Book Review: I AM PILGRIM by Terry Hayes

 

Book review:
I AM PILGRIM (2013) by Terry Hayes

”The only thriller you need to read this year,” gushes the review quote on the front page.

That year was just a decade ago – and boy, does it feel like several decades have passed since. One part of my experience reading I AM PILGRIM is nostalgia for a simpler time, when Islamist terrorism was the scariest thing in the world. Those were the days, eh?

Plot-wise, this novel is a straightforward spy thriller about hunting a terrorist who plans a devastating attack on the United States. The story consists of two parallel threads:

There is a running third-person account of how the terrorist ”Saracen” is radicalized by his upbringing in Saudi Arabia, and how he then proceeds to single-handledly plot the destruction of America.

The other narrative thread belongs to the protagonist ”Pilgrim” and his first-person account of how he came to be a (very) secret agent, his career, and how he chases Saracen in a race against time to stop the attack.

Pilgrim and Saracen eventually confront each other. I can safely spoil the plot by saying that Pilgrim wins – because the entire novel is narrated ”after the fact” so that you'll know in advance that things turned out well in the end. (I'm not sure this narrative device was a good choice.)

This is not a badly written novel. It has a task and accomplishes it competently. A big plus is that the main villain is not a one-dimensional monster; the author takes pains to depict how Saracen is shaped by circumstances into a dangerous fanatic.

Also positive is that the intelligence ”community” is not depicted as infallible or morally pure; the secret agent protagonist gets his hands dirty, and is frequently scared by the high stakes, risks and crimes of his profession.

I am not qualified to judge how credible the terrorist scheme is. At some point I began to doubt that Saracen could really pull it off all by himself – but there are no obvious holes in that part of the plot, as far as I can tell.

Why, then, do I not recommend I AM PILGRIM? Simply put: For the same reason that I didn't like the TV series ”24.”

Torture and the threat of torture is a crucial plot device; the success of the protagonist hinges on it (as in ”24”).

The narrator ”Pilgrim” repeatedly expresses moral anguish about the things he has to do in his work, and tries to paint himself as (vaguely) above other agents who are willing to use torture... and yet, the plot relentlessly drives home that the clock is ticking towards doomsday and doing reprehensible things is necessary to save millions.

But isn't this exactly what every psychopath and serial killer employed by a totalitarian state would say in their defense? (If you have the stomach for it, you can hear Russians say such things on social media, or on Russian state TV, in the year 2023.)

The ”torture is necessary because it brings out the truth” argument is this novel's main Big Lie. In reality people being tortured do not say what is true, but what they think the torturer wants to hear.

Also – and I hate that we live in a world where this needs to be spelled out – the narrator's argument that ”torture is necessary for intelligence work” is morally bankrupt, to say the least.

Let's be specific here. Would torture have prevented the 9/11 attacks? You should rather ask: Would competent intelligence work have prevented the attacks? 

The fact is that the real intelligence community utterly failed to prevent 9/11. It wasn't a lack of waterboarding that allowed the Twin Towers to collapse, but an institutional inability to follow up clear warning signs about Al-Qaeda's activities.

The 9/11 attacks are featured in I AM PILGRIM, and are very important to the protagonist... but he conveniently does not even try to explain the colossal intelligence failure... even though he is supposedly one of the best agents in the world. Even though he should take a professional interest in such things. Even though the reader would be dying to know how and why the CIA, NSA and military intelligence all failed to prevent Al-Qaeda's scheme to attack the U.S.

That is the novel's other Big Lie – a lie by omission. If Pilgrim had cared to explain just how the real intelligence work failed, the argument for the necessity of torture would fall apart. 

I conclude from this that Pilgrim is an unreliable narrator with a hidden agenda – a spook who lies to the reader in order to make himself and his profession look good. (While we're on the subject of lying, how dishonest can real spooks get? Don't get me started.)


Conclusion: The only thriller you don't need to read this year. It has a shiny, polished surface – but underneath that surface is a stinking turd.

On the other hand, I do recommend the non-fiction book Military Intelligence Blunders and Coverups (2004) by Colonel John Hughes-Wilson.

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