When a book has a quote on the cover that proclaims it as
“the only thriller you need to read this year”, you may think that’s hyperbole
but sooner or later you might be interested in finding out what all the fuss is
about. Especially if you’ve seen quite a few people reading it on the Tube.
The thriller in question is I am Pilgrim, the debut novel by journalist and screenwriter Terry
Hayes. Be warned, though – once you get started on this, you won’t want to put
it down. It’s smart, complex and very compelling.
The story begins at a murder scene in New York. The narrator
is the Pilgrim of the title, a man of many aliases who used to work for an
ultra-secret US intelligence department – he was, of course, their best agent –
but left after 9/11. Since then, he wrote a highly-regarded book on forensic
pathology (published under a false name) and has used his fieldcraft to
disappear under a false identity and move to Paris in a doomed attempt to leave
the secret world behind him and try to lead something approaching a normal life.
However, he gets tracked down by a determined NYPD homicide cop who has been
inspired by his book – which is how Pilgrim ends up helping to investigate a
murder in which the killer appears to have drawn inspiration from said book to
create a situation where the police can’t even identify the victim, let alone
the killer. Subsequently, the US government comes back into his life – as well
as a suicide that may not be all it seems in Turkey, there’s a big terrorist plot
against America, but they don’t know who’s behind it, where the plot is being
hatched or what form the attack will take. Only Pilgrim can figure this out.
Running alongside this are some flashbacks in which we get to see how Pilgrim became involved in, and later disillusioned with, the secret world. We also get to see another series of flashbacks that track the life of the novel’s antagonist, a
character known only as the Saracen – a Saudi boy who witnesses his father’s
beheading, became disillusioned with his mother’s tentative embracing of
Western values and went off to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Having thus
become a Muslim fundamentalist, he went on to become a doctor in Beirut but, having
adopting a false identity, he is himself nigh-on untraceable. From this
position, he sets about planning a spectacular act of bio-terrorism on US soil
– without so much as setting foot in the country itself.
This parallel plot device is similar to the cat-and-mouse layout
of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the
Jackal, which follows both the titular assassin and the detective who’s on
his trail until they finally meet at the novel’s climax. This is somewhat
appropriate, for The Day of the Jackal,
first published in 1971, was in many senses the first modern thriller (the
first thriller having been John Buchan’s The
Thirty-Nine Steps, first published a century ago and never out of print
since).
I am Pilgrim is,
at 896 pages, a long book but this gives Hayes the chance to go deep into the
characters of both Pilgrim and the Saracen. We get the extensive back-stories
of both men – the adopted, Harvard-educated spook who’s more than capable of getting
information out of Swiss bankers and bumping off just about anyone if required
to do so but has a vulnerable side when it comes to the subject of his
foster-parents, and the radicalised Islamist who will stop at nothing (in one memorably gruesome scene, he even removes someone’s eyes so that he can beat the iris-recognition software in a top-secret Damascus laboratory) in his quest to bring the mighty
USA to its knees. At times, the book’s fast-paced plot, spectacular set-pieces
and array of locations feel like it should be a movie (which I don’t doubt it
will be at some point), which is in a sense appropriate as Hayes’s background
is in movie screenwriting.
All in all, those commuters who were engrossed in this novel
really were onto something. I am Pilgrim
is definitely worth a read.