I AM PILGRIM by Terry Hayes (2014)

"Nobody’s ever been arrested for a murder; they have only ever been arrested for not planning it properly."

THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER-FREE

I Am Pilgrim makes one enormous mistake right from the start: it takes its ridiculous premise far too seriously. Scott Murdock, codename: Pilgrim, is the retired commander of The Division, an intelligence agency so secret that even POTUS doesn’t know it exists. Pilgrim is reluctantly dragged back into the “secret world” when a devout Muslim, codename: the Saracen, takes it upon himself to inflict the “soft death of America” by creating a strain of smallpox that is immune to the smallpox vaccine and releasing it in the US — as revenge for his father’s beheading in theKingdom of Saudi ARabia. (How it’s is the fault of the USA may have been established at some point, but the connection was so tenuous that I don’t remember what it may have been anymore.) This is, somewhat objectively, a ludicrous concept, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Yet I Am Pilgrim takes itself so seriously, and shows so little awareness of its own melodrama, that the overall effect becomes grandiose and self-indulgent. It’s like the novel version of a Quentin Tarantino film. Needless to say, I did not enjoy this book, and I am itching to tell you why. 

My first problem with this book is that the point of view makes no sense for the medium in which the story is told. Most novels are told in one of two points of view: first person, when ‘I’ am telling the story about ‘me’; or third person omniscient, when an all-knowing third party narrates the protagonist’s story, ‘omniscient’ due to their knowledge and information to which the protagonist doesn’t have access. With I Am Pilgrim, Terry Hayes made the peculiar decision to hybridise the two into first person omniscient: the protagonist is the narrator and thus has access to his own thoughts and feelings, but also has access to information he usually wouldn’t, such as the thoughts and feelings of other characters. What I find most confusing about the way this point of view functions in the novel is that we have no frame of reference as to the point in the future from which Pilgrim is telling the story, nor do we ever learn how he can access the minds of the other characters. Take the Saracen: since the book is written in first person from Pilgrim’s point of view, we should not see the Saracen’s thoughts — and even if Pilgrim learns about his actions in hindsight, there should still be only a surface-level amount of detail. Yet we receive an account of the Saracen’s story that is so meticulously detailed, it’s almost as if Hayes has switched to a third-party, third person omniscient narrator, and I have a theory as to why. Before publishing this novel, Hayes was a screenwriter most notable for Mad Max 2 (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). In movies, you can switch away from the protagonist to one of the other characters without issue, because traditional forms of point of view cease to exist on the screen — you can’t get into the characters’ minds in film as you can in books. Yet Hayes is so used to writing for the screen that he has applied film’s ability to oversee everything to his novel, to ill effect. The story became overly-detailed and confusing; Pilgrim would often spend so much time talking about the Saracen that it became unclear who was the main character. Out of all my issues with this book, this is the most technical, but it grated on me like nothing else. 

My second complaint is that I Am Pilgrim is extremely Islamophobic, racist, and misogynistic. The action/thriller genre is known for its stereotypical racial profiling when it comes to writing villains. Bad guys are usually one of three ethnicities: Russian, German, or Islamic. Hayes selected Islamic off the bad-guy-ethnicity wheel of fortune, and boy, did he come at it with a vengeance. This book is unbelievably racist and stereotypical towards Muslim people. It takes its inspiration from al-Qaeda and the Taliban and applies their radical interpretation of the Islamic faith to the entire Muslim population. The Saracen is a caricature of typical Muslim behaviour, and Pilgrim’s disdain for Islam, Saudi people, and the whole Muslim community. Problematically, the book justifies its anti-Islam stance through the fact that it is set only a few months after 9/11. I might have had slightly more patience with this abhorrent attitude if it was published in, like, 2002, but it came out five years ago. Thirteen years after the September 11th attacks, and Hayes was still under the impression that it was acceptable to blame the entire Muslim community for the isolated act of violence of one fanatical group. There’s also a general level of hatred for all ethnicities that are not Caucasian. One quote summarises it pretty well: 

I was angry at the fucking Chinese for not controlling the wholesale piracy of other people’s ideas and products [...] and I was angry at Arabs who thought that the bigger the body count, the greater the victory (Hayes, 2014).

I mean, really? You’re going to pin something as abstract as “the wholesale piracy of other people’s ideas and products” on the entire Chinese race? Perhaps I’m being needlessly picky, but this seems both ridiculous and extremely telling of the author’s state of mind — and I haven’t even mentioned the rampant misogyny yet. Women are awarded absolutely no respect in this book. They are objects existing solely for Pilgrim’s appraisal, and the first things he describes every time he encounters a new woman are their gorgeous bodies: their high cheekbones, their huge breasts, their shapely asses, their comely legs. It is truly humiliating to read a book like this and watch every female character be immediately reduced to her physical assets. Authors are not their characters, but Pilgrim’s passionate distaste for women and people of colour had an unfortunate authorial authenticity that left a bad taste in my mouth.  

Have I mentioned that Pilgrim is the greatest intelligence agent of all time? Because if I haven’t, Pilgrim would be happy to remind you a hundred more times, just like he does in the book. Pilgrim’s fake-humble attitude, which barely masks his overwhelming arrogance, dominates every page. He’s the world’s greatest intelligence agent, the best the secret world has ever known. We know this because of the countless times Pilgrim tells us that he is the world’s greatest intelligence agent, the best the secret world has ever known. But don’t worry: he’s a very modest man. Every reminder that he is the world’s greatest intelligence agent is prefaced with some variation on "I don't think I'm a boastful person, but...”, just so you’re left in no doubt that even though he’s world class, he’s still humble. Pilgrim is constantly reassuring the reader that yes, he’s the world’s greatest spy, he’s the adoptive child of billionaires, he’s attended only the most elite private schools throughout his education and has never had to truly suffer a day in his life, but guys, he didn’t ask for this life. He didn’t ask to be so brilliant that he becomes the leader of the world’s most elusive intelligence group in his mid-twenties. He didn’t ask to be adopted by billionaires. He didn’t ask to be a genius who has the privilege of dropping out of Harvard Medical School because it wasn't meaningful enough. We’re supposed to reconcile the fact that Pilgrim is an insufferable, egotistical prick with the fact that he didn’t ask for any of this, and perhaps this would be possible if he wasn’t such an enormous douchebag, but he is, so it’s not. 

I Am Pilgrim is a wildly popular book, so my opinion is certainly unpopular, but I stand by my belief that all 55,000 people who gave this book a five-star rating on Goodreads are idiots and my opinion is correct. (My cousin also rated this book five stars, so I hope she doesn’t read this.) This book was an insufferably long snooze-fest that had the potential to be a fun and animated story, but was unfortunately executed in the wrong way and took itself far too seriously for me to enjoy it in any legitimate fashion.

WORKS CITED

Cooper, J. K. (2014, August 21). So Far ‘I Am Pilgrim’ Is the Best Book of 2014. Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/so-far-i-am-pilgrim-is-th_b_5518631. 

Erin. (2017, January 29). I am Pilgrim: Arrogant. Retrieved from https://literaryvice.ca/2014/11/22/i-am-pilgrim-arrogant/. 

Hayes, T. (2014). I Am Pilgrim. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

May, E. (2016, May 15). Emily May's review of I Am Pilgrim. Retrieved December 10, 2019, from https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1639142185. 

Mendel, J. (n.d.). Fiction Book Review: I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes. Retrieved from https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-4391-7772-3.

Sharon. (2015, May 8). Sharon's review of I Am Pilgrim. Retrieved December 10, 2019, from https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1275014370. 

Zeko, M. (2019, September 11). An Electrifying Novel That Will Keep You Up Reading All Night. Retrieved from https://offtheshelf.com/2019/09/i-am-pilgrim-by-terry-hayes-review/.