Terry Hayes, English-Australian screenwriter and novelist
I think it was John Irving, the winner of both the National Book Award for a novel and the Oscar for a screenplay, who said that writing a movie is like swimming in a bath and writing a novel is like swimming in the ocean. T.H.
I Am Pilgrim has to be the holiday read to top all holiday reads!
And despite living up to the hype slashed all over its covers, it is also not what I expected. But it is long: 888p. It begins traditionally enough with a baffling crime seemingly unsolvable and then several chapters of interconnected back stories. Then in Part 2 another novel begins: the development of a young jihadist, simply known as The Saracen, and his decades long quest to bring down America and so similarly destroy its ally, the Saud family, rulers of Saudi Arabia, whose leaders murdered his father. It reads like a film script; not surprising since Hayes is a noted screenwriter, with short chapters, each like a single-set scene with usually a stinger of a last line; I call them waterfalls: they link smartly into the next scene, or, in a writing trope, they lead you to hastily turn the page. Lines like, ‘I was in the North Tower when it came down’ and ‘It was time to enter the dark and brooding house’ and ‘… it was a terrible thing I ended up doing to him.’
And then there’s the simple lists of what he plans to do and the outcomes he expects, to be followed by another page turning device: predicated hindsight – lines like “but I couldn’t’ve been more wrong” or “I should’ve taken more notice of the photo but I didn’t.” And the interest level goes up a notch or three.
The plot is international: Manhattan, Bodrum, Berlin, Jeddah, and the mountains of the Hindu Kush. The threat is not nuclear, or extraterrestrial, but, ironically for the times, viral. Firstly there is the murder in a sleazy hotel in Manhattan: a woman’s body is found in a bath full of acid, face down but because of the acid she has no face, and her fingertips have been removed as well as all her teeth. She is unidentifiable.
There is the first-person hero: a spook, an intelligence officer, a spy, a detective, and all-round nice guy who isn’t adverse to doing unspeakable things but only because he has to. He has many names so you are never sure which name is real. The villain, The Saracen, you know as a teenager and understand why he becomes the deliverer of evil; you almost like him. However, his unspeakable deeds are worse.
But then there is a death in Bodrum, Turkey, which the local authorities are convinced was due to misadventure. Our man knows it’s murder but needs to prove it. And all the while we jump back to The Saracen who is consolidating his self-manufactured weapon of mass destruction, starting with medical school. His is a very long term plan.
The faceless woman in Manhattan. The Saudi teen with revenge via mass-death on his mind. And a drug dazed tourist falling over a cliff to his death in Bodrum. Are they linked? Of course they are but for most of the book it’s hard to see how. But the deadly virus is manufactured, tested, packaged into 10,000 vials, and posted; the Saracen’s job is done. Our man’s task is to find out how and where the shipment is and when it will land. The climax is unputdownable!
Terry Hayes was born in Sussex in the UK but his family moved to Australia when he was five. As an adult after working as a journalist and investigative reporter he was hired by George Millar to do the novelisation of the original film, Mad Max (1979) and then subsequently several other Mad Max reincarnations and worked as a producer and/or screenwriter for TV shows like The Dismissal (1983), Bodyline (1984), Vietnam (1987) and Bangkok Hilton (1989) and several movies, including The Year My Voice Broke (1987), Dead Calm (1989), Payback (1999), and From Hell (2001). I Am Pilgrim (2013) is his debut novel and his second The Year of the Locust is yet to be released. MGM has acquired the film rights to Pilgrim with Hayes as writer but I wouldn’t be surprised if the project is re-done as a TV series; a far more suitable format for such a sprawling yarn, in my opinion.
Here is a very interesting, although over an hour long, interview with Hayes about writing I Am Pilgrim and where the inspiration came from.
I place a lot of importance on the first page of a novel, and William Boyd’s first page of Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009) is a doozy.
It almost made me forget the book I was reading and move quickly on to the second page and the third… and …
Page one is perfectly in tune with the marketing cover design:
…swept along with the thundering narrative tide – Observer.
A thriller of hide and seek among London’s low life. – Tatler
A storm of a story – Daily Mirror
A compelling fugitive chase … – Evening Standard Books of the Year
I can’t remember when I’ve had a more exciting read. – Antonia Fraser
Thrilling, hilarious, intricately plotted and terrifically readable – Craig Raine, TLS Books of the Year;
and the best one saved for the front cover:
A deft combination of suspense and literature. – Stephen King
I was hooked and looked forward eagerly to starting it.
And the opening of the story doesn’t disappoint. A successful and upwardly mobile climatologist, Adam Kindred, goes into a cafe after a very important job interview, a job that could define his career, to wind down. He makes casual conversation with a man at the next table, a man who leaves behind a file. Adam surveys the technically challenging documents and finds a phone number which he rings and arranges to return the file to the man’s hotel room. When he arrives he finds the man on his bed with a knife in his chest. The man demands Adam pulls it out. “Pull it out!” Adam obeys and promptly the man dies leaving Adam with the bloody murder weapon in his own hand – and the murderer out on the balcony. He runs.
He runs and disappears; and it’s the disappearing and the people he discovers on the way that take up the bulk of the novel. This is fascinating but not particularly thrilling, in the sense that a thriller is thrilling. His particular method of disappearing is simple and surprisingly effective. He completely avoids the modern world that is defined by electronics. He doesn’t use his smartphone and he doesn’t use his credit card; the devices that make any human being knowable and traceable.
He is forced to sleep under a bush under a bridge; he is forced to count every penny he has in his pocket and use it wisely, he is forced to eat a seagull; he is forced to beg, and develops an intriguing, if dishonest, but effective method; he is forced to change his appearance – from a clean-shaven man with a head of hair to a bearded baldy; he is forced into a saintly refuge where he garners a new name, new friends, and is taken in by a prostitute called Mhouse – a wonderful literary creation – and her two-year old son, Ly-on whom she drugs as she can’t always afford a baby sitter. Through luck and circumstances of his own making he obtains yet another identity and consolidates that identity with a credit card and a smartphone. He turns into someone else.
Of course the police are after him as well as the murderer and the murderer’s superiors and these characters are equally interesting; but of course, they are after Adam Kindred, a man who no longer exists. There are close-shaves and the stakes are high, but there is also romance and an ending that I won’t go into. No spoilers here.
I have been hearing about William Boyd for some time. He is a playwright, short story writer, screenwriter, and director and the author of highly praised and award winning books; he has been on the Booker Prize list twice and won the Costa Book of the Year in 2006 with his novel Restless; and I also understand why he was chosen by the Ian Fleming estate to write a James Bond novel called Solo which came out in 2013. I get the feeling that Ordinary Thunderstorms is one of his minor works and while I enjoyed it, it’s interesting and entertaining but not accurately reflected by the hype on the cover.
What did someone say once about how not to judge a book?
There are many enjoyable videos of William Boyd on Youtube such as this one: An evening with the Sunday Times bestselling author, recorded at the Duchess Theatre 24 September 2018.
You can find many books by William Boyd, including Ordinary Thunderstorms, in various formats here.
The first plot points give intensely conflicting actions, like a wife expressing deep love for her husband, then a day later she is discovered with a gun in her hand and her husband tied to a chair with five shots into his face, his blood mixed with hers as it drips from her slashed wrists, but she stands comatosed, but alive, and refuses to speak.
Then the first person narrator, an authoritative figure like a lawyer, doctor, or detective tries to get the woman to speak and is determined to solve the seemingly unsolvable mystery. There are no witnesses and the case seems cut and dried. He, and increasingly she these days, talks to people involved with the woman, and/or her journal, or long lost sister / lover / colleague, is discovered and details emerge about her history, her marriage, her family, her work colleagues which intermingle simultaneously with details of the narrator’s history, marriage, family, and work colleagues until a complicated web of possible motives, secrets, jealousies, and, of course, red herrings swim around your brain leading you to think, at various moments, ‘Oh, I know who did it!’ and then you are encouraged more in your beliefs and then suddenly they are dashed, or seemingly dashed, onto the rocks of evidence, only to emerge later as indeed a possibility, but maybe not.
Sometimes you are right and you’re left with a scraggy feeling of disappointment causing you to discard the book after ‘the end’, if you get that far, and to search for a different thriller writer.
Sometimes you are wrong and rarely, very rarely, you are hit over the head with the truth at the very moment of reading it, and you gasp.
The Silent Patient is one of those.
Alex Michaelides is a screenwriter of Greek-Cypriot/English extraction and lives in London. This is his first novel.
Adding to this mix of intrigue, and as a source of clues, are photo-realistic paintings – the woman, Alicia Berenson, is an artist; a Greek tragedy of love and resurrection by Euripides, Alcestis – the name of a Berenson self-portrait; and a secure psychiatric facility, The Grove, where our first-person narrator, Theo Faber, works and where Alicia is incarcerated.
At times the writing feels formulaic but it is, after all, a ‘No.1 New York Times Bestseller’ so you are warned. The film rights have been snapped up by Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production company, as part of its next three year plan and is currently listed as ‘in development’.
I rarely read thrillers – generally, I don’t care who did it – but this one kept me reading and what I love about this book is that the very way it’s written is a clue to, not who did it, but what caused it to be done, and that it is not a simple first-person narrative: when you’ve read it you realise that what you’ve read is only possible because you’ve read it. Enough said. No spoilers here.
The language is simple and direct and the pages are very easily turned. I read this in two afternoons. It’s the perfect airport novel, great escapism, entertaining, and Mr. Michaelides is grinning all the way to the good life. Smart Alex!
James D. “Jim” Grant, better known by his pen name Lee Child, is a British writer, who for many years worked at the BBC and Granada and was involved in the production of many popular television drama series. After being retrenched he took up writing: his first Jack Reacher novel appeared in 1997. He now lives in New York City.
It’s not that I’m an ‘author snob’ – although I can understand why that might be true – it’s just that procedural crime, thrillers, page-turners and the like, whether books, films or TV series, usually boor me. I just don’t care enough: who did it, how they did it, why, where, and, well … who cares? But I decided to give Lee Child a go. Everyone else is. This one, Personal (2014) is #19 of 23 and counting. He produces one bestseller every year.
I haven’t tried Stephen King, either. Yes, I know, I know. I should!
I was nearly put off by the quote, from the Independent, on the cover of this one: “Pulseracing”. See it? It’s not even a word, it’s two words: Pulse racing. It means that it makes your pulse race; not the book’s pulse, whereas … Oh, forget it! See what I mean?
I place a lot of faith in page one. Here is the first paragraph of this page one:
Eight days ago my life was an up and down affair. Some of it good. Some of it not so good. Most of it uneventful. Long slow periods of nothing much, with occasional bursts of something. Like the army itself. Which is how they found me. You can leave the army, but the army doesn’t leave you. Not always. Not completely.
Chatty. Casual. Matey. Short sentences, even if some of those short sentences aren’t actual sentences (no verb) but are there, nonetheless, courtesy of authorial licence. But it was the line, “Which is how they found me.” that sparked my interest.
The chapters are short – 58 in this one – and each one is like a little scene from the movie (there’s bound to be one) with a chapter-ending waterfall, some no more than an amusement – “So I headed for the sound of her voice, and stepped into a room, and came face to face with myself.” – some a major plot point – ” …first a tiny pinprick of sudden light in the far distance, and then the snap of flags everywhere as a gust of wind blew by, and then Khenkin’s head blew apart, right next to my shoulder.” Although this is action, the first real action (p116), a death, it’s passive action: Reacher doesn’t do anything, it happens to him. Well, it was supposed to happen to him: that little gust of wind, not an act of god but one by the author, blew the initially accurate bullet off course.
I was getting a little restless.
The next chapter continues with the aftermath: “His shattered head hit me on the way down and left a red and grey slick on the shoulder of my jacket. I remember thinking Damn, that was brand new, …” Such black-humoured, character-layering, Tarantino-esque moments are common in popular culture today. It’s been 23 years since Pulp Fiction – a cliche yet?
I re-arranged myself in my seat.
It took another 78 pages to get to the first piece of thrilling action: Reacher violently and swiftly overpowers 2 thugs masquerading as policemen; kills one, maims the other, but in the description of this, this:
… and launched the same elbow at the first guy, who was a big strong man, but clearly not much of a fighter. Maybe he had gotten too comfortable with getting by on appearance and reputation alone. Maybe it was years since he had been involved in an actual scuffle. The only way to deal with a sudden incoming elbow was to twist and drive forward and take it on the meat of the upper arm, which is also painful and sometimes numbing, but generally you stay in your feet. But the guy went the other way. He chose the wrong option. He reared up and back…
Three lengthly sentences of explanation, instruction, and justification in the middle of a description of a frenzied fight. This surprised me. But what surprised me more was that it didn’t matter. I was with him all the way. This book is in the first person, which can be limiting: the hero in a first person narrative only knows what they know, but the first person is IN the action, not outside it, and such thoughts and musings don’t subvert the action; the reader is with the narrator, safely in his (the author’s) hands.
This piece of action went on for three chapters and included this description of a man, a villain obviously, getting out of, and back into, a car:
And then a giant climbed out. He led with a bent head and a bent back, folded at the waist, folded at the knees, and then he straightened up in stages, like a complex mechanism, like a child’s toy that starts out as a squat dump truck and then clicks open, one component after another, to reveal an action figure. He was huge. … The action figure became a dump truck again. He bent his knees, and bent at his waist, and tucked in his elbows, and hunched his shoulders, and ducked his head, and backed butt-first into his seat.
And this piece of light-hearted description of a “hideous old farm vehicle” gearing up for motion:
The transmission was slower than the postal service. She rattled the selector into reverse, and all the mechanical parts inside called the roll and counted a quorum and set about deciding what to do. Which required a lengthy debate, apparently, because it was whole seconds before the truck lurched backward. She turned the wheel, which looked like hard work, and then she jammed the selector into a forward gear, and first of all the reversing committee wound up its business and approved its minutes and exited the room, and then the forward crew signed on and got comfortable, and a motion was tabled, seconded and discussed. More whole seconds passed, and then the truck slouched forward …
And it reads so well. I read it many times, and each time it made me smile. Great creative passages like these are worth the time and put this thriller writer a little above the rest, in this, my learning opinion.
But, back to the action, the second piece of action. Serious action only 23 pages on. Similar to the first but on a bigger scale. The first was 2 men, dressed like, but not, policemen asking Reacher and partner, Casey Nice, (her name. Nice.) to nicely get into the back of a van. Reacher didn’t oblige. The second was not a van but a one-door-one-window room behind an auto-shop which they, foolishly it turned out, walked into, with not 2 men present but 4 outside. “He closed the door behind him. And locked it.” End of chapter. The next chapter opens with just over 2 pages describing the 6 seconds of deductive thought going through Reacher’s mind after the click of the lock. This for two reasons: 1) it shows you what a smart-arse our hero is, and 2) it sets the time scale, 100-ish words per second. Reacher and Nice have a little chat which ends with them totting up what they have. A chair, a desk, a dirty jumper in a drawer, an arm chair, a window, a locked door. She says, “We’ve got nothing.” He says, “We’ve got what we’ve got.” “What are we going to do?” And the chapter ends with
So I told her what, and we rehearsed it carefully, over and over again, and then we started doing it.
Note the verb tense. Not the past tense, and then we did it = action completed; but the past continuous tense: and then we started doing it = action not finished yet. (Now, that’s a waterfall!)
Well, you’ve just got to turn the page!
So, man number 1 bursts into the room lured by the noise of the armchair going though the window, and while Nice deals with him with her hand wrapped in the dirty jumper and holding a large slither of glass (“Aim for his eye.” She does), Reacher quickly renders unsuspecting but hurrying man number 2 unconscious with the chair and then confronts men numbers 3 and 4, not in the boxed room but in the auto-workshop, bigger space, more to play with, where he can see both of them at once. He deals with them, expertly of course, telling us how and when and why they made the wrong choices and why he didn’t – he’s a smart-arse remember, taking about 1500 words, which adds up to 15 seconds of screen time, just over 5 pages of book time. So that’s how you write action! The chapter ends with
Then I hustled back to the boxed-off room, to see how Casey Nice was doing.
Would you stop there and start preparing dinner?
However, after this bit of page-turning there was over 100 pages of chat, explanation, assumptions, predictions and justification; a long wait for more thrills. This being a ‘thriller’. In fact in terms of pages, ‘thrills’ take up a very small number indeed. Or have I been seduced by the jacket quotes “Another cracker …” “The best one yet.” “Generates relentless momentum … Child’s dedication to suspense … approaches the Hitchcockian” and Child’s soaring reputation? Yes, the thrills happen expertly but not very often. Relentless momentum? I don’t think so.
Oh, the plot? Some sniper has taken a potshot at the French president. The Russians, French, and the British all have their theories, but the Americans know who it was, and the only man to find him is Reacher. But then we learn that the French president was only a decoy/rehearsal; there’s a G8 summit coming up in London. So who’s the target?However on the way there’s two London gangs who get involved – one led by that giant! And, yes, the climax is in the giant’s house where everything is 50% bigger than a normal house (great design opportunity for the movie-version) but Child throws a naked woman in the final scene. Tacky, but you’ve got to be true to the genre, I suppose.
The first Jack Reacher movie, One Shot, of book No. 9, came out in 2012. Child wasn’t impressed, I hear: Reacher is more the build and temperament of a beefy Arni Schwarzenegger, not a weedy Tom Cruise. So we’ll see if there’s more.
Child’s Reacher #20 is in the 3rd person, which might be an interesting comparison to this one in the 1st. But, maybe I am a snob when it comes to airport genres, after all. No. 20, Make Me (2015) is there on the shelf. I’ll think about it.
You can find Lee Child novels, well, … everywhere. Read one and tell me what you think.
Northern Ireland born Canadian writer BRIAN MOORE (1921 – 1999)
This review does not contain spoilers.
With Islam tearing itself, and most of the Middle East, apart at the seams because of denominational, ideological, and doctrinal differences it is easy to forget that Christianity has had it’s own experience of hatred, violence, bloodshed, and the corrosion of legal governance because of similar differences, and not that long ago: Northern Ireland; and the fact that the current conflict contains a large dose of post-colonial revenge doesn’t make it more different, it makes it more the same, just on a larger, international scale.
Brain Moore (1921 – 1999) Northern Irish born Canadian novelist wrote much about his homeland, the Troubles, and in no uncertain terms placed most of the blame on the Christian teachings – on both sides – of hate, entitlement, and rightness. Many of his books have been adapted for the screen: Intent to Kill, The Luck of Ginger, Coffey, Catholics, Black Robe, and most notably The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987) starring Maggie Smith. He also wrote screenplays, some based on his own prose, but also, among many, Hitchcock’s Torn Curtin (1966). Graeme Green always liked to cite Moore as his favourite living novelist which was flattering but also, according to Moore, “a bit of an albatross.”
His 1990 and Man Booker Prize nominated novel Lies of Silence (he was nominated three times) is set squarely in the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland. Michael Dillon, a failed writer, now successful hotel manager in Belfast, is forced by masked IRA house-invaders to commit an act of terror or his wife will be killed. This in itself is a strong set-up but Moore raises the stakes. On the night of the house invasion he plans to tell his wife he wants a divorce, he has fallen in love with someone else and plans tomorrow to leave with her for London, but instead of the truth his wife’s insecurity about her looks and job prospects, and his guilt no doubt, causes him to try and bolster her lack of self-confidence and instead of the truth he is forced to let her believe that she is a woman a husband would never leave. They sleep. He will tell her in the morning but he never gets the chance. It’s a page turner; but more so because of the additional drama supplied by themes of religious hypocrisy, cowardice, faithfulness, loyalty, love and dishonour.
I thought all Booker Prize nominated novels were high on character, low on plot. Not this one; in fact plot takes pride of place but character isn’t neglected; it is effectively painted through, among other things, dialogue; heartening since there is a modern trend, particularly in Australia, where dialogue is looked down upon as a novelistic tool. Moira, Dillon’s beautiful wife, more beautiful than his mistress, Andrea, is cleverly painted through what she says and how she says it. She is no shrinking violet; she is ballsy, determined, and sassy – she stands up to the IRA home invaders – but at the same time insecure, bulimic, and frightened. Dillion’s ‘Soloman’s Choice’, makes for a great plot-driver: the terror target is his own hotel and the possible dead, by his hand, would include his staff, guests, and a right-wing preacher who is in fact the actual target of the attack. Dillion hates him but in the ‘will I/won’t I save my staff or my wife’ his duty to his staff and guests – hundreds of them – is compromised by the fact that if he saves them he also saves the preacher-arshole, who he believes deserves a bomb. I’m not spoiling it for you; this is just the set-up.
After reading and blogging about A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara – a tome the size of a first-issue mobile-phone – remember them? – I raced through Moore’s and not just because of its normal paperback size: it was hard to put down. In the current reader-esque universe of keeping-up-with-the-latest-work-of-your-literary-heroes it’s very likely that you may have missed Brian Moore, I did – there’s so much to read! – but Moore is worth searching out if only as a relief from the intense literary fiction of today.
In his obituary in the Guardian (1999) the writer succinctly described Moore’s literary output as continually testing “even further the unremitting search of humanity for certainties in a remarkably unreliable universe. Almost two decades on and in another century that universe is, unfortunately, still remarkably unreliable.
When a friend gave me this book to read he said, “This is the best book I’ve read in ages.” I know what he means.
However Jacqueline Rose in The London Review of Books September 10, 2015 wasn’t keen to read it, having just read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl “… but I read on anyway, wanting to know more or less from page one why such hatred of women would be so popular.” I know what she means.
The Girl on The Train is about three women, Rachel (the girl on the train), Anna, the new wife of Rachel’s ex-husband, and Megan, a neighbour. All, one or two of them, are self-delusional, unemployed, unemployable, fat, barren, alcoholic, promiscuous, neglectful, possessive, lazy, a bad liar, vain, unwashed, treacherous, adulterous, stupid, flirtatious, misguided, bored, interfering, paranoid, insane, obsessive and one of them becomes a corpse. Collectively they exhibit the above attributes in the never-ending pursuit, entrapment of, and submission to men with the oft-stated, but never achieved, goal of happiness. Even Cathy, sane Cathy, Rachel’s long-suffering flat-mate has been dating her goal, Damien, for over two years without once being invited to meet his mother. We never meet Damien but the other men, real men, the ones these women are fixated on aren’t much better: Tom, Anna’s husband and Rachel’s ex; Scott, Megan’s husband; and Kamal Abdic, a ex-refugee and therapist. Their common attributes are handsome, sexy, successful and only one of them is a liar. If you only like reading books about nice people don’t read this book.
However I find Jacqueline Rose’s profiling of women, based on these characters, going way too far. These characters say more about the writer, Paula Hawkins, than about women in general; and anyway profiling is so unPC. If a woman wants to write about dysfunctional women searching for salvation amidst functional men she can.
But, hey! It’s a thriller, a fiction, an entertainment (it’s soon to be a movie) and a great way to spend a hot lazy humid weekend by the pool or under a fan.
What is interesting about this story is the way Hawkins tells it. She uses three first person narratives usually, but not always, in the present tense to tell the story, like diary entries. They are immediate, engaging and at times enthralling. Each section is headed with a woman’s name (Rachel, Megan or Anna), the time, day, date, and year. Keep track of these: note them. This confessional flavour is attractive in a personal gossipy sense that we all, let’s face it, enjoy. Hawkin’s characters don’t hold back: we hear all about their dreams, fears, desires, failures, fantasies, bad decisions, flights of delusion, lies, and bad bodily maintenance practices. If you are deluded by what they tell you they are deluding themselves as well. Keep this in mind.
Occasionally towards the end you can sense the plot-cogs turning: an authorial problem, and there’s a little soapy taste about the love-hate-love machinations in the minds of the women but it’s a great summer read.
Michael K Freundt 