I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

I Am Pilgrim: A Thriller by Terry Hayes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I almost loved this book, but it has two huge problems. First, as anybody who's read my mystery/thriller reviews knows, I hate mysteries that are solved by coincidence. The mere fact that the protagonist's involvement in a New York murder investigation gives him a cover reason to go to Bodrum, Turkey, where he's searching for a completely unrelated man, is unreasonable. But to have a second murder occur there, which is linked to the one in New York strains all credulity. That annoys me, but since this is more of a thriller than a whodunnit (and we actually know both the criminal and the crime, the story is actually about the search for the criminal), it's not as off-putting to me as it would be in a straight mystery. What was really driving me nuts was the foreshadowing at the end of many chapters. I really think that this could have gone from being a good book to a great book if Hayes had simply deleted the last line of every chapter. In the early chapters it wasn't too bad—"And he would have languished there… except that … the search for the Saracen hit a desparate impasse."—but the foreshadowing got heavier and heavier as we approached the climax. Much later, it's more like being hit with a clue-by-four: "I would never have found it if it hadn't have been for a set of traffic lights." The extra "have" was just a gratuitous freebie.

Still, Hayes is a really good, and graphic, writer (I confess to skipping many of the ghastly bits—he's a bit too graphic for me). When he describes a photo of a woman walking with her children towards a death-camp gas chamber, it's so vivid I can see the picture."

The villain of the piece is an Arab terrorist, planning an attack against the US. But Hayes isn't just picking the bogeyman-du-jour. Yes, the terrorist is a devout, even fanatical, devotee of a radical Muslim ideology, but he doesn't particularly hate the US. In fact, it's the Saudi royal family he wants to bring down, and he feels that if they don't have the support of the US, they'll collapse. He may well be right. Unlike most of our politicians, Hayes get that the Saudis are no friends of the west.

The particular attack being planned is incredible, but Hayes makes it (almost) entirely believable.

The protagonist (I can't simply name him, because even the name he grew up with wasn't the one he was born with, and as an operative of a US intelligence agency, he adopts and discards identities routinely) says "Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you're fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn't help but think of how many times I had violated our nation's deepest values in order to protect them."
I guess it's something that he still thinks of that—I suspect most of spooks never do—but I'm still not going to believe it's necessary. On the other hand, at the climax he sets up a particularly gruesome scenario, and I can't see the alternative either.