The President is Missing: A Novel by Bill Clinton and James Patterson - review

Narcissistic fantasies of a former President, says David Sexton
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David Sexton7 June 2018

James Patterson is a thriller production line. He has scored over 100 bestsellers and sold 305 million copies worldwide. This has been facilitated by the fact that he doesn’t write them himself, employing multiple collaborators to turn his treatments into formulaic novels. He is a brand, not an author, and what he sells under his brand is “Kentucky fried fiction”, as a wag said years ago.

Now Patterson (a longstanding golf partner of Donald Trump) has produced a thriller with a collaborator even more famous than himself, Bill Clinton. The publishers claim that it features “details only a President could know”.

Written in 128 very short chapters, spanning a period of only a few days, The President is Missing has an averagely preposterous plot. A nasty Turkish terrorist named Suliman Cindoruk, backed by various nefarious forces, plans to release a computer virus that will return America to the Dark Ages. But the designer of this ultimate cyber-weapon, Abkhazian hottie Nina (“a cross between a Calvin Klein model and a Eurotrash punk rocker”) has doubts about what she has done and has fitted it with a “password override” that will save civilisation if entered within 30 minutes, so providing a bit of ticking-clock tension, as key words are tried in upper and lower case.

The novel’s hero and narrator, President Duncan, has to go off the grid to meet her — but the meeting doesn’t go well. There’s a deadly international assassin on the loose, a “tall, leggy, busty redhead” from Bosnia called Bach, for, apart from killing, she thinks of nothing else but Johann Sebastian (even her semi-automatic rifle is called Anna Magdalena).

Multiple gun battles result, the President grabbing a Glock himself, when need be. And is there a treacherous bitch inside the White House for good measure? You bet.

“Jonathan Lincoln Duncan” is an ideally revised William Jefferson Clinton. Instead of avoiding military service, he is a famously brave war hero, who was injured, captured and tortured in Iraq. Instead of being a notorious intern-exploiter, he is chastely devoted to the memory of his lovely late wife, the brilliant Rachel, whom he met in law school, with whom he had one daughter, Lilly. Before leaving on his incognito adventure he looks at the last picture of her, taken shortly before she died from cancer. “I put my fingers to my lips, then touch Rachel’s photo.” That’s one way of dealing with the Hillary problem, isn’t it?

Instead of being a busted flush in deep shit with #MeToo, the President is saving America from Armageddon completely solo.

This narcissistic fantasy is thrust into our faces all the more powerfully because most of the book is narrated in that inexcusable mode, the first person present — I do this, I do that, “I stand in the kitchen looking out over the backyard” — as pioneered in Twilight, The Hunger Games and Fifty Shades.

"Instead of being a busted flush in deep shit with #MeToo, the President is saving America from Armageddon completely solo."

David Sexton

Is Clinton’s contribution otherwise detectable? Alas, yes, whenever the rattling plot is halted for pious

op-eds from the Pres, about how he always wanted to give his country a new spirit, culminating in a grotesque final chapter. His approval rating having soared from 30 per cent to more than 80, President Duncan delivers his vision for a better America to a ravished joint session of Congress.

“America has been given a second chance… I believe we should start by reforming and protecting our elections… We could have real immigration reform… We could have a real climate-change debate...” And so forth.

“We owe it to our children, ourselves and billions of decent people throughout the world who still want us to be an inspiration, an example, and a friend to make the most of this second chance.” In his dreams. And in this potty book.

The President is Missing: A Novel by Bill Clinton and James Patterson (Century, £20), buy it here.

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