If he hadn't decided to become a writer, Terry Hayes would have made an excellent terrorist.
The villain of I Am Pilgrim, who is referred to mostly as the Saracen, has an ingenious plan. The amount thought he's put into it (and therefore the amount of thought the author put into it) is incredible. This isn't the kind of book where a bad guy simply steals a biological weapon from a top secret medical facility. This is the kind of book where the bad guy spends five years getting a medical degree so as he can remove someone's eyeballs so as he can fool a retinal scanner and infiltrate a top secret medical facility so he can steal a vaccine, so as he can inoculate himself, so as he can safely reverse engineer a biological weapon... and so on. Every step is meticulous and cunning, in a way that I don't think I've seen in any other work of fiction.
The Saracen's dedication to his evil plan, demonstrated over decades, makes him an oddly sympathetic character. It's hard to dislike someone with so much grit, even if his end-goal is to murder millions. In one nailbiter of a scene, Australian soldiers have the Saracen pinned down in an abandoned village filled with booby traps, and the reader genuinely wants him to slip through the net. The audiobook is read by Christopher Ragland, who reads these scenes with characteristic intensity. (A necessary disclosure - Ragland also reads the audiobooks of my Timothy Blake series.)
The protagonist, by contrast, feels a bit hollow. He has many names, but we're told none of them are real. He has plenty of attributes, but none of them seem important. His drinking problem isn't a problem - he brushes off the cravings with no apparent difficulty. His past as a drug addict has given him the ability to quickly calculate dosages but has done him no harm whatsoever. His relationship with his adopted father, while well articulated and touching, serves only to ladle some ennui over the proceedings.
I Am Pilgrim was published in 2014, but the story is aggressively post-9/11. The narrator is a courageous American male. He's a former spy (the best ever, we're told) and also the author of an investigator's handbook (also the best ever). He's summoned by a second courageous American male (a New York City cop who pulled survivors from the wreckage of the World Trade Centre) to assist with a homicide investigation. But before the ex-spy can be of much assistance, he's summoned by a third courageous American male (the US president) to help save the Western world from a terror attack. He's sent to Turkey, where almost everyone he meets is slimy, cowardly and corrupt. This justifies the hero's methods, which are sometimes more harsh than clever.
The worldview of this book could be concisely summarised as America good, Muslims bad. (The existence of American Muslims is not acknowledged.) At one point, the hero contemplates kidnapping and torturing a Turkish cop who has not, at that stage in the story, done anything wrong. At another point he stabs a struggling Turkish bass player for the crime of being surly, and then tells him to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, just like in American Psycho. Unlike in American Psycho, the musician is inspired to better himself by this incident. (As a bassist myself, I might have taken this personally.) The heroic president is a union-buster, and the terrorist plot hinges on American manufacturing jobs moving offshore. If not for the undeniable humanity of the Saracen, and the book's obsession with the horrors of the holocaust, the whole thing might seem uncomfortably MAGA.
Sexism is splashed around as well. The US president demonstrates his tenderness and humanity to the whole world when he's photographed hugging a crying man at his dying wife's bedside - but only after waiting a minute or two for the guy to get a hold of himself. Several characters are described as "an intelligent woman" as though this is a quality that most women do not have. In a surreal, meta exchange, one woman at a seminar criticises how the narrator writes about women. When the narrator defends himself by saying that he's had "quite a lot of success with women," his accuser is immediately charmed and seduced.
Still, there's more to a book than just how woke it is, or isn't. Telling a coherent and compelling story over 912 pages is quite an accomplishment, no matter how old-fashioned parts of it may seem. The murder mystery element doesn't take up many of those pages, but it's genuinely brilliant. Having said that the Saracen was my favourite character, the book would have been worth reading even if he and his terrorist plot weren't in it. The narrator's deduction involving a mirror is astounding. The language Hayes uses to precisely capture every moment is fluid and beautiful. And the level of research he has clearly undertaken into virology, geography, history, spycraft, language and religion gives the whole thing an impressive air of authenticity. I may grate against some of the politics of this book, but I can't accuse the author of ignorance. In fact, I have to tip my hat to him. He's clearly as patient, dedicated and resourceful as the terrorist he created.
The Saracen's dedication to his evil plan, demonstrated over decades, makes him an oddly sympathetic character. It's hard to dislike someone with so much grit, even if his end-goal is to murder millions. In one nailbiter of a scene, Australian soldiers have the Saracen pinned down in an abandoned village filled with booby traps, and the reader genuinely wants him to slip through the net. The audiobook is read by Christopher Ragland, who reads these scenes with characteristic intensity. (A necessary disclosure - Ragland also reads the audiobooks of my Timothy Blake series.)
The protagonist, by contrast, feels a bit hollow. He has many names, but we're told none of them are real. He has plenty of attributes, but none of them seem important. His drinking problem isn't a problem - he brushes off the cravings with no apparent difficulty. His past as a drug addict has given him the ability to quickly calculate dosages but has done him no harm whatsoever. His relationship with his adopted father, while well articulated and touching, serves only to ladle some ennui over the proceedings.
I Am Pilgrim was published in 2014, but the story is aggressively post-9/11. The narrator is a courageous American male. He's a former spy (the best ever, we're told) and also the author of an investigator's handbook (also the best ever). He's summoned by a second courageous American male (a New York City cop who pulled survivors from the wreckage of the World Trade Centre) to assist with a homicide investigation. But before the ex-spy can be of much assistance, he's summoned by a third courageous American male (the US president) to help save the Western world from a terror attack. He's sent to Turkey, where almost everyone he meets is slimy, cowardly and corrupt. This justifies the hero's methods, which are sometimes more harsh than clever.
The worldview of this book could be concisely summarised as America good, Muslims bad. (The existence of American Muslims is not acknowledged.) At one point, the hero contemplates kidnapping and torturing a Turkish cop who has not, at that stage in the story, done anything wrong. At another point he stabs a struggling Turkish bass player for the crime of being surly, and then tells him to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, just like in American Psycho. Unlike in American Psycho, the musician is inspired to better himself by this incident. (As a bassist myself, I might have taken this personally.) The heroic president is a union-buster, and the terrorist plot hinges on American manufacturing jobs moving offshore. If not for the undeniable humanity of the Saracen, and the book's obsession with the horrors of the holocaust, the whole thing might seem uncomfortably MAGA.
Sexism is splashed around as well. The US president demonstrates his tenderness and humanity to the whole world when he's photographed hugging a crying man at his dying wife's bedside - but only after waiting a minute or two for the guy to get a hold of himself. Several characters are described as "an intelligent woman" as though this is a quality that most women do not have. In a surreal, meta exchange, one woman at a seminar criticises how the narrator writes about women. When the narrator defends himself by saying that he's had "quite a lot of success with women," his accuser is immediately charmed and seduced.
Still, there's more to a book than just how woke it is, or isn't. Telling a coherent and compelling story over 912 pages is quite an accomplishment, no matter how old-fashioned parts of it may seem. The murder mystery element doesn't take up many of those pages, but it's genuinely brilliant. Having said that the Saracen was my favourite character, the book would have been worth reading even if he and his terrorist plot weren't in it. The narrator's deduction involving a mirror is astounding. The language Hayes uses to precisely capture every moment is fluid and beautiful. And the level of research he has clearly undertaken into virology, geography, history, spycraft, language and religion gives the whole thing an impressive air of authenticity. I may grate against some of the politics of this book, but I can't accuse the author of ignorance. In fact, I have to tip my hat to him. He's clearly as patient, dedicated and resourceful as the terrorist he created.
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