Non Lit Lessons: The Day of the Jackal as a time and place marker
Why commercial fiction can deliver more than just a story
I can’t stand snobbery - I never could. The division of the world into intellectuals and non-intellectuals, low and high brow, etc., has never held much interest for me. There is so much to be discovered in the world, so many stories in each life that is lived, such extraordinary beauty in unexpected places, that worrying about categories and classifications seems arbitrary. My view of common grace informs almost all of how I relate to the world, and this provides great liberty to find Christ playing in ten thousand places, and to find buried treasure in what can look like intellectual scrubland. In that spirit, I am posting some meditations and celebrations from writing that doesn’t typically qualify as literature, marking some of the things it is communicating to me and ways in which it affects my view of the world.
Over the past few weeks, I have been revisiting some of the thriller novel writers whose work was central to my love of story as a boy and a young man, laying aside some of the arbitrary boundaries we place between literature and non-literature. The death of Frederick Forsyth on 9th June has prompted me to go back to writing that is pacy, plot driven, and addictively page-turning. I am glad to report that none of the magic has been lost.
Last week I offered a meditation on how the reading of great stories is an end in itself, but also a gateway into a wider world of books. In this week’s post, I want to interact with the world of The Day of the Jackal and share some abiding impressions that Forsyth’s Paris has left on me, particularly with regard to how writing can serve to capture the essence of time and place in a unique way.
The strength of incidental geography
The true evocation of place is one of the hardest things to do well as a writer. One can either get so lost in details that descriptive sections sound like navigational instructions, or conversely, a location can feel like an arbitrary set for the more important plot progression. One need only think of Conan Doyle’s Victorian London, or James Joyce’s 1904 Dublin, and the idea that a city or a territory can be a character quickly comes into focus.
Commercial thriller writing tends to be avoidant of meditative episodes or deliberative psychological musings. Key to the success of the genre is the advancement of a plot that holds the reader’s attention, without too many comfort breaks to think about feeling or the meaning of phenomena along the way. This is, of course, a hugely reductive generalisation, but an observable feature nevertheless.
What surprised me about The Day of the Jackal on my most recent read is the deep world-building the novel embodies. Not only is the geography of Paris meticulously. captured, but the city seems to live and breathe for the reader. Forsyth’s restaurants are no mere facades where more important things happen, but meals are itemised and revelled in. The public buildings and private apartments where much of the action unfolds have an almost ‘scratch and sniff’ quality to them - one can hear the traffic noise, and smell the acrid fumes of Gauloises cigarettes drifting from the pages.
Frederick Forsyth was famously fussy about getting details right, at times putting himself in danger during research trips about foreign wars and terrorist activities. His Paris, however, is a singularly well-realised world precisely because he lived in the city as a Reuters journalist in the 1960s. This means that as a British writer abroad, he was enough of an outsider to notice the city, and enough of an insider to know it intimately. There is something original and timeless about Paris at the tip of Forsyth’s pen, and subsequent thriller writers/movie makers have borrowed heavily from the blue-tinted, smoke-infused, incurably ‘foreign’ feel that The Day of the Jackal manages to capture.
This ability of well-written fiction to draw the reader into an unknown and now past world is surely one of its greatest benefits. It could be argued that novels can capture the reality of the physical world in ways that more formal non-fiction writing can fail to. To visit Paris with Frederick Forsyth is to be deeply immersed in the sights and sounds of the city that he knew so well, and to feel history sit on the surface of the physical environment like traffic film. Perhaps because commercial fiction makes these features peripheral rather than central, we can then truly feel that we are in the environment. Writing that is self-consciously seeking to evoke a cityscape might fail where Forsyth succeeds precisely because background is not supposed to be foregrounded. I contend that it is almost impossible to read a text like The Day of the Jackal and not have one’s senses assaulted by the scenery and scents of the city of Paris.
These features are part of what moves me to say that fiction of this kind has a time capsule quality about it, creating an organic impression of a world that is perpetually alive all by itself.
The strangeness of recent history
On the weekend that I started reading The Day of the Jackal, I posted to social media about it, and my (first) cousin (once removed) left the following comment,
I love the dynamics of a trans European manhunt era when the hunted can conceivably get to a border before his photograph does.
Perhaps this comment primed my consciousness for picking up now-defunct artefacts and noting the difference that not having all of our modern technology makes, but all the way through The Day of the Jackal, I was astonished by how different the world of 1963 felt to our present era. It is a commonplace to highlight movies whose entire plots are unravelled by the presence of a mobile phone, but reading this older thriller novel brought more than that home to me. Although representing a period of time before I was born, the pre-technological world of The Day of the Jackal bore striking resemblances to my childhood and youth - the prevalence of analogue, the reality of genuine privacy, the enforced isolation entailed in travelling from one point to another, the forgetability of one’s past when not logged and recorded in online archives, the multiple processes that simple activities demanded.
Re-entering the pre-Internet world made me realise how strange recent history feels now, or perhaps more pointedly, how strange the present day is. The jackal might have been apprehended more easily with modern inventions, his planned crime thwarted more quickly, but being transported back to the analogue era made me question if we have gained as much from technological advances as we have surrendered to them.
Perhaps the most keenly felt of these was in the area of surveillance. Over and over again, I found myself engaging a reflex that said the Jackal couldn’t possibly go undetected in his undercover journey across Europe because CCTV would pick him up. The constant reminder I had to give myself that this wasn’t part of life for the greater part of history made me realise just how much I have accepted intrusion as a necessary evil. Delving back into a book that was not self-consciously attempting to capture history highlighted the fact that we no longer have private lives, that I have sublimated surveillance to such an extent that I no longer notice it, but must always be assuming it in some subtle way.
Keeping non-lit alive
My brief foray back into the world of twentieth-century commercial fiction has reawakened my appetite for these kinds of stories. I had expected to be enthralled again by the narrative force of this genre, but the evocations of place and time were nostalgic, enjoyable, and a little disconcerting all at once. Long live non-lit, long live good stories and bulky paperbacks, long live the boon of books that do not pretend to give us anything other than a well-told story in a well-woven world.