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It began the night the President sought to bring about the end of the world.
An article by Dan Bilefsky in the October 16, 2017 New York Times reports that the author of TO KILL THE PRESIDENT, Jonathan Freedland (AKA Sam Bourne), handed in the manuscript 72 hours after Donald Trump's inauguration as US President and changed nothing in it thereafter. So the opening scene in which the unnamed president, in office now for two years, struggles to launch a nuclear attack on North Korea because its leader has insulted him beyond endurance is purely a flight of fancy. But the fact that there really is nothing substantial to prevent him from pressing the button is, sadly, not. It is this latter realization that convinces the Chief of Staff, Robert Kassian, and the Secretary of Defence, Jim Bruton, that something definitive must be down to forestall a nuclear holocaust. There are few options. The likeliest to work is assassination.
Bilefsky also reports that ten US publishers passed on the book. Even a less provocative title was not enough to convince them that publishing this was a good idea. Still TO KILL THE PRESIDENT is considerably less inflammatory than you might imagine. In the first place, the president in question is neither named nor present as an active character in the events that unfold. Even his tantrum in the opening chapter is reported at second-hand, not directly observed. The political heavy lifting is in the far-from-subtle hands of a man named McNamara and known as Mac, the president's chief strategist. Mac is a foul-mouthed manipulator who is on track to establish a demagogue in a permanent presidency that Mac will stage manage from behind the scenes. But although Freedland's friends took to calling him Nostradamus for a while, this is not really a roman à clef; it is a speculative dystopia with a serious question at its heart.
That question is posed by the protagonist, one Maggie Costello, an Irishwoman who had been employed by the previous administration and pressed by the former president to stay on in the hope of softening some of the excesses of the new regime. She has her own reason for accepting the charge, but that is revealed only very late in the book. Maggie is very clever and has a strong moral centre. Her cleverness leads her to comprehend that a plot to assassinate the president is underway; her moral sense prompts her to try to thwart it.
Of course, there are those who would try to keep her from succeeding and they use some rivetting technological possibilities that should make average readers take a long, hard look at whatever automatons are making their lives apparently easier. Never has a "smart" thermostat or a hackable car seemed more sinister. Along the way as well, some of the best writing in the book occurs in several brief narratives describing a series of murders that took place in the months leading up to the present events. We do not know why these persons were being disposed of, but we do feel their loss and it is a device that serves to underscore the seriousness of the central moral question of the book. Killing, murder, assassination, no matter the word, deprives a human being of life and destabilizes the order of the universe. When, if ever, is it justified by the good that is perceived to follow from the act? Or does that benefit actually occur as imagined?
It is hard to resist a book blurbed by Jeffrey Archer, Ian Rankin, and Charles Cumming. The cautious reader might want to disguise the cover when commuting on a crowded subway or taking a plane, but there is nothing inside that cover that might appeal to even the most deranged of potential assassins; in short, though it has evident connections to current events, it is no blueprint for violence. It is an entertaining, well-plotted thriller that recognizes that we live in such volatile times that even a popular thriller must watch its step. It's a cautious approach that we wish the actual inspirations for some of its characters would also exercise.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2017
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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