The President Is Missing

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The President Is Missing is a thriller that was created in collaboration between former American President Bill Clinton and American writer James Patterson and was published in 2018. It is about the fight of a fictional President of the United States against a cyber terrorism attack on his country.

content

Jonathan Duncan, the President of the United States , faces a congressional committee of inquiry for allegedly establishing contact with the Turkish cyber-terrorist Suliman Cindoruk, the notorious leader of the Sons of Jihad terrorist group . Before the hearing can take place, the president goes into hiding, which is fueling speculation in public, from illness to high treason. The Republican majority leader Lester Rhodes is already preparing impeachment proceedings against the Democratic president and seeks the support of Duncan's internal party competitor and Vice President Katherine Brandt.

Duncan, on the other hand, stands above party political intrigues and has only the welfare of his country in view. He sees this as endangered by a recently discovered computer virus , which he attributes to the ingenious and unscrupulous Cindoruk. When a young woman named Nina contacts him to tell him how he can get rid of the virus that all experts are helpless to face, she does so using the code word “Dark Ages”, which apart from the president and his chief of staff Carolyn “Carrie “Brock only know six people, including the Vice President. Duncan keeps his next steps secret from his closest confidante and meets incognito with Nina and her partner Augie at a baseball game. Mercenaries under the direction of a hit man with the cover name "Bach" find out about the meeting and murder Nina. Duncan and Augie can be saved by the President's Security Service. But the attacks continue and are now directed against the White House .

As Augie reports, he and Nina were members of the Sons of Jihad . While Nina was writing the virus, he was responsible for distributing it. When they got scruples, they wanted to stop the virus against assurances of impunity. But the knowledge of how to do this took Nina with her into death. Even with Augie's help, the hastily called security specialists cannot find an antidote to the virus, which threatens to paralyze all Internet traffic in America and delete all electronically stored data, with unforeseeable consequences for the American economy and population. Only a password query from Nina grants a 30-minute delay, which ticks down to the last second, before it is Duncan's chief of staff, Carrie, who guesses the password: Sukhum , Nina's hometown in Abkhazia .

The virus can be stopped, the hit man Bach arrested, and Suliman Cindoruk kills himself. Members of the royal family of Saudi Arabia and the Russian government, who share an interest in weakening the superpower USA, are exposed as its backers . As for the betrayal of the code word from the President's environment, all signs point to Vice President Brandt, until Duncan unmasked his Chief of Staff: He had already known of the password in advance from the SMS traffic on Nina's cell phone and merely staged the dramatic rescue operation convicting whoever would contribute the password at the last second. While Duncan has always relied on his chief of staff, Carrie has long held a grudge against her boss for not making his political career. Duncan used his newfound popularity in saving the country to address the American people in which he carried out his program to make America a better place in many ways. But this, he mused after the speech, cannot be done by the President alone; it is everyone's responsibility.

background

Bill Clinton (2015) and James Patterson (2008) Bill Clinton (2015) and James Patterson (2008)
Bill Clinton (2015) and James Patterson (2008)

Bill Clinton and James Patterson, both 71 years old at the time the novel was published in June 2018, had met years ago over breakfast in Florida and felt sympathy for each other. Clinton had long toyed with the idea of ​​writing a detective novel, Patterson is known for working with various co-authors. The impetus for their collaboration was the Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, who had previously marketed their books. When they wrote together, they mainly "listened" to one another and "respected" one another. The manuscript flew back and forth between them like a table tennis ball.

However, stylometric studies by James O'Sullivan suggest that the majority of the text was written by James Patterson. According to Andrian Kreye , Clinton's passages are above all those "that are not only in the first person, but above all in the tone of the southern dialects." The fictional President Duncan cultivates exactly the same style of language and the popular language images that Clinton also used in the southern states also popularized. In doing so, he fantasizes about situations that he “did not complete quite as heroically in real life” as his fictional president, such as his own hearings before Congress about the Lewinsky affair . And at the end, Duncan gives a statesmanlike speech "the way Bill Clinton never got it."

Ron Charles sees Bill Clinton's transformation into Jonathan Duncan as an object of illustration for psychological studies: Both lost their fathers at an early age and grow up in difficult circumstances, only to become governor in the end. Both meet their brilliant future wife at law school and both have a daughter. However, the differences in her résumé are telling: where Clinton evaded military service during the Vietnam War , Duncan becomes a celebrated war hero, where Clinton has had an affair with his intern in the Oval Office , Duncan resists the torture of the Republican Guard in Iraq , where Clinton is said to have had various extramarital affairs, Duncan cares for his dying wife with devotion and remains loyal to her after death. Clinton himself commented, “The president in the book is not supposed to be like me. But he does not express any beliefs that I believe are wrong. He says things that I think are right. Those who are honest and reflect what he believes in. "

James Patterson explained that the two authors did not want to make the book too political. It's not about Republicans, Democrats, past or present presidents. “It's not about President Trump . If [Mr. Clinton] wanted to write about it, he would do it in a non-fiction book. We didn't want to do it. ”Nonetheless, the book has often been understood by reviewers in the context of the current US president. For example, for Ulrich Noller Trump is “always present as Duncan's invisible antipode”. The counter-model to Donald Trump drawn in the novel is "almost touchingly nostalgic": Duncan embodies exactly "the presidential gesture [...] that many miss in the ruling president: with style, responsibility, commitment - honesty."

reception

According to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf , who publishes The President Is Missing together with Little, Brown and Company , the novel sold 250,000 times across all formats in the first week. Nielsen BookScan found 152,000 copies of the hardcover book edition sold. This made The President Is Missing the best-selling adult novel in its first week since Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman from 2015. On June 24, 2018, it reached number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list . The German translation reached 5th place in the Spiegel bestseller list in June 2018.

Janet Maslin reads the novel as an " escapist tale" about healthy politics and a noble president that ignores the "shrill, bitter tone of real politics". Nevertheless, it is a great book, "driven by star power and convincing-sounding presidential sincerity". Anthony Lane complains about some “carefree and forgivable shortcomings”, but the book is reliable read that “maximizes its potential and fulfills its mission.” Adam Kirsch considers the book to be a “standard product” like thousands of other crime stories in film and television Book that does not lay claim to serious consideration, neither literary nor political. But the idea of ​​a president as an action hero who does not want to be held back by any critic or bureaucratic shackle in his claim to leadership, but demands blind trust in his actions, is deeply undemocratic. The fact that a former president lends his name to such fantasies and these then become bestsellers is "a sign that something is very wrong with the American concept of power".

For Elmar Krekeler, the passages “that Patterson received from the Clintons”, such as the president's closing speech, “have a rather low-threshold literary penetration”. But also that Patterson, who most recently had co-authors written, took up pen himself in The President Is Missing , "you can unfortunately see". Andrian Kreye reads the novel as an "orgy of justification" by Bill Clinton. The attempt to “use James Patterson's writing workshop to heave an almost childlike revision of history onto the bestseller lists” is an “invitation to shame others”. Hannes Hintermeier agrees with the conclusion that the book is “incredibly bad” and justifies this with an outrageous plot, language templates and “obnoxious leading articles on the state of the country”. Adam Soboczynski, on the other hand, considers kitsch and clichés to be insignificant when evaluating a thriller. In its “development of intrigue and counter-intrigue” and its “mechanical generation of tension”, The President is Missing is even “a particularly good book. You can film the novel straight away ”.

In fact, numerous studios and TV stations showed interest in a film adaptation even before the book was published, so Clinton and Patterson completed a Hollywood tour with 16 meetings. In the end, the TV station Showtime was awarded the contract for an ongoing TV series. David Nevins, the station's CEO, announced: "The pairing of President Clinton with the most compelling storyteller in literature promises a movie experience [...] that fits perfectly with a politically relevant, character-based action series for our network."

expenditure

  • Bill Clinton, James Patterson: The President Is Missing . Alfred A. Knopf and Little, Brown and Company, New York 2018, ISBN 978-0-316-41269-8 .
  • Bill Clinton, James Patterson: The President Is Missing . From the American by Anke and Eberhard Kreutzer. Droemer, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-426-28197-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Elizabeth Renzetti: 'If there's a traitor in the White House, this is how it could happen': James Patterson on collaborating with Bill Clinton on The President is Missing . In: The Globe and Mail, June 5, 2018.
  2. ^ A b Martin Ganslmeier: Bill Clinton's debut as a crime novel writer . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur from June 5, 2018.
  3. ↑ Bill Clinton presents political thriller . In: Der Tagesspiegel from June 5, 2018.
  4. ↑ James Patterson: Bill Clinton and James Patterson are co-authors - but who did the writing? . In: The Guardian of June 7, 2018.
  5. ^ A b Andrian Kreye : Clinton's book is an invitation to be ashamed of others . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of June 7, 2018.
  6. ↑ Ron Charles: Bill Clinton and James Patterson's 'The President Is Missing' is an awkward duet . In: The Washington Post, June 4, 2018.
  7. ↑ "It's not about President Trump. If [Mr. Clinton] wants to get into that in non-fiction, that would be his choice. We didn't want to do that. ”Quoted from: Elizabeth Renzetti: 'If there's a traitor in the White House, this is how it could happen': James Patterson on collaborating with Bill Clinton on The President is Missing . In: The Globe and Mail, June 5, 2018.
  8. ^ Ulrich Noller: An appeal in the thriller format . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur from June 5, 2018.
  9. ↑ Andy Lewis: Bill Clinton, James Patterson Novel Sells 250,000 Copies in First Week . In: The Hollywood Reporter June 13, 2018.
  10. ^ The New York Times Best Sellers . In: The New York Times, June 24, 2018.
  11. ^ The President Is Missing . At Buchreport .
  12. ↑ "escapist fairy tale [...] keep the shrill, bitter tone of real politics out of this fantasy [...] Still, this book's a big one." It's driven by star power and persuasive-sounding presidential candor. "Quoted from: Janet Maslin : Bill Clinton and James Patterson Team Up to Imagine a True Fantasy: Sane Politics . In: The New York Times, June 3, 2018.
  13. ↑ "Blithely forgivable faults. It's a go-to read. It maximizes its potency and fulfills its mission. "Quoted from: Anthony Lane : Bill Clinton and James Patterson's Concussive Collaboration . In: The New Yorker of June 18, 2018.
  14. ↑ “A sign that something is very wrong with the American imagination of power.” Quoted from: Adam Kirsch: Bill Clinton's Novel Isn't a Thriller — It's a Fantasy . In: The Atlantic of June 16, 2018.
  15. ↑ Elmar Krekeler: You must know that about Bill Clinton's thriller . In: Die Welt from June 4, 2018.
  16. ↑ Hannes Hintermeier : Ex-President single-handedly saves the world . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of June 9, 2018.
  17. ↑ Adam Soboczynski: When Presidents Chase Traitors . In: The time of June 7, 2018.
  18. ↑ "The pairing of President Clinton with fiction's most gripping storyteller promises a kinetic experience, one that the book world has salivated over for months and that now will dovetail perfectly into a politically relevant, character-based action series for our network." Quoted from : James Hibberd: Bill Clinton's first novel to become a Showtime TV series in major deal . In: Entertainment Weekly of September 22, 2017.