The first thing to note is that the title is fake news. The president isn’t missing; he has to lie low for a bit, but spends almost all the novel surrounded by his Secret Service security detail, as well as other aides and officials. Indeed, the president himself narrates most of the book, which wouldn’t really work if he had no clue where he was or what he was up to.
Bill Clinton is not the first modern president to make a foray into fiction: in 2003, Jimmy Carter wrote The Hornet’s Nest, a well-regarded historical novel set during the revolutionary war. But for his novel, Clinton has teamed up with James Patterson, a thriller industry unto himself, whom Stephen King has not unjustly called “a terrible writer”. One character is a female assassin codenamed Bach, who, when we first meet her, is described strolling seductively through an airport with a décolleté “allowing just enough bounce in her girls to make it memorable”. Girls?
Anyway, the president of the title – president Jonathan Lincoln Duncan – is facing an enormous cyberattack, codenamed “Dark Ages”, which will bring the US to its knees. Thanks to a helpful slab of exposition by a geek halfway through, we know that this is really, really serious. It’s not just that Tinder and Alexa will stop working; all bank records will be wiped, the electricity grid will go down, water will stop running, air defences will fall silent, that sort of thing. Also, the Russians might be behind it, and Duncan might have a mole in his own ranks. So out of the White House the president sneaks: he disguises himself using makeup with the help of a famous actress friend (as you do), before meeting someone who might be able to help at a baseball game. Luckily, he is being followed by the pros.
The president is a super-decent bipartisan hero, an ideal mash-up between John McCain and, um, Bill Clinton. Like Clinton, Duncan met his wife at law school and has one adult daughter; unlike Clinton, his wife is tragically deceased and he spent time as a prisoner of war in Iraq. (His vice-president is resentful at being upstaged by her boss, a “war hero with rugged good looks and a sharp sense of humor”.) His training as an army ranger enables him to wield a Glock with confidence during one early kinetic set-piece, rather like Tom Clancy’s fictional president, ex-Marine Jack Ryan.
But readers hoping for spicy revelations about what really goes on in the White House are likely to feel short-changed by bromides such as, “Sooner or later, every president faces decisions in which the right choice is bad politics, at least in the short term”, or the revelation that there is a one-lane bowling alley in the White House basement. The sense that a lot of important conversations happen in dull rooms over video-conferencing links, however, does ring true. As does the populist opinion on beer: “You can shelve all those microbrews: at a ball game, there is no finer beverage than an ice-cold Bud.”
Patterson, who never knowingly writes a paragraph when a single sentence will do, also seems highly unlikely to have authored all the prose-blocks of sorrowful asides on the state of the media and politics today. After some pretty good twists, the novel ends (spoiler alert) with the president having foiled cybergeddon and delivering an earnest televised address, in which he basically promises to do everything a Democratic voter might want. Throughout, the story regularly halts for folksy homilies on police shootings of African Americans (bad), stricter gun control (good), or the desirability of friendly relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia.
But never mind, because soon we will cut to a sexy vegetarian assassin dangling from a tree, or a silent helicopter making stuff blow up, or Secret Service men clenching their jaws in moodily lit rooms as their maverick president plans to do something they don’t like. As long as it concentrates on this stuff, the forthcoming Showtime TV series will no doubt be a hit.