alongside him, while others trail him on a mini flotilla of boats.)
As in the book, the Jackal remains unflappable, near-impossible to read. Redmayne's impassive face, complimented by the proverbial stiff upper lip, does the job credibly. In contrast to his chilling blankness is the bustling energy of his nemesis, an MI6 agent called Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch). She is as much of a gun enthusiast as him, not quite the ideal parent (like him, again), and just as ruthless. And yet, the audience's sympathy, which should have been with Bianca—she puts her life, family and career at stake to do her job—seems to tilt in favour of the Jackal.
The underdog who succeeds against all odds is a familiar trope in the history of fiction. But in the case of The Day of the Jackal, the underdog doesn't rise to glory from the ashes. He is a cold-blooded killer, who will murder anyone for money. It's a testimony to Forsyth's genius that he could turn a textbook villain into a heroic figure, brave enough to take on the mighty status quo and defeat it with single-handed guile. So what if he isn't a Batman or a Robin Hood?
In a world overrun with megalomaniac plutocrats, a fictional assassin's creed of executing a flawless hit, his ability to do a task perfectly, may be just the metaphor we need to push back against the forces that control our lives.
Rereadings is a monthly column on backlisted books that have much to offer in contemporary times.