The Day of the Jackal

There is a new TV series called The Day of the Jackal. As far as I could tell from the trailer, it bore almost no relation to the original book of the same name by Frederick Forsyth or its 1973 movie adaptation. Was the entirety of the overlap that the new version also concerned a skilled professional assassin? Was there any more to it than that?

Over the past few weeks I reread the book and saw the movie for the second time—having consumed both as a teenager—and as of today I have watched about half of the episodes of the TV series. I remain confused about the idea behind the latter, since it lacks the reportage quality of the original. The book featured a story drawn from 1960s headlines, involving one of the most famous national leaders of the 20th Century. It built on the documented effort to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, going on to imagine a related plot involving the same group that organized the real life attempt. In Forsyth’s story, the Jackal is hired by fictional members of the real group of disaffected soldiers angered by the loss of Algeria, the OAS. The series, set in our own era, has no such tie to real people or events. In the book, it is difficult to tell where real events left off and the imagined plot began. In the series, everything is made up, and feels disconnected and diluted as a result—at least by comparison.

The fact that Forsyth was a reporter living in France during the aftermath of the Algerian war gave the book its immediacy and depth. Forsyth was intimately familiar with the workings of the French government and its security services, and went into minute detail about them—some of the flavor of which manages to permeate even the visual storytelling of the adaptation. You get a tangible sense of what emergency ministerial meetings at the Élysée Palace might actually look like. My favorite aside in the book is the note that although the Sûreté nationale features in every French thriller as a romantic and compelling band of toughs, it’s really just a small bureaucratic layer between the regular police force and the Ministry of the Interior. From that kind of observation, you get the sense that you’re in the hands of a master. Someone who knows precisely what he’s talking about. His knowledge is not showy, it’s workmanlike. Useful. And Forsyth chose as his hero an ordinary, hardworking member of the Police Judiciaire, whose main asset is his ability to project himself in the mind of the assassin.

In the TV series, the important events do not take place in France. Nor is there any other country focus to replace the loss. We don’t get any of the same kind of unity of a specific place and history and government, let alone an instantly recognizable, widely-known figure at its head. In the course of the story, we bounce around to Germany, Spain, Belarus, Hungary, Croatia, and ultimately Estonia, where the major assassination is supposed to take place. Is there any reason we’re ending up in Estonia over any other country on the globe? Absolutely not! In parallel to these movements of the sniper, much of the investigation of his goals and means takes place in Britain, among members of the British security services. The lead investigator, a Black woman named Bianca Pullman, is the foil for the elusive assassin. Unlike Forsyth’s ordinary detective, Bianca is an elite spy/warrior with specialized knowledge of guns and their manufacture. Her persona borrows from another character in the novel, the Special Branch officer doing his best to help the French, Inspector Thomas. Yet even Thomas—more of a counter-espionage agent than the french detective, Lebel—mostly finds his man through ordinary police work. Thomas does not go running off to Belgium to intercept the underworld arms manufacturer supplying the assassin; he sits in his office in Whitehall sending his juniors out to the registry office to look through lists of birth and death certificates for the British assassin’s alias. Sometimes, less is more.

Half a century has passed since The Day of the Jackal was written. Although it burst on the scene at the time, the methods of its assassin seem quaint nowadays. A lot of thrillers have been released in the intervening years, accumulating more and more notions of what makes for an exciting villain or chase. Both assassins and the security forces chasing them use much higher-tech devices. It’s understandable that the more modern story would want to update some of these aspects. Yet there is a lack of specificity to the newer version that seems glaring. Is there no towering international figure like De Gaulle anymore to seize everyone’s attention? Do we have less of a collective sense of history and destiny than people did in the wake of a monumental event like World War Two? The history and relationship between Churchill and De Gaulle (and thus England and France) hovers in the background of Forsyth’s story the whole time. What more modern story could deal in that kind of currency?

It was notable to me that the Englishness of Eddie Redmayne’s Jackal serves no function, except as a nod to the original. Does it matter than it’s a British person trying to assassinate the tech mogul who becomes the main target? Not as far as I can see. Do we get any kind of political hint about Brexit from this very English fellow traipsing about Europe? Nope. The Robin Hood scheme of the mogul also struck a false note, in this new age of oligarchy. This is one reason it makes sense to steer close to real events. That way you err on the side of the plausible.

This is not to say that I think the TV series is bad on its own terms. On the contrary, the acting in it is probably better than most thrillers of its ilk. Redmayne and the Spanish actor playing his wife, Úrsula Corberó, give solid performances. And I appreciated some of the ways it paid visual homage to the 1973 film—such as the exploding melon during target practice. It’s just that the harkening back to the original created a huge hill for the series to climb. When you come for the king of thrillers, you had best not miss.