Tag: day of the jackal

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Subject Matters

I learnt yesterday that Jamie Oliver has withdrawn his children’s novel Billy and the Epic Escape over accusations that it stereotyped Indigenous Australians. It had already been on sale for six months.

As the backlash dies down, it’s being quickly replaced by puzzlement. If this book had been written by a previously-unknown author and released by a small press, it’s easier to see how this might have happened.

But this is one of the country’s best-known celebrity chefs contracted to one of the five largest publishers in the world, namely Penguin Random House. The manuscript will have been seen by countless pairs of eyes before the first copy was even printed. Each would have looked at a specific element such as grammar or typesetting, and that would typically include some consultation with the community it portrays. The story is also widely believed to have been ghostwritten, adding another possible layer to the checking process. We’re unlikely to find out who this is. It’s almost always a contractual requirement that the identity of a ghostwriter is not revealed.

Still, this book somehow slipped through the net, and the reason might never be known. I’m only conjecturing here, but it’s possible that everyone involved assumed someone else was dealing with the matter, or maybe any concerns didn’t reach more senior ears.

It must be stated that there’s nothing wrong per se with authors writing outside their own experience, but it’s vital to have an insider’s perspective. When Frederick Forsyth wrote The Day of the Jackal, a fictionalised background to a real assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle, he used his background in investigative journalism to construct his plot. It shows in the precision of the language and imagery, even if I personally think he could have deployed a few more commas.

Regardless of whether it’s done for well-justified reasons, banning or withdrawing a work is often the best promotion it can receive. I wasn’t aware of Billy and the Epic Escape before this news broke, nor about Oliver’s most recent cookbook, which is also on sale and has attracted no controversy.

At the time of writing, it’s still possible to bag a copy of the novel from Amazon UK, and you can bet the remaining stock will sell out soon.

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Learning From Fiction

Growing up, I read a substantial chunk of Roald Dahl’s output. I liked them not just for the stories, but how he would explain concepts to his young readers. It was through his novels that I learnt why payments of royalties are made, how some fighter jets fired missiles through the propellor, and that finds of certain metals need to be reported to the authorities.

But learning from fiction is in no way restricted to children’s books. Anyone can glean or dispute historical stories from Dan Brown, or learn a little about the law from John Grisham.

A personal favourite is The Day of the Triffids, where a character talks about risk management by using an example from his family farm. It was explained that once in a while, the cows would bunch together and burst through the perimeter fence, yet it was so rare and unpredictable that it was quicker and cheaper to fix breaks as they occurred than to reinforce the whole fence.

And then I read Lee Child giving praise to Frederick Forstyth as The Day of the Jackal turns half-a-century old. The entire novel is almost a textbook for an assassination, such is the level of detail. The hitman isn’t a spiv with limitless resources. We see how he funds his operation and where his weapon and fake documents are obtained.

Yet the reader is never overloaded with lists of data. The key technique is to convey much of the detail via dialogue. At the very beginning, for example, a suspect begins to tell the police about the assassination plot, and the reader learns the details at the same time as the officers.

I feel compelled to leave a caveat here that anything learnt in fiction should always be cross-checked with a non-fiction source. That’s doubly true if you plan to include something educational in your own work.