The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
At last, a second Pilgrim arrives – covered in gore
Terry Hayes’s long-awaited new thriller is messy but dizzying fun
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It has been a long decade for those of us awaiting a follow-up to Terry Hayes’s debut thriller I Am Pilgrim (2013). No other recent thriller has matched its level of excitement: to achieve a comparable adrenalin rush, you would have to abandon your sofa and go bungee-jumping. The tale of an American secret agent tasked with preventing a Saudi terrorist from unleashing a deadly smallpox virus, Hayes’s novel seemed for once to justify the epithet of “epic”, which can usually be dismissed, when applied to thrillers, as a euphemism for “too long”.
There was plenty with which to find fault – nobody would say that Hayes, best known previously as a screenwriter on the Mad Max films in the 1980s, is a master of style or characterisation – but there was something elemental about the book, a rare sense that the outcome of its contests of brain and brawn really mattered.
But can the trick be pulled off twice? The long wait for The Year of the Locust has hardly induced optimism among Pilgrim’s devotees. A teasing couple of chapters were released in 2015, but since then the novel’s advertised date of publication has been pushed back so many times that it started to look as though Prince Louis’s debut tell-all memoir would appear first. Yet, with only a few weeks’ notice from its publisher, The Year of the Locust has landed – and if Hayes was overawed at any point by the challenge of living up to I Am Pilgrim, it doesn’t show.
This book is, for the most part, as thrilling and compelling as its predecessor, and even more ambitious in scope, breaking new generic ground. Although it deals with a new set of characters, it occupies familiar terrorist-hunting territory. CIA agent Kane
– not his real name, although when we do eventually find out what that is, we gain a clue to one of Hayes’s literary influences – specialises in missions in
“Denied Access
Areas”: when you need somebody to pop over to Russia or North Korea, he’s the chap you send.
The CIA gets wind of a terrorist “spectacular” planned for Thanksgiving by the Army of the Pure, an offshoot of Isis hunkering down “among the granite pillars, ancient villages and hidden valleys of the frontier between Pakistan and Iran”. Kane is dispatched to the border badlands, and there follow hundreds of pages of hair’s-breadth escapes against a soundscape of spurting blood and crunching bone.
The only clue to any possible difficulties Hayes might have had in the writing is that Kane’s mission comes to a climax fairly early, and then, after the novel has trodden water for a little while, he embarks on another one: there’s a slight sense of cut-and-shut. While the first half chronicles events you might expect to read about in tomorrow’s newspaper, the second half is an excursion into sci-fi.
There’s no question that Hayes’s writing is often ludicrously overblown; there are even times, as when the head of the CIA feels the need to explain to his staff who Yuri Gagarin was, that you feel as though Dan Brown had been let loose on the manuscript. But it hardly matters, because Hayes has been blessed with worldbuilding skills that no other thriller writer at work today can equal. He evokes the starkness of the borderlands beautifully, but his depiction of the workings of the CIA HQ at Langley is just as solidly convincing: compare this with the thrillers written by Mr or Mrs Clinton, and you come away feeling that Hayes is the one who has more inside knowledge.
Hayes’s ability to imagine ways in which Kane can harness the latest technology to aid his mission outsoars that of his rivals, as does his ingenuity in devising lowtech ways for Kane to get out of a fix when separated from his Q Branch-style gadgets. And it hardly seems adequate to say that Kane is a character for whom you can’t help rooting: Hayes has the magical ability to make you believe that this is the one man who can save the world. The result is that The Year of the Locust has some of the resonance of a myth.