Day of the Jackal

Rating:
Summary: One of the best thrillers
Review: ''It was a cold October morning in Paris and even colder for a man about to be executed by the firing squad''.
Thus begins the opening lines of an all time great bestseller and a benchmark as far as thriller writing is considered. Frederick Forsyth is one of my favourite thriller writers after Alistair Maclean. Read this novel and you would understand why.
The book starts with a group called OAS, who plan to assasinate Charles de Gaulle. A bunch of fiercely committed French nationalists, they have never forgiven de Gaulle for this role in granting independence to Algeria. After the first abortive assasination attempt on De Gaulle, which results in the capture and execution of many of the group members, they decide to hire a professional mercenary to do the job.
And the man they find is an unknown, shadowy and ruthless mercenary called The Jackal. In fact none even knows what his real name is. But this guy has no idelogy nor associated with any ism. He is happy as long as he gets paid. And now starts the best part of the book. The Jackal liasions with a photographer to get a fake passport and identity. After getting which he promptly murders him. And soon the French police manage to get a lead on this. They track down a Polish guy who acts as a go between the gang and the Jackal. On interrogating him they learn the truth.
And then starts the cat and mouse game between the cops and the Jackal leading to the climax.
The planning by the Jackal, the strategy adopted by him, and the investigation by the French cops are brilliantly describe in this book. And the climax is a real heart stopper. To enjoy all that you must read this book. The best thing i love about Forsyth's novels is the topicality he brings to his novels. Every minor detail is so brilliantly captured and he gives a real insightful look into the world of espionage and international politics. Once you read this book, its difficult to put it down. It grips your attention from the word go. So to all people who love thriller novels, read this book. Just dont miss it.

Rating:
Summary: Why Didn't I Read this Earlier?
Review: Every now and then I get a yen for a good page turner, a real pot boiler. An airport read, if you will. Day of the Jackal fits the bill, perfectly. The one probelm with this book is that it is almost impossible to put aside. Forsyth weaves a superb yarn from a historical context, namely French military disaffection with DeGaulle and a subsequent plot to kill him. The suspense generated is equal to any novel I've read. Make sure you have a few hours at a stretch to read this.

Rating:
Summary: While published around in1971...
Review: this book is in no way outdated or old. The swift moving plot, the realistic police methods, the interesting characters, all make for a complete story which never lets you get away - you're hooked from the first page. Much of the story, like many of Frederick Forsyth's books, depend mostly on the characters, how they think, what actions they take or fail to take. This story does not rely on advanced computer systems, super weapons or sinister plots carried out by ex-Nazis from underground bases in South America.
In other words, a good story no matter when you read it.

Rating:
Summary: The prototype for espionage thrillers!
Review: I just finished reading The Day of the Jackal again more than 15 years after my first read. It hasn't lost a thing over the years and remains one of my top three novels of all time. I think the book is even better than the original movie, although that was great too. Frederick Forsyth is still writing and I've read most of his novels over the years. In my opinion, only the Odessa File came close to this one. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: The Definitive Assassin Thriller
Review: It is 1963 and The Jackal is an assassin hired by the OAS, an organization of French war veterans who feel betrayed because DeGaulle gave up Algeria, to kill the man. However the police get tipped off and so the book turns into a sort of cat and mouse game, especially as the Jackal knows the police are on to him and he proceeds with his plans anyway.

Forsyth puts his readers in the mind of the assassin as he methodically carries out his plans and at times I found myself rooting for the bad guy, even though I knew how the story had to come out. He also lets his readers see the efforts of Commissionaire Claude Lebel as he sets out almost singlehandly to try and stop the Jackal.

The Jackal is meticulous, resourceful, ruthless and a master of disguise, while Lebel is dogged and determined as he calls in every favor and uses every connection he has with world wide police agencies in a frantic effort to find out who the Jackal is so that he can stop him.

Though this book was written a generation ago, it still holds up today and for my money, it'll still be held up as the definitive assassin story a generation from now. That Mr. Forsyth is a genius is beyond question. He is a master of his craft as he was back then, all those years ago, when he wrote this book. If ever there was a nonstop thriller, this is it.

Rating:
Summary: still the best espionage thriller
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Frederick's Foresight
Review: "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.




Rating:
Summary: One of the the best novels of the century
Review: 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) .