I Am Pilgrim

I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

One of my fellow Splinters has been banging on about this book!  I hadn't taken the bait as the title didn't grab me; somehow the Bunyanesque handle put me off.  800 pages of someone on a pilgrimage?  I didn't warm to the idea.  So get the idea out of the head, quite simply this novel is a gripping thriller.  It's scary, an inventive spy/terrorist narrative with plausible plot-lines.

Terry Hayes is a former journalist and screenwriter.  He has been an investigative reporter, a political correspondent and columnist.  He is writing on his own territory.   If, like me, you like to intersperse seriously good, top notch, intelligent writing with a well-written and compelling page-turner then Pilgrim fits the bill.  Think Jack Reacher, but so much better on all fronts!

Amazon says:

Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn’t exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation.

But that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder – and Pilgrim wrote the book.

What begins as an unusual and challenging investigation will become a terrifying race-against-time to save America from oblivion. Pilgrim will have to make a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to a deserted ruins on the Turkish coast via a Nazi death camp in Alsace and the barren wilderness of the Hindu Kush in search of the faceless man who would commit an appalling act of mass murder in the name of his God.

WHAT I THOUGHT

‘Two psychos enter, and one psycho leaves. Good entertainment for readers with a penchant for mayhem, piles of bodies and a lethal biochemical agent or two.’ Kirkus Reviews

This is certainly a page-turner, a race against time between two sharp minds, determined to prevail.  In a nutshell, a former intelligence agent who wrote a book on forensic pathology becomes involved in a case where someone uses his book to commit untraceable murders. Because of the agent’s earlier career, he also gets involved in another case involving a threat involving an ex-Afghan fighter who uses the network he established fighting the Soviets to reverse engineer a virus which threatens humanity.  The fighter is turned as an eleven-year old boy when he witnesses the public beheading of his father in a Saudi Arabian square.

In trying to get inside the mind of the Saracen, Pilgrim has to use his intuition and intelligence from the highly sophisticated technology which is available to the intelligence agencies, i.e. the FBI.  From all the data that is gleaned from signals, mobile phone calls etc that are being picked up by the FBI ultimately there is one trace that the human intelligence machine determines is likely to be ‘the one’.  They run with that link.  Then there is the coincidence of the relationship between the meeting of the policewoman Leyla Cumali in connection with the murder of the American woman in the run-down apartment.  She happens to be the sister of Saracen.  These threads spun just so make for clever plotting.   

What I admire about this thriller is that Terry Hayes switches between providing detailed character studies of the two protagonists with a narrative of roller-coaster action which shifts across continents leading to the denouement where there is the inevitable encounter between Pilgrim and the Saracen in Turkey.

Terry Hayes is an author, screenwriter and film producer who started work as a journalist in New York.  He surely wrote I am Pilgrim with an eye to a film. 

Here is a review by the New York Times which is not a plot-spoiler.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/books/i-am-pilgrim-by-terry-hayes.html

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay

What Amazon says:

Bletchley Park was where one of the war’s most famous – and crucial – achievements was made: the cracking of Germany’s “Enigma” code in which its most important military communications were couched. This country house in the Buckinghamshire countryside was home to Britain’s most brilliant mathematical brains, like Alan Turing, and the scene of immense advances in technology – indeed, the birth of modern computing. The military codes deciphered there were instrumental in turning both the Battle of the Atlantic and the war in North Africa.

But, though plenty has been written about the boffins, and the codebreaking, fictional and non-fiction – from Robert Harris and Ian McEwan to Andrew Hodges’ biography of Turing – what of the thousands of men and women who lived and worked there during the war? What was life like for them – an odd, secret territory between the civilian and the military?

Sinclair McKay’s book is the first history for the general reader of life at Bletchley Park, and an amazing compendium of memories from people now in their eighties – of skating on the frozen lake in the grounds (a depressed Angus Wilson, the novelist, once threw himself in) – of a youthful Roy Jenkins, useless at codebreaking, of the high jinks at nearby accommodation hostels – and of the implacable secrecy that meant girlfriend and boyfriend working in adjacent huts knew nothing about each other’s work.

So.… what did I think:

Without any facts at my fingertips, but only hearsay from occasional broadcasts about Bletchley Park and the Enigma code I have always had a rather glamorous notion of the place, a hothouse of a select group of brilliant people who put their minds to the cracking of the code and who had  eureka moment.  So the story of a rambling house populated by thousands of men and women, recruited in sometimes  most chancey and haphazard ways in order to set about the long slog of the interception and decoding bit by bit of the German code, was a revelation. McKay manages to convey from the outset that there was an atmosphere of informality and disorganisation at the house that was overcome by the British talent getting on with things.

I loved the way Sinclair McKay tells a story of human beings, sometimes so aristocratic, and others so ordinary who were united in loyalty to their mission.  A loyalty so solid that it persisted into this century.  The staff at Bletchley Park were secretive even between themselves.  Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of their story is that they kept it secret for so long: most veterans did not even tell their families what they had been up to, and only confessed when the cat was officially let out of the bag 30 years later.

So Bletchley was staffed by a motley collection of people, cryptographers, mathematicians, Egyptologists, linguists, astrologers. Sometimes it was down to who you knew in upper circles, who for example a relative played golf with.  The inmates had been recruited from all walks of life. Debutantes and working-class girls mixed with mathematicians, servicemen and university lecturers in an environment where the normal class divisions and deference for rank no longer seemed to apply. They entertained themselves by putting on their own shows and music recitals, playing tennis and swimming in the manor house lake. They smuggled barrels of cider into their rooms, worried about how to make their rations last, and fell in love among the clattering machinery.

I loved the anecdotal bits, like the fact that code-breaking machines that were cobbled together with everyday objects such as sticking plasters and pieces of string – one of these machines was actually called the “Heath Robinson”. And yet of enduring significance apart from the immediate benefit of shortening war I learnt that the forerunner of the computer was created here. 

The setting up of Bletchley Park was rather amateur at the outset, described endearingly by the author.  Those it brought together were united in a common and vital task.  I think it must have been very exciting to be involved in such a crucial and unique part of the war effort.  Cushioned from many of the vicissitudes of living in wartime Britain, working in that rarified atmosphere seems very glamorous to me, being a committed crossworder and puzzler.  I have a Codeword app on my iPad which I love.  It was real cloak and dagger stuff that resulted in the establishment of a very professional organisation derived from the best of human endeavour, ingenuity and commitment. 

Having read this book I now feel I must visit the place to see it for myself.  Does anyone want to join me?