It has been 10 years since Terry Hayes published the international hit I Am Pilgrim, and it’s fair to say that his second novel, The Year of the Locust (Bantam), has been much anticipated. Emerging dazed and somewhat brutalised after two intense days reading this utterly gripping, elegantly written 650-page-plus thriller, I can say that it was most definitely worth the wait. Kane (not his real name) works for the CIA, one of a small group of spies who specialises in entering “denied access areas – places under total hostile control such as Russia and Syria, North Korea, Iran, and the tribal zones of Pakistan”. So when an asset with information that could save the west from a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 needs exfiltrating from the wilds of Iran, he is sent in.
Kane is a fantastic character: preternaturally brilliant and brave, humble and insightful, he comes up with a solution no matter what he’s faced with, and is the sort of narrator who calmly says things such as: “It was now a race between my knowledge of lock-picking and the gravitational pull of the moon.” Some bits I read grimacing and gasping; other bits cheering him on, as his mission turns darker and darker – and (you guessed it) the fate of the world ends up on his shoulders. “I had walked and run for a hundred miles, I had pushed myself to the limit of my endurance, I had travelled by starlight and witnessed things most people would never see: campfires flickering behind enemy lines, mirages so real I could touch them, peregrine falcons in all their majesty, a dead man hanging from a cross.” I wasn’t entirely convinced by the wild twist towards the end of the book, but by that point, I was all in for Kane and would have followed him anywhere.
