Growing Up With Frederick Forsyth : My Voracious Adolescent Years of Pulp Fiction

The last book of Frederick Forsyth’s that I read was back in 1992. I did not particularly like it, and the review I attempted to write about it never got published in the end. But now, reading the tributes to his life and writing, I can’t help trying to offer one of my own. After all, he was my favorite writer when I was a teenager, and an inspiration for many of us who thought we could grow up to become anything other than, well, a doctor or an engineer.

As the years passed, and then the decades, and my collection of books grew from the hundreds into the thousands and even as books and memories from times before got lost in moves and migrations, I will admit I hardly thought of him until the news of his passing came yesterday (except perhaps that one time a year or two ago we re-watched “The Day of the Jackal” on TV). But, then, what this writer meant for a certain generation growing up in a certain time in history in India, and what that experience felt like, especially now that I think of it all from the hindsight of a student of media and pop culture, is perhaps worth sharing.

The name “Frederick Forsyth” stands out in my memory in a way that perhaps today’s teenagers will someday remember the moment they “unboxed” the latest smartphone or videogame. Even before we entered the world of his stories, Forsyth’s books stood out as objects of awe to the children of the 1970s. In Hyderabad’s A.A. Hussain’s bookstore, or in Madras’s sprawling Higginbotham’s or Kennedy’s, or Bangalore’s Book Cellar or Gangaram’s, or in Begumpet airport, or in the A.H. Wheeler stalls on railway platforms, Frederick Forsyth stood tall as one of just a handful of authors whose books you would expect to see everywhere (some of the other ubiquitous names were Robert Ludlum, Sidney Sheldon, Alastair Maclean, Mario Puzo, Robin Cook and Harold Robbins). There wasn’t too much of Indian fiction in the bookshops, and perhaps R.K. Narayan’s novels were about the only titles one saw. But at that time, most of our attention fell upon comics, whether Amar Chitra Kathas, or other foreign series, and the idea of reading something with a lot of words and no pictures was still alien, and daunting to many of us. And there was also the fact that these books were imports, and fairly expensive. Since we didn’t have too many “foreign” objects in our stores in those closed-market days, foreign authors carried that aura of distance and exclusivity too.

I share this context by way of a prelude because we live now in a time, just half a century or two generations later, when the media ecology of those growing up today makes it hard to imagine what it was like to actually enter the world of a writer through his books. Even if our lives growing up in quiet colonies in south India under the shade of tall trees and natural landmarks were nowhere close to the well-traveled landscape of adventures in these novels, from Europe to Africa to North and South America, our entry into the world of reading them marked the beginnings of our small adventures in a way.

Even before some of us read with the idea that we were reading to learn to write or to perhaps one day grow up to become writers ourselves, we were reading Frederick Forsyth and others simply because it was an act of daring in itself, a rite of passage, as it were. Summer holidays spent with slightly older cousins, whispered rumors of a certain that scene on that page, and the like. Vivid discussions about weapons and gadgets and fights. Between seventh and ninth class, or Vishwanath’s double century and then Gavaskar’s, or many such temporal landmarks, we grew up, or so we thought, with our Ludlums and Sheldons and Forsyths.

I realize now, that my one page short-story titled “The Assassination” published in our school magazine (in which a sniper named Carlos tries to murder the Chief Minister in Hyderabad’s Lal Bahadur Stadium using a “gamma ray gun”), probably came right out of the Forsyth initiation.

“The Day of the Jackal” was possibly the third full-length novel I read in my life (“The Bourne Identity” and “The Godfather” being the others).  I cannot recall how I got a copy, but I remember it vividly, a greenish paperback, already bent at the spine. The print was small, and somehow, my memory of its opening page now seems fused with that of George Orwell’s “1984.” I do not remember what was going on in the real world at that time, perhaps the great N.T. Rama Rao’s Chief Ministership, or our own passage through exams and classes. But what I remember now is the sense of being in a world not like our own, and in a manner not quite like what we had felt either. There were movies, sure. But then, in the novel, there was that solitary escape into a world where you felt at once close to the hero and the villain, or in this case, the heroically intelligent and deadly villain who happened to be the protagonist, as well as the detective who somehow manages to close in on him. We did not have classes on creative writing, or much of an idea that one could even learn the craft that way. But in the way in which language spreads and grows, the idea that one could create worlds like this, also got planted in my mind. 

I realize now, that my one page short-story titled “The Assassination” published in our school magazine (in which a sniper named Carlos tries to murder the Chief Minister in Hyderabad’s Lal Bahadur Stadium using a “gamma ray gun”), probably came right out of the Forsyth initiation, as did my unpublished novella called “The Thirteenth Sortie,” which transported Forsyth’s gripping “The Shepherd” to an Indian Air Force pilot’s adventure during the 1971 India-Pakistan war.

My friends and I read many of the authors we could find in India at the time, occasionally pacing ourselves out during the holidays to discuss the novels as we progressed. I remember getting The Odessa Files on a Sunday afternoon in one of the footpath stalls that appeared in Hyderabad’s Abid Road those days, for that’s where you went to save some money. But then, it was the manner in which I completed my Frederick Forsyth collection that I still remember as proof of my admiration for him. In January 1983, the legendary Ananth (“Uncle”) Pai began a series of quiz contests based on the new comic series he had started called Tinkle. The Hyderabad contest was held in the Indira Priyadarshini auditorium in the Public Gardens. The elimination rounds went on and on, and suddenly only me, and another student, remained. Then, the tie-breaker went on, and on, and they almost decided to just end it and split the prize. But I got ahead on that one last question, and with that princely prize sum of Rupees one hundred and fifty, I finally bought, almost a full year later, a collected box-set of the remaining Forsyth books I was yet to read; “The Dogs of War,” “The Devil’s Alternative,” and “No Comebacks.”

For readers who have never read Forsyth’s books, I will say that the experience was similar to other authors in the genre of espionage, but there was a sense of depth and presence that one felt with his writing. Forsyth was acclaimed for his attention to detail, and while we did not know as much about the man then in the pre-internet days, the fact that he had a storied life in the military and elsewhere certainly completes the picture. I wonder now what it might feel like to revisit some of his books, nearly four decades later, and perhaps see if another generation will take to them, if at all.

As teenagers back then, we did not quite have the niche publishing phenomena that have come to exist now, with Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, and others. We leaped right from our Enid Blytons and Hardy Boys to Forsyth and Ludlum. Then, by the 1990s, the whole world of publishing changed, and some of us went on to forget our “genre” favorites for the emerging “literary” stars of the time, Rushdie, Ghosh, most of all. I remember reading Forsyth’s later novels, like “The Fourth Protocol” and “The Deceiver,” with a sense that the thrill had passed; either because these stories did not have what the earlier ones did, or perhaps I as a reader now needed a different kind of word-map for my feelings and situations (mostly of the “Catch-22” kind, being stuck in an engineering college doomed to failure and dropping out).

And by the time I completed my graduate studies, immersed in the world of critical theory and postcolonial literature, somehow the possibility of even revisiting the genre that had introduced us into reading seemed remote. After all, everything these stories revolved around was imperialism, and neo-colonialism, and white privilege, and hegemonic masculinity, wasn’t it? Even the fact that our childhoods, our Indian childhoods, were in effect captive markets for Anglo-American media corporations, while no British or American children ever grew up admiring our writers, became a symbol of the realities of the world we live in, beyond our escapes and entertainments and fictions.

All that remains. And yet, the news of a writer’s passing, a writer once admired, sought to be emulated, moves me to remember the good with the not-so-good I suppose. I like to tell my students especially when watching Indian movies in class to think not only of “representation,” the main concern of Western academia today, but also of “rasa,” a sensibility borne of a cultural and aesthetic tradition that takes our emotional immersion in performance seriously. Frederick Forsyth’s books could indeed be critiqued from a political standpoint in terms of the former. But then, for all that his stories did to immerse us in a sense of the “veera” rasa and sometimes even the “adbhuta” rasa, he will be remembered with fondness and respect too.

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Vamsee Juluri is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco. His latest book is “The Firekeepers of Jwalapuram,” part 2 of a trilogy titled “The Kishkindha Chronicles,” … “because the world was a better place when the monkeys ran the world.”