Review: The President Is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson — eclipses most American political novels (2024)

Plenty of US presidents have penned well-received memoirs, but Bill Clinton is almost the first (Jimmy Carter has written a historical novel) to venture into fiction. So it’s sensible that he’s chosen to team up with a mentor, and in James Patterson he has a running mate who is not only a prolific and versatile storyteller, but also a highly experienced collaborator.

A brilliant, tricksy first chapter, in which their beleaguered hero takes on his congressional enemies, unmistakeably shows that their partnership works. And it immediately sets the book apart from previous White House tales, in print or on screen, because the co-authors have taken the smart decision to make it a first-person narrative. The West Wing often similarly depicted Josiah Bartlet dealing with simultaneous crises, but it wasn’t able to put us inside his head.

Confronting President Jonathan Duncan, a widower and Gulf War veteran, is a pile-up of predicaments. He could be impeached over an incident in Algeria where an Osama bin Laden-like figure escaped capture. He is told the same terrorist mastermind, Suliman Cindoruk, is behind a computer virus that could soon destroy America’s entire economy and infrastructure, turning it into “a Third World country”. And he learns that there’s a traitor in his eight-strong inner circle, who might be linked to the virus plot.

Duncan initially disappears when he slips out in disguise to meet two hackers who passed on a warning about the cyber-apocalypse plan. Later, still “missing”, the president sets up a secret base, bringing together tech experts and world leaders in the hope of finding a way of stymieing the virus. In the novel’s climax, an attack on this rural hideaway by a female assassin called Bach and her backup team coincides with increasingly desperate efforts to find a blocking password in time.

The President Is Missing enthrallingly interweaves a cyber-thriller, a Homeland-style battle against jihadi terrorism and a find-the-mole hunt à la Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — and it has aspects of a Cold War geopolitical thriller, too. In deftly combining these elements, the authors’ collaboration is largely seamless until the denouement approaches. Once it looms, however, Patterson’s trademark ultra-short chapters and paragraphs (often stacks of single-sentence ones) start to appear in action sequences, and Clinton can be assumed to be chiefly responsible for dialogue scenes full of implausibly long speeches despite the urgency of the situation.

Other final-third flaws include foreign characters who are improbably fluent in English, the mole investigation’s outcome (old hands will find the villain too easy to spot) and a self-indulgent coda in which Duncan, hitherto carefully differentiated from Clinton, voices the former president’s views on the dangers of polarised politics as he addresses Congress.

These relatively minor blemishes, though, don’t prevent The President Is Missing from eclipsing most previous American political novels, not least because the authors curb each other’s vices: in a solo Clinton thriller, it seems fair to assume, the cloak-and-dagger malarkey might well be merely a pretext for musing and speechifying about power and what’s wrong with America, while the writing and the hero’s psychology would be much cruder in a solo Patterson effort. To paraphrase Katharine Hepburn on Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Bill gives James class and James gives Bill sexed-up plotting.

Century £20 pp513