No fiction in this Forsyth thriller

Book: The Outsider: My Life In Intrigue
Author: Frederick Forsyth
Publisher: Bantam
Pages: 365 
Price: Rs 399

Frederick Forsyth is one lucky man. That's my succinct first impression of his autobiography titled The Outsider, which chronicles how, at 19, this hugely successful thriller writer became the youngest RAF pilot by lying about his age. He also narrowly escaped losing an arm in a deadly car crash. He witnessed history in the making more than once as a journalist at Reuters, which began with a series of chance encounters. Then, to make a few bucks, he wrote The Day of The Jackal, hoping that at least a few people would read it — and the book sold more than 10 million copies!

If that's not serendipity, I don't know of what is!

The back cover of this memoir claims that Forsyth came very close to "starting the Third World War", "barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, [was] strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war and landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau". There are some pretty and dangerous women too, just to make this James-Bond-meets-Indiana Jones saga a complete 'gig'. But the real twist comes later.

What's interesting is that while The Outsider reads like a mishmash of all of Forsyth's novels, there is not a grain of fiction in his story. Which is to say that while he used all his life experiences to produce some of the finest thriller writing of our time, his own life did not need wild imagination or dazzlingly unreal characters for high-quality thrills.

Forsyth weaves his life story in 60 vignettes held together by his quest for adventure, presence of mind and pure fluke. Like a war veteran grandpa recounting his adventures to dewy-eyed kids around a fireplace on a snowy December night, he starts from the start; but with a caveat: "All of that I saw from the inside. But all that time I was, nonetheless, an outsider."

It's a different matter that it took him a lifetime to experience 'all of that' and 365 pages to put it all in words. The Outsider spans 50-odd years, beginning with a young Forsyth dreaming of becoming a pilot and ending in the present, with him as a successful author. Forsyth reminisces about how, as a journalist, he could move in and out of war zones in East Berlin and France. He describes witnessing the assassinations of leading political figures of the day so impassively that one would think that, back then, it was an ordinary affair. He goes on to mention that he soon got bored of all of that and started craving for more adventure. Once again, luck shone on him and Forsyth found himself in the middle of the Biafran (Nigeria) war in 1960.

The rest, as they say, is well-rumoured.

In 1968, Forsyth met Ronnie, an MI6 operative who needed an asset in the Biafran enclave. "When I left for the return to the rainforest, he had one," Forsyth writes, finally admitting he worked for British intelligence for almost two decades. In this new role, Forsyth the stringer sourced exclusive information on the war and Forsyth the shamus shared it with his bosses in London in exchange for something more prized than money. The quid pro quo in this arrangement was MI6's assistance with the research for his books.

It It is rather strange for an author to defend his writing by saying that the only reason he took it up — apart from earning a livelihood — is because "journalists… lie well". And when this very successful journalist-turned-author claims on the first page of his memoir that he "never intended to be a writer at all", it remains for to us to decide if he is being brutally honest (or brutally dishonest) or if he owes everything to a mammoth stroke of luck!