“I pulled the Beretta out of my waistband and crept silently towards the door.” There's a certain goodwill one has for an old hand Hollywood scriptwriter whose first novel is a gargantuan slab of pulp fun but when that scriptwriter lives in Switzerland and thanks his lawyer in the acknowledgements you're not inclined to cut him as much slack as some young turk emerging blinking into the light. "I Am Pilgrim" is blatantly "The Satan Bug" meets "The Day Of The Jackal" and according to the cover blurb the only thriller you’ll need to read this year. Well five hundred pages in and we have false walls pivotting upwards in a house built by Nazis and suddenly the beating pulp heart of this novel is laid bare. “I Am Pilgrim” is a great big slice of cake, perfect beach fodder (your boss will read this beside the pool and press it on you when he returns) and a slum dunk for relatives who like a good yarn. My mother lapped it up. Yet for all it’s talk of Echelon and gene splicing and characters directly impacted by 9/11 its narrative and ideas are as old as the hills - this is a 700 page episode of "The Man From UNCLE" - and afterwards you’re not left with much to say beyond “golly, that was gripping” and “I certainly hope no one gets any bright ideas from all this.” The USP is how scary the old-school premise seems when it’s dressed up in modern clothes but frankly “Homeland” does that. “Spooks” used a similar premise as “I Am Pilgrim” for a whole season arc and when the cover story of a nuclear trigger is employed you suddenly get flashbacks to season whatever of "24". Plus Matt Helm would have wrapped this yarn up in 150 pages max. Kudos for the trip into the White House but, wistfully, the President is more Jed Bartlett than Donald Trump and the super dooper computer “Echelon” is depicted as jolly useful and benevolent despite the real-world NSA being far more malevolent and, unfortunately for the NHS, cack-handed. I wish something more than lip service had been paid to the moral complexities at work here. Hayes apparently has a couple of sequels lined up, natch, but the premise here seems pretty untoppable and he lacks a Lisbeth Salander to really jump start a franchise; Pilgrim himself is a pretty faceless fellow, any actor de jour could play him. The pages flutter by in their hundreds and the novel certainly has what Rider Haggard called “the Grip” but there ain’t much else that hasn't been done better elsewhere. Definitely recommended if you want something for the li-lo, but in the hope it proves a gateway drug to more toothsome fodder.
