Before publishing this novel, Hayes was a screenwriter most notable for Mad Max 2 (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). 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. 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. 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.

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.

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. My first problem with this book is that the point of view makes no sense for the medium in which the story is told. Needless to say, I did not enjoy this book, and I am itching to tell you why. It’s like the novel version of a Quentin Tarantino film. 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.

(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. 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. Scott Murdock, codename: Pilgrim, is the retired commander of The Division, an intelligence agency so secret that even POTUS doesn’t know it exists.

I Am Pilgrim makes one enormous mistake right from the start: it takes its ridiculous premise far too seriously.

I am pilgrim novel