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nigellicus 's review for:

I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes
1.0

I did not like this at all. So why the hell did I give it five stars? I'm an idiot. (Hey, you can change the star rating!) Well written, but weirdly alienating and not very interesting. A post 9-11 spy thriller that expects its audience to have faith in Intelligence is asking for a lot, and the awesomeness of the narrator was laid on a bit thick, and the first hundred pages is a lot of this happened and then this happened in my awesome history with a trip to a concentration camp and 9-11 itself there to reinforce his righteousness, followed by a hundred pages of villain history, the villain being an Islamic jihadist. Hard to argue with that as choice of villain in a modern thriller, but they're just, no matter how horrible and clever and dangerous they are, it's impossible to respect anyone who believes those horrible things as a human being so they become dehumanised even while filled with holy passion and reading them on the page is hard because they're so crushingly banal and apparently simple-minded in their evil no matter how devious their schemes. So, yeah didn't work for me at all.