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.
#IamPilgrim
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