In Martin Amis’s 1995 novel of literary enmity, The Information, Richard Tull, failing writer, walks the entire length of the plane that’s taking him to the US, from economy, where he is ignominiously marooned, to first class, where his super-successful rival, Gwyn Barry, lies “practically horizontal on a crimson barge”. During this perambulation, he somewhat loftily observes the books his fellow passengers are reading and thus is able to boost his increasingly wobbly amour propre. In economy, you see, it’s all Daniel Deronda and the first world war. Move towards the front of the plane, though, and the guys in “prestige stockings and celebrity slippers” are majoring exclusively in “chunky chillers and tub-like tinglers”: Cartel and Avarice and The Usurers; Magenta Rhapsody and Of Kingly Blood.
The much-hyped fictional “collaboration” between Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the US, and James Patterson, a writer whose books have sold more than 375m copies worldwide, is a tingler (allegedly) that comes in at a distinctly tub-like 513 pages – and my nickname for it, during the long hours I spent ploughing through them, was: Of Presidential Blood. Partly this had to do with its self-important cover, on which we find gold embossed letters and a stirring image of the White House at night; you can just picture it splayed open across the soft belly of some knackered executive as he sleeps in his club-class bed, having taken one too many champagne refills with his wagyu steak. Mostly, though, it seemed to me simply to be a better, more appropriate title than The President Is Missing. This novel is indeed missing several things, including a believable plot and even the remotest sense of narrative tension. The president, however, is not one of them.
OK, so he briefly slips out of the White House minus his Secret Service detail, the better that he might meet an actress friend who will give him distracting new eyebrows to match the beard he has grown in record time (so very manly, this particular leader of the western world). On the other hand, given that he is the novel’s principal narrator, we always know where he is, be it bunker or bathroom. He’s also, incidentally, just about the most reliable narrator ever written in English, even if he does say everything in a present tense so weirdly emphatic and muddled, you half wonder if American is his first language – or his second (“Her face once again becomes a poker-face wall”). He does not lie. He does not dissemble. If he tells us he’s “enjoying the comfort” of the embrace of the Israeli prime minister – don’t panic: it’s not what you think – we’d better believe him.
What a guy he is, this Jonathan Lincoln Duncan: a veteran of his country’s adventures in Iraq, he is principled, determined and believes in God. But how many problems he has, too: newly widowed, suffering from a chronic blood disease, political enemies who’d like him impeached. More urgently, he has got wind of an imminent cyber-attack cooked up by a Turkish-born but confusingly non-Islamic extremist who leads – the Lord knows why, if he’s not a Muslim – an organisation called the Sons of Jihad. Should this prove successful, the consequences will be a bit more serious than when, say, Visa went down. America will become “the largest third world country on Earth”. In Duncan’s crisis den, there is talk of dark hospitals and silent smartphones. Reading between the lines, however, I took it to mean that Arby’s would no longer serve curly fries – or not every day.
Can Duncan stop the virus? Two things stand in his way. The first is a music-loving Bosnian assassin, Bach, who has perky breasts (otherwise referred to as – brace yourselves – her “girls”) and who is carrying the baby of a man known only as Geoffrey. (I wondered at first if this was a little joke, aimed in the direction of the novelist Jeffrey Deaver, whose jacket quote for The President Is Missing refers, with unintentionally amusing accuracy, to the “relentless” nature of Patterson’s plotting – only then I remembered: This Book Does Not Include Jokes.) The second is the password that will deactivate it. What could it be? Pages and pages are devoted to Duncan’s various guesses. On and on Clinton and Patterson go, seemingly unaware, what with having so many aides at their disposal, that most of us spend quite a lot of time every week wondering what password we used for this or that. “Try Abkhazia!” the president says at one point, to which – the excitement builds – an aide can only reply: “How do you spell Abkhazia?” Like I said: if you want tub-like, dive in. Just don’t expect any tingles on the way.
• The President Is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson is published by Century (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
