Book review: Slow Horses by Mick Herron

Wanted more spy fiction after watching The Bureau, and was lucky to find Mick Herron’s Slow Horses. I think this was on my radar after seeing it recommended in Warren Ellis’ newsletter, both of which––the comic book writer and his weekly newsletter––were recently cancelled.

I think the thing about spy fiction is you can’t just have straight up heroes. You need a twist to make the heroes sympathetic, because god knows what they’re doing for queen and country isn’t. The Bureau has Malotru betray his country, The Americans and Deutschland 83 feature spy protagonists working for what audiences have been conditioned to think of as ‘the bad guys’, even the first James
Bond novel ends with Bond adopting a moral coda that technically puts him at a remove from the normal business of spying.

The twist in Slow Horses is that we’re following the spies of Slough House (hence Slow Horses), a sort of MI5 warehouse for past their best before date spies, who can no longer be trusted with the work but who can’t be fired. So they’re left to rot in a sort of rubber room, being given the menial tasks of filing reports on low level jihadist websites and doing threat assessments on reams of machine translated Arabic language phone calls, picked up as part of the state’s mass surveillance program.

The spy protagonist River Cartwright is sentenced to become a Slow Horse at Slough House because he failed to stop a training exercise bomb on the London Underground, which would have, "killed an estimated 120 people”––and this is clearly the bigger sin––“(cause) £30m worth of actual damage, along with a projected £2.5 billion in lost tourist revenue.”

But it’s his boss Jackson Lamb, the spy handler, who is the hero we need for the 20s. A fat slob not afraid to answer a superior’s question with a fart, who’s late for the book’s pivotal meeting because he wanted to grab a sausage sandwich and then proceeds to stain his pants with it (but shrugs it off because the stain blends in with his other stains). Lamb makes the Phillip Seymour Hoffman character in the adaptation of Le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man look as debonair as James Bond himself. I’ve convinced his farts (there are four of them: a silent one we’re told he wants to blame on Cartwright, a petulant one against his boss, and a final blow out when he gives himself up at MI5 hq) are symbolic, or at least act as some sort of signal within the book, though I haven’t figured it out yet.

Herron absolutely nails the depressing, sordid lives of these losers and there’s something incredibly refreshing about it. Nobody has any false pretences that better days lie ahead. One of them meets a career track woman and describes as her smelling like fresh laundry. At one point they watch in fascination as a woman cuts her omelette into uniform slices instead of gobbling it all down in one go.

In fact the dialogue reminded me of The Thick of It, though Jackson Lamb never quite reaches the heights of Malcolm Tucker. It’s their fallen nature that makes the book’s banter work. If it wasn't for their status as failures you’d have Marvel movie quipping, which is so ingratiating because it involves characters saying they’re doomed before coming out of a cgi rollercoaster sequence completely unchanged. Worse still is when upwardly mobile strivers start bantering. Insufferable. Wordplay should be the domain of the downtrodden.

There are two plot lines, one following a kidnapping and the other following the internal machinations of MI5. The kidnapping plot line is fairly simple and has a somewhat novel ending that really works for the characters, given that the kidnappers, kidnapped and Slow House spies are all supposed to be fuckups. But what’s really interesting about the kidnapping is the way Herron keeps us on our toes by changing what audiences (both the book’s readers and those watching the livestreamed kidnapping within the world of Slow Horses) know about the kidnappers (Islamist extremists? Far right Brexiteers? MI5 itself doing a false flag?) and the kidnapped (white? Pakistani? Random or high value target?), and he does it all without invalidating our previous assumptions.

‘That’s the way I’d do it,’ Lamb said. ‘If I wanted maximum attention. I’d start off letting everybody think they knew what was happening. So by the time I got around to explaining the real deal, everyone would already have an opinion.’

And he was right, thought River. The fat bastard was probably right. Everywhere, everybody would be doing what Lamb had said: reconfiguring their earlier position that this was Islamist extremism. And he wondered how many of them would experience a brief hiccup before civilized outrage reasserted itself; a moment in which the thought would intrude that this foul threat, if neither fair nor just, was at least some kind of balancing.

The second plot line is the more interesting but becomes less plausible and more convoluted towards the end. Desperate for a job more exciting than harassing journalists, River Cartwright breaks the rules and gets his team involved in an investigation which could disrupt the search for the kidnapping victim. There’s an ongoing debate within MI5 about whether to play the game of espionage using London rules (where the priority is always cover your ass) versus Moscow rules (where the priority is always to watch your back). In this it reminded me of the Inspector O series about a North Korean agent, in both cases the detective work of the novel isn’t applied directly to the solving of a mystery, but the bureaucratic machinations that go on behind closed doors, to allow such work to eventually be carried out.

Will definitely be checking out the rest of the Slough House series.

Details

Title: Slow Horses

Author: Mick Herron

Series: Slough House

Format: ebook

Length: 320 pages 

Date: published June 1, 2010

Publisher: Soho Press