Mick Herron writes about the broken spies sworn to protect today’s broken England.
So when somebody writes a book that grips and settles me, that makes a reader out of me again, I become quite helpless with gratitude. I feel this way about Mick Herron. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, in England, and educated at Oxford, Herron writes squeakingly well-plotted spy thrillers. More than that, he composes—at the rate of a pulpist—the kind of efficient, darkly witty, tipped-with-imagery sentences that feel purpose-built to perforate my private daze of illiteracy. More than that, he’s a world-bringer, the creator of a still-growing fictional universe with its own gravity, lingo, and surface tension. He whacks his characters and winnows his cast with real 21st-century anti-sentimentality, but there always seems to be enough life-energy around to generate more stories. A TV series is in the works, and a new novel, Joe Country, was published in June.
At the center of Herron’s mythosphere is a terrible, terrible office: Slough House. Although … can Slough House be at the center of anything? It’s a terminus, permanently dislodged from—at odds with, even—the flow of existence. A grimly nondescript building somewhere in the London borough of Finsbury, a concrescence of London dilapidation and anonymity, Slough House is where you’ll find the “slow horses”—the MI5 operatives deemed too dysfunctional, addicted, high-risk, or failure-prone for anything but the most grinding busywork. J. K. Coe is there, monastically hoodied, sizzling with PTSD, listening to Keith Jarrett in his earbuds and not talking to anyone. Shirley Dander is there, always thinking about the wrap of cocaine in her pocket. (“It wasn’t like Shirley was an habitual user. It was a weekend thing with her, strictly Thursday to Tuesday.”) The manager of Slough House, its twice-as-toxic David Brent, its stained and farting Buddha, is Jackson Lamb. Once a formidable “joe”—Herron-speak for an agent—at Berlin Station, Lamb is now a chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking shambles and a creature of coal-black cynicism. Herron’s slow horses are always being pulled into plots, called upon to exercise their latent joe skills. As rejects, they are the natural enemies of the elite. They can smell a false-flag operation a mile off. No fake news for these genuine losers. In Joe Country, a hunt for the missing son of a deceased slow horse leads to an encounter with the most infernal echelons of the Establishment.
Espionage is a shadow battle; it looks like the psyche. “On a normal day,” muses a spy in Joe Country, “London was bright and busy, full of open spaces and well-lit squares. But it was also trap streets and ghost stations; a spook realm below the real.” In this realm, people change shape; graves open and dead things rise; stories turn inside out. Like John le Carré—with whom he has been much compared—Herron is obsessed with that area of human experience, that area of the human brain, where paranoia overlaps with an essential, feral vigilance. “Since leaving the Park he’d had that uneasy sense of footsteps in synch with his own. There were tricks you could pull—double back to check a shop window, pause to fix a shoelace, halt at a bus stop …” No such thing as coincidence. Ordinary, bovine, walking-down-the-street life is an illusion, a sleep-state. Don’t get caught standing around: bad tradecraft.
Herron has been praised for the wit and velocity of the workplace banter at Slough House—the infighting, and the awful, un-PC things that come out of Jackson Lamb’s mouth: “I’m an ardent feminist, as you know. But haven’t you girls got better things to worry your little heads about?” A little of this, I find, goes a long way. Sections of London Rules in particular seemed to me to be rather clogged with Veep-like repartee. Joe Country corrects the error. The slow horses are drawn out of fast-talking London and into wintry Wales, land of snowy ditches and burning owls. The bastions of privilege are casting their long shadow. And in joe country—the place, the mind-set, where the spies live—there are ironies and inversions, but no jokes.
read in full here @ The Atlantic - Review by James Parker
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