by Terry Hayes ★★★★★
I had pretty much given up hope that Terry Hayes would publish another novel. Back in 2014, his debut I Am Pilgrim narrowly missed out being named my "Book of the Year", finishing 2nd (or really "1b") to The Martian. As I wrote at the time, "This might be 1b, but it was edged out only because of a very convenient coincidence late in the novel. Other than that, this was one of the best thrillers I've read in several years. What opens with a murder in a NYC apartment eventually turns into a cat and mouse game between an elite US special agent and a jihadist with a bioterrorism plot to wipe out America."
I mention the above for a couple of reasons. First, to establish that I came in with some pretty high expectations for this novel. And second, to highlight my ten-year-old note about "coincidences". Terry Hayes writes a great action thriller, but in both I Am Pilgrim and in The Year of the Locust, puzzle pieces tend to fit together just a little too well some times. If you can look past that and a few other flaws, The Year of the Locust should be a wholly enjoyable read for most people.
The lengthy novel focuses on a veteran CIA agent named Ridley Walker, codename Kane. He's a "Denied Access Area agent", one who goes deep undercover, alone, into the most treacherous areas of the globe. When a source in Iran sends word through the CIA information network that a jihadist organization called the Army of the Pure is planning a major terrorist event known as a "spectacular" (think something akin to the 9/11 attacks), Kane is sent undercover into a remote corner of Iran to meet with the source. He soon finds that the mastermind behind the attack is Abu Muslim al-Tundra, a man who the CIA presumed had been killed in a drone strike years before, and who is identifiable by the tattoo of a locust that covers his entire back.
The novel plays out in several acts, and for the first several sections it mirrors I Am Pilgrim, with al-Tundra doggedly pursued by Kane, only to continuously stay a step ahead. It's fairly well grounded in reality, with smidges of cutting-edge technology and spycraft that one could believably accept is available to the CIA. But then things take a few very bizarre turns. Without giving any of the plot away, suffice it to say that cutting-edge tech gives way to space viruses, time travel, and at one point a section of story that could be an episode of The Walking Dead or The Last Of Us. That turned off a lot of readers, and you'll find plenty of reviews online that suggest this is "two separate books".
I don't fully agree with the "two separate books" assessment, but the shift from grounded-in-reality (mostly) to supernatural is jarring. Where authors like Michael Crichton would make the supernatural seem scientifically plausible (it's the mosquito in the amber! it could happen!), Hayes kind of glosses over explanations, and so the reader is left to just accept the situation at face value. I found myself frustrated, at one point scoffing and declaring "this is getting ridiculous". But then I stepped back and asked myself why I was reading The Year of the Locust. While I may have expected a spy thriller (and it is that), the primary purpose of reading a book like this is for entertainment. Do I roll my eyes and get mad at the Avengers when unbelievable shit happens in those movies? (Well, sometimes -- I googled "is Black Widow immortal" after watching the absurd ending of that movie). But instead of griping about the unreality, I instead chose to suspend any disbelief and just go with it. And when I made peace with what this was -- think of it almost as a superhero story where anything is possible rather than a by-the-book spy thriller -- I was able to appreciate it again.
The evolution (and I use that term with some significant hesitation) of the Fast & Furious series is probably an even more apt comparison here. In the first movie, everything was stunt-focused, but there was nothing that seemed humanly impossible. By the time you get to Fast X, things had gotten completely out of control. However, they gradually made that change over ten movies so that fans went into a later films expecting them to continue to push the envelope of reality and recognizing that the characters had basically become invincible superheroes. Where Locust fails is it jumps from the reality of The Fast and The Furious to the unreality of Fast X over the course of 50 pages, and the reader is left with the bends. If you can prepare for and get past that, there is a ton to love about the story, bounds of reality be damned.
For those unaware, author Hayes is first and foremost a screenwriter. His top credits include Mad Max 2, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Payback, and From Hell -- all action or thriller movies. Even more than I Am Pilgrim, The Year of the Locust reads like a script. At 792 pages, it's long, but it's a page-turner, and if you can make peace with the bending of reality, I thought it was a pretty great story and one that I'm appreciating as I've had time to digest it. All the pieces fit conveniently together, but I still liked it despite the coincidences, and it thoroughly entertained me for the time I was reading it. Relax, approach it like you would a Clive Cussler or Matthew Reilly novel (or a trip to the theater to see a summer blockbuster), and allow Hayes to entertain you for almost 800 pages. It's fun and worth the read.
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