The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes: ludicrous thrills

It has been a long decade for those of us awaiting a follow-up to Terry Hayes’s debut thriller I Am Pilgrim (2013). No other recent thriller has matched its level of excitement: to achieve a comparable adrenaline rush, you would have to abandon your sofa and go bungee-jumping. The tale of an American secret agent tasked with preventing a Saudi terrorist from unleashing a deadly smallpox virus, Hayes’s novel seemed for once to justify the epithet of “epic”, which can usually be dismissed, when applied to thrillers, as a euphemism for “too long”.

There was plenty with which to find fault – nobody would say that Hayes, best known previously as a screenwriter on Mad Max films in the 1980s, is a master of style or characterisation – but there was something elemental about the book, a rare sense that the outcome of its contests of brain and brawn really mattered.

But can the trick be pulled off twice? The long wait for The Year of the Locust has hardly induced optimism among Pilgrim’s devotees. A teasing couple of chapters were released in 2015, but since then the novel’s advertised date of publication has been pushed back so many times that it started to look as though Prince Louis’s debut tell-all memoir would appear first. Yet, with only a few weeks’ notice from its publisher, The Year of the Locust has landed – and if Hayes was overawed at any point by the challenge of living up to I Am Pilgrim, it doesn’t show.

This book is, for the most part, as thrilling and compelling as its predecessor, and even more ambitious in scope, breaking new generic ground. Although it deals with a new set of characters, it occupies familiar terrorist-hunting territory. CIA agent Kane – not his real name, although when we do eventually find out what that is, we gain a clue to one of Hayes’s literary influences – specialises in missions in “Denied Access Areas”: when you need somebody to pop over to Russia or North Korea, he’s the chap you send.

The CIA gets wind of a terrorist “spectacular” planned for Thanksgiving by The Army of the Pure, an offshoot of Isis hunkering down “among the granite pillars, ancient villages and hidden valleys of the frontier between Pakistan and Iran”. Kane is dispatched to the border badlands, and there follow hundreds of pages of hair’s-breadth escapes against a soundscape of spurting blood and crunching bone.

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