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

Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan is a multi-award-winning American novelist and short story writer.  She won the Pulitzer in 2011 for A Visit from the Goon Squad.  Manhattan Beach is her fifth novel.  

Amazon says: 
Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression.

'We're going to see the sea,' Anna whispered.

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles.

Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career as a Ziegfield folly, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a night club, she chances to meet Styles, the man she visited with her father before he vanished, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have been murdered.

Mesmerizing, hauntingly beautiful, with the pace and atmosphere of a noir thriller and a wealth of detail about organized crime, the merchant marine and the clash of classes in New York, Egan's first historical novel is a masterpiece, a deft, startling, intimate exploration of a transformative moment in the lives of women and men, America and the world. Manhattan Beach is a magnificent novel by one of the greatest writers of our time.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/29/manhattan-beach-jennifer-egan-review

What I thought:
Much of the action is set in the New York dockyard during World War II.  The narrative is a female voice.  Well constructed, the novel moves between the characters and timescales.  Some of the most vivid writing centres around Anna's attempts and ultimate success at becoming a sub aqua diver.  I did feel, as did a fellow reader when we discussed it, that the ending was rushed.  As the Guardian reviewer notes, the author decided to withhold crucial scenes until late in the book and I found this unsatisfactory.   It seemed to be late in the day to have those revelations.  It was this that gave the impression of an abrupt ending. 

  

Murders with a Twist

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s carer in his squalid home and her day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city.

In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a handsome prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her
wildest imaginings.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfega was shortlisted for the Man Booker 2016, nominated for three other literary prizes and book of the year for the Times, Observer and Daily Telegraph.  That is quite an accolade.

His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

The year is 1869. A brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands leads to the arrest of a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae. A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but it falls to the country s finest legal and psychiatric minds to uncover what drove him to commit such merciless acts of violence. Was he mad? Only the persuasive powers of his advocate stand between Macrae and the gallows.

Graeme Macrae Burnet tells an irresistible and original story about the provisional nature of truth, even when the facts seem clear. His Bloody Project is a mesmerising literary thriller set in an unforgiving landscape where the exercise of power is arbitrary.

'The book’s pretence at veracity, as well as being a literary jeux d’esprit, brings an extraordinary historical period into focus, while the multiple unreliable perspectives are designed to keep the audience wondering, throughout the novel and beyond. This is a fiendishly readable tale that richly deserves the wider attention the Booker has brought it.'  Guardian Review.

To read the full review follow this link:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/12/his-bloody-project-by-graeme-macrae-burnet-review