30. Mick Herron, Slow Horses (2010) (12/29/22)
The story revolves around Slough House, where disgraced agents of MI5, or the Security Service, Britain's domestic counterintelligence agency, go to spend their days doing worthless work. They are known as the "slow horses," for they have been put out to pasture.
The plot gets going slowly, to allow the various characters to be introduced in some detail. When it does take off, it centers on surveillance of a washed-up far-right journalist, but then the action shifts when a young man is abducted and a video appears online claiming that he will be beheaded in 48 hours. The slow horses suspect the two are linked. And soon they are drawn into high-stakes intrigue, in which not everyone at the top is behaving as conscientiously, or selflessly, as they should.
The writing sparkles, and there are many cynically hilarious bits. The book, written before Brexit and Boris Johnson's rise to power, also presents a telling portrait of Britain's struggle to maintain integrity. As Herron said in a July 2022 interview,
I was conjuring worst-case scenarios and made some lucky stabs in the dark. I’ve been drawn to politics as a backdrop because it seems to go hand in hand with the kind of espionage thriller I’m interested in. I don’t want to write a big, plotted, evil-mastermind spy novel; I’m interested in incompetence, things going wrong, badly motivated stuff, and that’s essentially our political reality now. It gives me plenty of scope, but I don’t feel good about it. We have a prime minister who acts with the worst possible intentions because he’s only interested in himself. As a citizen, I deplore it; as a writer, I’m rubbing my hands.
One of the main characters is a young man named River Cartwright who (for reasons that eventually come clear) was set up to fail a training exercise involving a would-be bomber in the London Underground. Normally, his failure would have had him booted straight out of Five, but instead he was sent to Slough House because of a word from his grandfather, formerly a mucky-muck in the Service. In one scene, River visits his granddad. There, he remembers the first time he met him, when River's irresponsible mother dropped him off—for what amounted to the rest of his childhood—and "bolted." The old man—or Old Bastard, as River's mother called him—had been gardening, on his knees digging in the dirt.
When River thought back on scenes like that—on the umpire's hat and the jumper holed at the elbow; at the trowel and the rivulets of sweat creasing his round country face—it was hard not to see it as an act. The props were certainly to hand: big house with wrap-around garden; horses within spitting distance. English country gentleman down to the vocabulary: "bolter" was a word from early twentieth-century novels; from a world where Waughs and Mitfords played card games on tables designed for the purpose.
Except that acts could shade into reality. When River remembered his childhood in this house, it was always bright summer, and never a cloud in the sky. So perhaps it had worked, the game the O.B. played; and all the clichés he espoused, or pretended to espouse, had left their mark on River. Sunshine in England, and fields stretching into the distance. When he'd become old enough to learn what his grandfather had really done with his life, and determined to do the same himself, those were the scenes he was thinking about, real or not. And the O.B. would have had an answer for that, too: Doesn't matter if it's not real. It's the idea you have to defend.
That attitude becomes an undercurrent of the book, of the slow horses, both as something to embrace and as something to fight back against—because nothing's simple, is it?
In the end, amid the plot developments and action, there is a lot of food for thought, and pleasing complexity in the characters. I'm already looking forward to the next book in the series, Dead Lions.
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