When a chapter in a memoir opens with “I recall the date I almost started the Third World War”, it’s fair to say one expects to settle into a rollicking story of cold war intrigue and brinkmanship, particularly when the author is none other than the thriller writer Frederick Forsyth. In fact, his anecdote, from his time as a Reuters journalist based in 1960s East Berlin, is over in just four pages.
The Outsider is an odd read like that. Chapters are short vignettes that never really get to the heart of the author of The Odessa File and The Dogs of War, offering instead rather cursory accounts of assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle, or the horrors of the Nigerian-Biafran war. Even his sexual awakening is faintly ridiculous in its blink and you’ll miss it account: it happens in the bed of a German countess who “had the quaint habit of singing the Horst Wessel during coitus”.
It’s so matter of fact, it has the air of a ghostwritten sports autobiography – except Forsyth’s sport is mostly recounting the most cliched, James Bond-style scrapes possible. Which, admittedly, has its pleasures.
