Terry Hayes - I am Pilgrim

I cannot recall anytime when I have been as confused by what to feel about a book as I was about I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes (I read the Swedish translation by Örjan Sjögren.).

The plot surrounds "the Pilgrim". He is a super rich white American secret agent traveling the world catching bad guys. His "archenemy" is an islamist that he has to capture. Both of their backgrounds are explored in detail. I mean, there are even backstories to the backstories!

I had a teacher once who had worked as a taxi driver. He sometimes told us anecdots about the clients he had had during those days and what he had learned about people from them. One of them, reagarding male and female conversation did I find particularly interesting for a description of the writing in I am Pilgrim.

My teacher said that, based on conversations he had overheard from the backseat of the taxi as he was driving people around he could decipher two types of conversations. One could generally be ascribed to men and the other to women. The male one can be seen as a pretty straight line (one topic). It might from time to time deviate from it, but always got back to that first line pretty soon afterwards. The female conversation however is rather unstructured, meaning women tend to jump much more between topics and might also be discussing many topics together at the same time. If ever they do go back to the original topic, it can take quite awhile, when every other subject has been discussed. Since he told my class this, I have thought about it watching others have conversations and often find it to be true. What is interesting about I am Pilgrim is that it is written rather much like a female conversation. There are a lot of different anecdots from different times in the main character and his archenemy's lives, not always told in chronological order and after a while you start wondering when it is ever going to return to the bathroom with the dead girl that opens up the entire book.

One of the back stories within the backstories turned out to be the most interesting part of the book for me. It is when the Pilgrim tells us a story of how he and his adoptive father visited a lesser known concentration camp, Natzweider-Struthof, on the border between France and Germany in his youth. The Pilgrim talks about how emotional he got by a photo of a mother and her children as they walk to the gas chambers and I think we can all relate to that. Photos of the Holocast tend to leave a sense of horror and emotions in most of us. As an archaeologist however, I find his adoptive father's reaction to the pile of everyday items even more intriguing. The adoptive father says something about he never knowing how powerful simple things can be (Because I read the Swedish translation of the book I won't quote it because as can be seen by Google Translate Sings on Youtube, translation back to the original language might not work so well.).

Archaeology is all about researching how people are interaction with materialities. We have always interacted through them and we continue to do so. They are history in physical form. They make us remember. They make us reflect. They make us feel emotions. They can even make history more human and close! In a word that turns digital and immaterial more and more by the minute, I think it is important that materialities are used to keep us grounded in "the real world". I am not against digitalization. I think there are a lot of benefits. However it happens too quickly and unreflectively. I rarely blog about my profession, but this is something I think even non-archaeologists should be aware of and reflect upon from time to time.

But back to I am Pilgrim. Even though it got me hooked, I still cannot shake the fact that it is very much a tale about a white man written by a white man. Even the title indicates as much! It is good that Hayes tries to make him more "human" by having him react to a photo of Holocaust victims and he says he has no problems with female being the hitmen and he shows sympathy for the Romani people (Because I read the Swedish version I have no idea if the more degrading term for them was used in the original book as it was in the Swedish.). Hayes also give the islamistic sort of "archenemy" a (too) well-described backstory with a thoroughly explored motivation for going all extremist. It felt refreshing against the all too normal Hollywood "because they are evil"-approach. However as he describes himself as a super rich, super intelligent, super competent super secret super agent who makes a lot of mistakes (seriously every other chapter ends with him telling about a new one), but who people still think is the best at his job and who is the youngest boss the super secret super agent bureau has ever heard of, I cannot help thinking he would be completely dismissed as a Mary Sue character had he been a woman.