The Next-to-Last Page: July 2020

I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To start with the problems, this is a structural mess. We open with a taut, procedural scene where our hero – who ultimately has so many names that I don’t know what to call him other than “Pilgrim” – reads a brutal crime scene and determines the murderer is a woman. That’s not high art, but Hayes pulls it off with real skill. You know you’re in the hands of someone with some chops, and you know we’re going to see how Pilgrim solves the murder while dealing with the burden of a troubled past.

Except, that’s not what happens. The in media res moment turns out to be almost a wrong turn. The murder case matters, I suppose, but it’s merely parallel to and coincidental with, a much larger terrorist plot. The murder, in fact, fades so far into the background that it seems contrived when we return to it. That great first scene seems like it belongs to a different book.

In something of the same way, we move for a long time into a series of almost alternating perspectives. We have Pilgrim as he finds himself drawn back into the secret agent world he’s left, and we have “the Saracen” who becomes radicalized after the Saudis behead his father for the crime of independent thought. We get a lot from inside the Saracen’s head, but – given that this is a first-person narrative – there’s no explanation for how we get that material.

[MAJOR SPOILER: This ends with the Saracen dead and Pilgrim cutting himself off from U.S. intelligence agencies. That means that there is no plausible way for Pilgrim to know all that he comes to tell us. Terry Hayes may know it, but he presents it to us as if we are learning it through Pilgrim’s consciousness. It is, if you look too closely at it (though it’s mean-spirited to do that) a major flaw. Or, it’s an effective way to build tension that not-too-unreasonably asks us to suspend our disbelief.]

More tellingly, the politics here are troubling.

On the surface level, we have the consistent premise that torture and assassination work. Pilgrim isn’t happy about it, but he kills people, and he participates in things like water boarding. He owns up to the ugliness, but he values the intelligence such methods help him gather. [SPOILER: At the end, when the Saracen waterboards him to try to uncover a false lead he’s planted, we get the report that he’s held out for some number of seconds longer than the world record holder.] Worse, he stoops to serious unscrupulousness at the end when he comes close to hanging a five-year-old with Down’s Syndrome to get the Saracen to reveal the nature of his plan to infect the West with vaccine-resistant small pox.

Concerning as that is – intelligence operatives regularly report that information obtained through torture is as likely to be misinformation as it is legitimate – it obscures a deeper darkness. The Saracen does get occasional sympathy. He is, after all, a great and brave fighter, a man committed to freeing his people from the house of Saud, and a clever adversary. He didn’t ask for revolution, he had it forced on him.

Still, the broad outline of this is a proxy religious war. We have a “Saracen,” explicitly defined early as a warrior defending Islam, against a “Pilgrim,” a man committed to leaving the safety of his home to pay respect to something he holds holy. Moreover, Pilgrim is a man denied his birthright. His adoptive father, a billionaire, dies before his adoptive mother who effectively cuts him off. Pilgrim is supposed to be a child of privilege, supposed to be a natural born sailor enjoying the fruits of his inherited wealth, but he’s been cast as a front-line defender of the West.

Put like that, it’s hardly a [SPOILER:] to say that he succeeds. At its ugliest, this is the story of the best the West can provide outsmarting the best the Islamic world can provide. So, yeah, no surprise that he ends the book literally sailing off into the sunset on a private boat, stoically implying that he – a part of the potentially softened West – has proven the sleeping strength of our secret warriors.

So, though, with all that to hold against this book, I still found myself hanging on the edge as I worked through the final chapters. For all the narrative clumsiness of the method, Hayes succeeds in building tension, in creating the “thrill” that underscores a thriller. This isn’t generally my genre of choice, but I tip my hat to the overall effectiveness of it.

If you want to read a book that grabs you and puts you through the ringer, this is a good one to try. It may lack a certain narrative logic to jump back and forth as Hayes does, but it has a real power when it all comes together. I felt it when a crucial phone call seemed to go awry, and I acknowledged the moral price that Pilgrim understood himself as called to pay. Sure there’s an ugliness in accepting the necessary ethical compromises of the secret-agent work; Robert Ludlum made that clear a generation ago even if he simultaneously (like Hayes) valorized it in the midst of his critique.

But, at the end of a novel like this, when you’re properly exhausted from its effective ups-and-downs, when your nerves are frayed, it’s exciting to see the showdown between our two formidable characters.

So, there may be a lot this book is guilty of, but I also have to admit it’s a kind of guilty pleasure too.

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