Story Telling

Reading this tribute to Frederick Forsyth, took me back to the time when I read Day of The Jackal. The author's experience reading the books mirrors my own:

I gobbled up the book and thought it was fantastic – fast, pacy, exciting, suspenseful and laced with detail and intrigue. Then I thought, wait, what? How was this book working? It was a twin-track thriller – an assassin hunts his target while law enforcement hunts the assassin. But the intended victim was Charles de Gaulle, a real person, the president of France, who had been in the news almost daily until his death in 1970, from an aneurysm. Therefore we all knew the assassin had failed. How did that not short-circuit the will-he-won’t-he suspense that thrillers seemed to require?

Back then, I was too young and unsophisticated as a reader to understand what Forsyth had done was genre-defying and should not have worked logically. It was completely hooked on the story and it stayed with forever. When I watched the movie recently, I was able to tell exactly what will happen in the next scene just recalling the story. And that did not in any way diminish my enjoyment of the movie. By then I knew how things end in real life and in the book. So there was absolutely no mystery anywhere and yet it was an edge of the seat experience. If that is not wizardry of story-telling, I don't know what is.