An Exercise in Editing: Revising a Passage from Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal
Earlier this year, after watching and enjoying the new remake of The Day of the Jackal starring Eddie Redmayne, I decided to finally read the 1971 novel, which I’d heard a lot about. Spy thrillers are my guilty pleasure, and I’ve read a wide variety, ranging from genuine masterpieces, like John le Carré’s novels, to others that are not so good and which I’ll leave unnamed.
I have to say that as a novel, The Day of the Jackal was somewhat baffling. The plot is relatively straightforward spy thriller material: a group of right-wing French officers bitter about Algeria are trying to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle and decide to hire an enigmatic and ruthless English assassin code-named The Jackal. But the style of the novel is so frustratingly unemotional that it makes for a strange reading experience: events and scenes are detailed and described with forensic precision, but we rarely get into a character’s head to see the complex emotions motivating their decisions. The supporting characters are often very thin, and the women in particular are comically one-dimensional, and it made me long for the human complexity of le Carrè’s The Night Manager, which I’d recently read.
But then, suddenly, almost towards the end of the book, Forsyth drops in a passage that opens up the Jackal as a character and reveals what really makes this apolitical assassin tick:
The bill came, he glanced at it and winced. God, the prices these people charged! To live this kind of life a man needed to be rich, to have dollars and dollars and even more dollars. He looked out at the jeweled sea and the lithe brown girls walking along the beach, the hissing Cadillacs and snarling Jaguars that crept along the Croisette, their bronzed young drivers keeping half an eye on the road and the other flicking across the pavements for a likely pick-up. This was what he had wanted for a long time, from the days when he had pressed his nose to the travel agent’s windows and gazed at the posters showing another life, another world, far from the drudgery of the commuter train and the forms in triplicate, the paper clips and tepid tea. Over the past three years he had almost made it: a glimpse here, a touch there. He had got used to good clothes, expensive meals, a smart flat, a sports car, elegant women. To go back meant to give it all up.
The passage comes at a moment when the Jackal is sitting at a restaurant in Cannes and considering abandoning his assignment. Things have gone wrong, and the French police are closing in on him, and he knows it would be wiser to flee the country rather than push on to Paris. But, as the passage reveals, the Jackal knows that if he aborts the mission, he will lose out on the payday, the kind of payday that will guarantee him a place among the world’s elite, a life at luxury hotels like the one he’s staying at in Cannes. The Jackal, we thus learn, is not motivated by something as obsolete as politics, like the right-wing French officers who’ve hired him. Instead, he is a more thoroughly modern man, driven ultimately by a modern desire.
At the same time, as much as I appreciated how this passage finally revealed our protagonist’s motivation, and while this was certainly the best passage in the whole novel, I still felt that the paragraph was imperfect in places, despite its evident power. The unnecessary comma splice at the beginning irritated me, and phrases like “dollars and dollars and even more dollars” and “good clothes, expensive meals” etc. felt vague and lazy.
I had an idea, then, to improve the passage, to turn this somewhat frustrating reading experience into an exercise in editing. If I really thought Forsyth a mediocre writer, then shouldn’t I prove it by improving on the standout passage of his novel?
Before I proceed, I should note that Forsyth is a thriller writer, whereas I am a literary writer, and so our respective versions of the same passage might look different because of the stylistic expectations of our genres. At the same time, having read so much John le Carré, I knew that thrillers could also be literary and filled with descriptions as lyrical as anything you’d find in the best literature. And so perhaps it’s important to hold all thriller writers to that higher standard. Just because a book is as popular as The Day of the Jackal doesn’t mean it can’t also be well written.
The first thing I changed of course was the irritating comma splice by adding a simple “and.” I know comma splices can sometimes be acceptable if we’re trying to capture the natural rhythms of a character’s thoughts, but in this case, I think the heightened lyricism of the passage demands a higher grammatical accuracy. Beyond that, I decided to change the word “people” to “places” because I felt that emphasizing the setting of the luxury hotel pointed more directly to the Jackal’s desire. He didn’t care about the people who ran these hotels. He cared about the hotels themselves as spaces — luxury spaces that had become his home.
Then we come to the first major line that I felt really lacked strength: “To live this kind of life a man needed to be rich, to have dollars and dollars and even more dollars.” This to me was just a lazy line, repeating the same word three times instead of offering any specific imagery. Instead, what if we created a more specific image of wealth to highlight the Jackal’s deeper desires? I decided to change the line to the following: “To live this kind of life a man needed to be rich, to have the kind of money that in the past only the landed aristocracy possessed.”
Why this phrase? To me, a reference to the aristocracy underscores an essential class politics that the larger novel suggested but never openly addressed. The Jackal’s desire for money, as this very passage shows us, comes from the fact that as a child he didn’t have any. In a past age, class mobility would have been almost impossible for someone like him, but one of the key facts about the twentieth century is that the world dangles the possibility of social advancement before us all. Aristocrats are no longer the solely wealthy class, and it is theoretically possible to join the elite through hard work and skill. This is what the Jackal wants, deep in his soul, the reason he chooses not to give up on his task, even when he feels the walls closing in. To make a reference to the aristocracy thus highlights the old class hierarchy that the Jackal hopes to transcend.
Thus, I’ve rewritten the opening section of the passage as follows: “The bill came, and he glanced at it and winced. God, the prices these places charged! To live this kind of life a man needed to be rich, to have the kind of money that in the past only the landed aristocracy possessed.”
From here, the original passage actually proceeds quite beautifully, and I decided there was nothing I needed to change about this next sentence: “He looked out at the jeweled sea and the lithe brown girls walking along the beach, the hissing Cadillacs and snarling Jaguars that crept along the Croisette, their bronzed young drivers keeping half an eye on the road and the other flicking across the pavements for a likely pick-up.” Unlike the ugly phrase “dollars and dollars and dollars,” here we actually have specific images, written with lyrical deftness: the “lithe brown girls,” the “hissing Cadillacs and snarling Jaguars,” the “bronzed young drivers.” The next sentence too begins with a beautiful specific image: “This was what he had wanted for a long time, from the days when he had pressed his nose to the travel agent’s windows and gazed at the posters showing another life, another world…” This image, the young boy pressing his nose to the travel agent’s window, this is the heart of the Jackal’s desire, and it’s almost touching to see him recall this memory years later, at his most ruminative moment.
As a result, I wondered if it was worth deepening this image, since it seemed so essential. What did the young boy see on these travel posters beyond just “another life” and “another world?” I decided to add a series of specific images of what such posters might have looked like, using as a basis my own memory of certain vintage travel ads from the period, but also trying to imagine what specific details would stay in the mind of a man like the Jackal, a man who desires the finer things in life. One obvious image was “the glimmering beaches of the Côte d’Azur,” since that was of course where he was sitting now. Equally evocative, I added “the shadowy streets of crumbling, romantic Venice” to suggest the kind of Italian setting a young British boy might be drawn to — and then, to cap it all, “a jet plane flying high against the sun,” which of course symbolized the romance of escape in a thoroughly twentieth-century image.
The end of the sentence I felt was already well done: “far from the drudgery of the commuter train and the forms in triplicate, the paper clips and tepid tea.” Once again, this is an excellent series of specific details that convey the drudgery of his ordinary life. But now, with my additions, these four images, the commuter train, the forms, the paper clips, and the tepid tea, contrast starkly with the beaches of France, the streets of Venice, and the jet plane in the sky. By adding such a contrast, I felt I heightened the power of these images of drudgery.
The resulting passage thus looked something like this now:
The bill came, and he glanced at it and winced. God, the prices these places charged! To live this kind of life a man needed to be rich, to have the kind of money that in the past only the landed aristocracy possessed. He looked out at the jeweled sea and the lithe brown girls walking along the beach, the hissing Cadillacs and snarling Jaguars that crept along the Croisette, their bronzed young drivers keeping half an eye on the road and the other flicking across the pavements for a likely pick-up. This was what he had wanted for a long time, from the days when he had pressed his nose to the travel agent’s windows and gazed at the posters showing another life, another world, the glimmering beaches of the Côte d’Azur, the shadowy streets of crumbling, romantic Venice, a jet plane flying high against the sun, far from the drudgery of the commuter train and the forms in triplicate, the paper clips and tepid tea.
From here, I decided to address the penultimate sentence, which I felt was actually the paragraph’s most important one. The final sentence — “To go back meant to give it all up” — was already a perfect capstone, which meant the sentence before needed to build up to it effectively. As it currently stood — “He had got used to good clothes, expensive meals, a smart flat, a sports car, elegant women” — it once again just felt too flat and lazy. I felt I could replace each of these phrases with something much more specific or evocative.
First, “good clothes.” What kind of clothes would a man like the Jackal want to buy? How about “Italian suits.” Then, “expensive meals.” Obviously it would have to be “champagne and oysters at lunch” which conveyed the specific image of luxury the Jackal was aspiring to. Lunch in particular, I felt, was an essential detail, as nothing was more indolently luxurious than dining in such a way while everyone was still at work. Then I changed “a smart flat,” to “a smart flat with a balcony that looked out onto the winding Thames,” since England was the Jackal’s home, and I imagined him high up looking down on the river. “A sports car,” meanwhile, was easy to embellish: “a sports car that turned heads whenever he breezed down an oceanside street.”
And then the final phrase: “elegant women.”
To me, this was the most important phase in the whole passage. At the end of the novel, the Jackal’s downfall comes partly because of a tryst he decides to have with an aristocratic woman he meets at a hotel. Rhythmically, meanwhile, I felt this was the apotheosis of the whole passage, the detail everything was building to, and I wanted to let the lyricism sing, not to bottle it all up in a two word phrase.
First, I added “of course” because obviously elegant women would be one of the Jackal’s motivations. But what kind of elegant women? What did elegant mean? “Long-limbed” I wrote, imagining the ideal of the 1960s, “high-heeled women,” and from there I described the outfits such women might wear, since for a man like the Jackal, the expensive clothes signifying high status were as much a part of the draw as the body underneath: “women with outfits that cost more than his father’s yearly salary.” To bring in his father here might feel strange, but of course I thought it important to bring us back to the boy pressing his nose to the window of the travel agency, and I imagined how such a boy might resent his father’s lower class status, his lack of money. Perhaps it’s Freudian, but I felt it the perfect way a man like the Jackal might measure his new worth.
Finally, then, the ultimate peroration, the clause that I felt would take us to the heights of lyricism and straight into the Jackal’s sour heart, a further clarification about the women the Jackal would pursue: “women who, once they saw that he was a man of means who could pay a restaurant bill without giving it a second look, opened themselves up to him in a way no girlfriend ever had back in the council flats of Manchester.” Opened of course was the right word, because that’s what the Jackal wanted, not to love a woman but to have her “open” herself to him, a form of power and domination. The reference to an old girlfriend in Manchester, meanwhile (Was the Jackal from Manchester? I didn’t know, but it felt like the right kind of place for him to want to escape, a post-industrial city on the decline, the exact opposite of glitzy Cannes where he now sat.) was the perfect contrast to the luxurious women he hoped to bed — the girlfriend might have loved him, might have genuinely loved him, but for someone like the Jackal, love was no match for the more lurid desire of a woman impressed by a man’s money.
And so, I felt with this final image, I had finally done it: I’d taken the original passage and elevated it to something more lyrical and more transcendent:
The bill came, and he glanced at it and winced. God, the prices these places charged! To live this kind of life a man needed to be rich, to have the kind of money that in the past only the landed aristocracy possessed. He looked out at the jeweled sea and the lithe brown girls walking along the beach, the hissing Cadillacs and snarling Jaguars that crept along the Croisette, their bronzed young drivers keeping half an eye on the road and the other flicking across the pavements for a likely pick-up. This was what he had wanted for a long time, from the days when he had pressed his nose to the travel agent’s windows and gazed at the posters showing another life, another world, the glimmering beaches of the Côte d’Azur, the shadowy streets of crumbling, romantic Venice, a jet plane flying high against the sun, far from the drudgery of the commuter train and the forms in triplicate, the paper clips and tepid tea. Over the past three years he had almost made it: a glimpse here, a touch there. He had got used to Italian suits, champagne and oysters at lunch, a smart flat with a balcony that looked out onto the winding Thames, a sports car that turned heads whenever he breezed down an oceanside street, and of course elegant women, long-limbed, high-heeled women, women with outfits that cost more than his father’s yearly salary, women who, once they saw that he was a man of means who could pay a restaurant bill without giving it a second look, opened themselves up to him in a way no girlfriend ever had back in the council flats of Manchester. To go back meant to give it all up.
All in all, I felt like it retained the essential heart of Forsyth’s passage — but, whereas the impulses of the thriller writer is towards economy and technicality, to limit the human emotions to only the essentials, for me, a literary writer, a passage like this that got to the heart of a character was a chance to really let one’s prose sing.
Perhaps some might consider me arrogant for attempting to edit a writer as celebrated as Frederick Forsyth, a man who has sold more books than I probably ever will. So let me say that, despite my criticisms, I undertook this exercise out of a love for this passage — a recognition that Forsyth had written something magical here, successfully bringing together the subtle threads of his narrative. Another writer might make different choices than I did when it comes to a passage like this, and perhaps they may find my own version overwrought and excessive. But as a writer and a teacher, I decided this was an interesting way to demonstrate the power of editing. We tend to think of editing as sanding away excess prose, refining something down to a shorter, more condensed form. But sometimes editing requires the opposite choices — requires adding detail rather than taking it away.
