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reubenhcomic 's review for:
I Am Pilgrim
by Terry Hayes
This book has been on my to-read shelf for a long time, and I was looking forward to a page-turning spy-mystery-thriller in the vein of Jason Bourne. Unfortunately, reading it over the last few weeks was more of a drawn-out disappointment.
In my opinion, at nearly 900 pages it's about a third longer than it needs to be. Fortunately the chapters are very short (most only 3 or 4 pages long) which made it easier to digest this elephant of a book one bite at a time.
The story has its moments. Our titular hero is the world's greatest crime scene investigator slash secret agent - he literally wrote the book on solving crimes committed in the hidden world of spies and government assassins. We meet him at the scene of a grisly murder in New York, and in the process of the investigation the narrative flashes back and forth along Pilgrim's past to piece together his complete memoirs from his upbringing by billionaire adoptive parents to his adventures in international espionage.
In the meantime, we follow our villain 'the Saracen' from the moment of radicalisation as a boy in Saudi Arabia, as he enacts his plan of vengeance - involving releasing a deadly virus into the world.
The two stories arc towards each other throughout the novel until they finally collide in the last hundred-odd pages where all the different tangents we've been dragged along are brought together in a conveniently packaged conclusion.
My overall impression of the story is that it's not nearly as smart as it wants to be. More than once, my disbelief was dislodged from its suspensions by far-fetched coincidences. And for a so called genius detective, our character seems to solve most of his problems thanks to intuition, and good luck. He comes across as smug, over privileged and uninteresting.
Furthermore the narrative reeks of American nationalist undertones, xenophobia, and often outright Islamophobia.
This isn't exactly a surprise - The 9/11 attacks in New York are a key motivator for certain characters, and are mentioned several times, and the Islamic terrorist villain, while well rounded, is ultimately a cliché.
In spite of these concerning undertones, the final line of the book still surprised me with a direct quote from the Bible. Ending this trudging Pilgrims progress with a full blown Messiah complex!
In my opinion, at nearly 900 pages it's about a third longer than it needs to be. Fortunately the chapters are very short (most only 3 or 4 pages long) which made it easier to digest this elephant of a book one bite at a time.
The story has its moments. Our titular hero is the world's greatest crime scene investigator slash secret agent - he literally wrote the book on solving crimes committed in the hidden world of spies and government assassins. We meet him at the scene of a grisly murder in New York, and in the process of the investigation the narrative flashes back and forth along Pilgrim's past to piece together his complete memoirs from his upbringing by billionaire adoptive parents to his adventures in international espionage.
In the meantime, we follow our villain 'the Saracen' from the moment of radicalisation as a boy in Saudi Arabia, as he enacts his plan of vengeance - involving releasing a deadly virus into the world.
The two stories arc towards each other throughout the novel until they finally collide in the last hundred-odd pages where all the different tangents we've been dragged along are brought together in a conveniently packaged conclusion.
My overall impression of the story is that it's not nearly as smart as it wants to be. More than once, my disbelief was dislodged from its suspensions by far-fetched coincidences. And for a so called genius detective, our character seems to solve most of his problems thanks to intuition, and good luck. He comes across as smug, over privileged and uninteresting.
Furthermore the narrative reeks of American nationalist undertones, xenophobia, and often outright Islamophobia.
This isn't exactly a surprise - The 9/11 attacks in New York are a key motivator for certain characters, and are mentioned several times, and the Islamic terrorist villain, while well rounded, is ultimately a cliché.
In spite of these concerning undertones, the final line of the book still surprised me with a direct quote from the Bible. Ending this trudging Pilgrims progress with a full blown Messiah complex!