The Day of the Jackal (novel)

Four years ago, I watched and wrote about The Day of the Jackal (1973), this week I finished the novel the movie is based on. I even re-watched the movie for good measure.

Written by Frederick Forsyth and published in 1971, this political thriller starts with factual events, namely the assassination attempts by the OAS against French President Charles de Gaulle. The OAS was a real group of ex colonial military personnel, who wanted to kill de Gaulle for giving Algeria its independence. They saw it as high treason after bleeding and dying for the colonies. So far so good.

Enter the rest of the book which is fictional. Realizing that their organization is riddled by informants and spies, and that any plans were leaked to French Intelligence as soon as they were formed, the leaders of the OAS hires a professional assassin, The Jackal. Being completely outside the entire OAS organization, the informers, and therefore the security mob were helpless to stop the assassin.

Enter police commissaire Lebel. This small but brilliant man is given almost limitless power to find and stop the Jackal, a job made harder by the fact that de Gaulle refuses to be careful. Being an old warhorse, he sees it as cowardice and weakness to increase security and cancel events just because someone might want to kill you.

The book is split into essentially two parts, the Jackal and his methods, and the police in France and the UK. We follow both investigations and the Jackal's preparations in excruciating detail. This is where the genius of Forsyth comes to play. A lesser author would have written a boring book that lumbers from scene to scene until you throw it away in disgust. Not Forsyth! The Day of the Jackal is never boring. We follow the Jackal as he steals passports, buys hair dye, flies to Copenhagen to buy Danish clothes for a disguise and it is all fascinating. I don't know how he did it, but he pulled it off.

I'm not going to spoil it for you, but I want to compare book and movie a bit.

Since I re-watched the movie in the middle of reading the book, I was in a good position to really compare the two, and they are super close. The things the movie leaves out are mostly superfluous details. In the book, the Jackal steals several passports for his disguises, but in the movie we see him steal only one. In the book the French security people have a meeting every evening, in the movie we see only a few. In essence, the movie leaves out nothing of value, and it is still almost two and a half hours long. It however leaves most scenes completely unchanged. Another good example is when the Jackal buys some false papers from a forger. In the book they meet in a bar and take a taxi to the forgers workshop, while in the movie they just meet up in the workshop, small things like that.

If you've seen the movie or intend to, but you are unsure if you should read the book first, there is no need. Unlike to many other film adaptations, The Day of the Jackal is extremely faithful to the source. The book is absolutely worth reading though, don't get me wrong. I absolutely recommend both, but you won't miss anything of value from just watching the movie.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time, and until then, have a great week!