I Am Pilgrim

“The idea of a young woman without a face made me think of a Lennon/ McCartney groove from long ago—it’s about Eleanor Rigby, a woman who wore a face that she kept in a jar by the door. In my head I start calling the victim Eleanor. The crime-scene team still have work to do, but there isn’t a person in the place who doesn’t think Eleanor was killed during sex: the mattress half off the base, the tangled sheets, a brown spray of decaying arterial blood on a bedside table.”

Murdoch’s ability to construct an association between a grisly crime scene and a popular song establishes that his intellect is unusual and macabre. The allusion also introduces his love of music and art as a part of his character, one of the ways that he maintains his humanity despite his sometimes horrifying work. His role as detached investigator sets up the novel as a crime procedural, with no hints yet of the espionage plots that will dominate the text. The catalog of evidence here, then, is a kind of disguise of the work’s multiple genres.

“‘Oh good,’ I say without much interest, ‘an intellectual.’ ‘Not really,’ he replies, ‘according to their database she only borrowed one book in a year.’ He pauses, looks at me hard. ‘Yours.’ I stare back at him, robbed of words. No wonder he was preoccupied. ‘She read my book?’ I manage to say finally.”

Initially Murdoch is casual and unaffected, joking amid the horror that surrounds him. Only Bradley changes his relationship to what he sees, underlining the importance of their relationship. They are united in a shared horror, one Hayes does not explain, adding to the suspense and confusion of the scene.

I was a perfect candidate for the secret world. I was smart, I had always been a loner, and I was damaged deep in my soul. My father walked out before I was born and was never seen again. Several years later my mother was murdered in her bedroom in our apartment just off Eight Mile Road in Detroit—like I said, there are some places I will remember all my life. An only child, I finally washed up with adoptive parents in Greenwich, Connecticut—twenty acres of manicured lawns, the best schools money could buy, the quietest house you’ve ever known.”

The self-description here is an early manifestation of the themes of family bonds and moral redemption. Murdoch calls himself “damaged deep in my soul” and emphasizes his family tragedy. His adoption is not a panacea or a respite; he “washes up” like a piece of debris or a wreckage.