Is the accidental avant-garde actually accidental?
On the bizarre audaciousness of Terry Hayes' 'The Year of the Locust'
I've never written about my enjoyment of spy thrillers before. It's something I'm neither ashamed of or proud of. Nor do I read enough of them to be able to say anything meaningful about them as a genre as a whole. I read a lot and sometimes I read spy stories for fun; simple as that.
So it's taken something pretty seismic to make me want to write about a spy thriller. And that seismic something is Terry Hayes' The Year of the Locust.
Hayes, a veteran Hollywood screenwriter (of two of the Mad Max sequels amongst other things) scored a smash hit with his first novel, 2013's I Am Pilgrim. The success was deserved; while the book didn't redefine the spy thriller, the inventive plotting and vivid sense of place made it compulsive reading.
I read I Am Pilgrim a year or so after it came out. A few years later I casually wondered whether Hayes had written a follow-up. I discovered that The Year of the Locust was scheduled to appear in 2016, but in the end it was delayed so often that, even before publication, the Amazon listing attracted many frustrated 'reviewers'. It certainly ratcheted up the anticipation; I myself bought the book a week after it finally appeared on 9 November 2023.
It's unsurprising that The Year of the Locust took so long to see the light of day. Interviews suggest it was a tortuous process to write and equally exasperating to his publisher to guide it over the finish line. And for good reason: The Year of the Locust is one of the most audacious and ridiculous books I have ever read.
For the first two thirds or so of the (700 page) book, the story explores much of the same terrain as I Am Pilgrim (although it's not a sequel): Kane, a 'Denied Access Area' CIA spy, is sent after a dangerous Islamist terrorist, based in the borderlands between Iran and Afghanistan, who is planning some kind of 'spectacular' attack on the West. As in his previous book, Hayes takes this uninventive premise and turns it into something vital. Yes, the writing style is guilty of some airport thriller vices - pedantic over-explaining, stilted dialogue, twists that you can see coming a mile away - but the sheer brio of the book makes them forgivable. The Year of the Locust is just too much fun for the occasionally ropey writing style to matter too much.
But that's the first two thirds or so. After that....
I'm not an experienced enough fiction reviewer to explain this without giving away the mother of all twists, but don't worry - the book is still worth reading even if you know. So here it is:
About two thirds of the way into The Year of the Locust, and without any warning, the book suddenly morphs into sci-fi. One minute we are with Kane in Langley, being briefed on a mission, the next we are in a time-travelling submarine. Shortly after that, Kane finds himself in post-apocalypse New York fighting 'Orcs'; super-soldiers enhanced with alien DNA who are trying to wipe out humanity.
I guess it's a tribute to Hayes's skills as a storyteller that, by the end of the book, everything just about hangs together plot-wise. But there's no getting away with it: Switching suddenly from spy thriller to post-apocalyptic sci-fi is one of the craziest thing I have ever seen a writer do.
Plots that twist and turn are ten a penny, particularly in thrillers. Switching entire genres, though, is something that is very rarely done. And switching to a genre that demands that the reader accept a very different set of premises without any warning, asks a hell of a lot from the reader.
The next book I read after The Year of the Locust was In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes. This is 'literary fiction' (it was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize) and the elegant prose and deep characterisation marks it out from the airport thriller. Nonetheless, the book's plot takes in undersea discoveries, space exploration, contact with alien civilization and time travel. As with The Year of the Locust, the expansive scope of this journey is far from apparent at the start of the book, which recounts a difficult childhood in Rotterdam. The difference is that In Ascension gradually inculcates the reader into this universe. While there are sudden revelations, the reader is prepared for them. It's all impeccably tasteful.
Genre has never been a prison-house. Eclecticism and experimentation with form and genre is hardly novel. Fusions of genre within a single work are one of the motors of artistic development. But the sudden shift of genre in the course of a single work, is often the domain of the artistically derided, of 'low' culture, of commercial and artistic failures.
Sometimes, those sudden shifts in genre can give a work cult status. For example, Ray Steckler's 1966 B movie Rat Pfink A Boo Boo begins as a crime drama. But Steckler, apparently bored with the picture, executes a bizarre shift 36 minutes in: The film's star steps into a wardrobe with a minor character and they step out moments later as Rat Pfink and Boo Boo, obvious parodies of Batman and Robin.
This sudden shift was made knowingly by a director with a reputation for shoddy but enjoyable film-making, subsequently canonised as 'so bad it's good' by the cult film aficionados. Other such shifts, though, may simply be seen as so bad it's bad. The final series of The Crown was ridiculed for featuring a 'ghost' Diana haunting other royals after her death. The first season of the TV series Das Boot decided, for some unfathomable reason, to intersperse claustrophobic sequences inside U Boats with a bizarre subplot in which a U Boat captain ends up in New York dating a jazz singer from Harlem. It didn't work, needless to say.
Yet to dismiss such indigestible shifts in genre and tone as simply the mark of bad or unsuccessful art would be a mistake. It's more productive to see such weirdness as artistic experimentation, as a mapping of new aesthetic territory. Why must 'experimental' art be knowingly obscure and impenetrable? Why shouldn't the desire to explore new aesthetic worlds occur in mass market art?
For a long time, I've been playing with the concept of the 'accidental avant-garde'. The accidentally avant-garde is work that pushes at the limits of artistic conventions, without any particular intent to actually do so. The accidental avant-gardist is one who may wish to achieve mass success in a genre but who, in seeking to conquer a genre, also breaks it.
I am fully aware that this concept risks being incredibly patronising and arguably leads us down rabbit holes in the futile search for an artist's 'intention'. What The Year of the Locust has taught me is that the concept of the accidental avant-garde may sometimes need to be reversed: What if the apparently accidental is actually intentional? Can we actually cope with the possibility that a mass market art can deliberately set out to play with and transgress the limits of genre?
There are clues in The Year of the Locust suggesting that Terry Hayes might be a much more sophisticated author than he seems. While the first two thirds of the book outwardly appears to be set in 'our' world, it seems to be seeded with suggestions that actually this is either set in the near future or in some kind of alternate universe. There is, for example, a lot of high-tech spying going on and in retrospect it's hard to tell whether the tech being used is currently available but secret, whether its arrival is imminent, or whether this is simply made up. At one point the CIA manages to isolate an audio recording from months before, of a conversation that took place in the back of an SUV travelling through war-torn Syria, we are told that this was part of the vast amount of data sucked up by satellites. Yet it's possible that this is tech so advanced that we are actually in sci-fi territory without knowing it. Here, Hayes leverages the secrecy of actual intelligence work in a slyly clever way to create an ambiguity - the average reader doesn’t really know what is or is not possible with today or tomorrow’s tech.
The Year of the Locust may also be playing with the reader geopolitically too. Much of the early part of the book involves a US military presence in Afghanistan. I simply assumed that all this meant was that the book was set prior to the US withdrawal in August 2021 and the endless delays in publishing the book meant this detail had become a bit dated. Yet later on there's a fleeting reference to the 'Second Ukrainian War'. While, again, that could be explained away as a clunky distinction between the Donbass secessionist war post-2014 and the 2022 Russian invasion, it's more likely another clue that we are years ahead of 2023 or perhaps on another timeline altogether.
The biggest clue of all is dropped in casually half way into the book, when the villain escapes to a secret centre in the Russian space facility in Baikonor, Kazakhstan, for processing ore from asteroid mining. That is not currently a thing as far as I know, although it might be in future decades. But so matter-of-fact is Hayes's tone here - at least when this is first introduced - that's it's easy to either miss it or dismiss it as bad science. Only later do we realise the pivotal importance of the asteroid mining.
I don't know what game Terry Hayes is playing in The Year of the Locust. Maybe it's best not to know. That way we can treat the uncertainty over whether the book's avant-gardeness is accidental or not as an intriguingly enjoyable puzzle. Either way, it's a salutary reminder of how playful pulp can be.
Have you heard Farrah Abraham's proto-hyperpop album MY TEENAGE DREAM ENDED? Most of its strangeness was not intentional: Abraham sang without hearing a music backing track, and the producers went wild with Autotune in a really amateurish way. Yet it's extremely effective at conveying the tormented life story of a woman who was abused by her mother and became a mom herself while a teenager. It's abrasive, but I find it perfectly listenable and quite emotionally expressive.
In filmmaking, I think GLEN OR GLENDA is a great surrealist work comparable to early Luis Buñuel and an attack on narrow 1950s notions about gender and sexuality. If Ed Wood really were the worst director ever, it would be far more difficult to sit through.
Thank you, Keith -- enjoyable musings on books I'm unlikely ever to read so thank you for the glimpses!