Slow Horses by Mick Herron, Soho Press, 2010
A Legacy of Spies by John Le Carré, Penguin Books, 2017
Provenance: I blame The New Yorker for this one. They had an article on author Mick Herron, talking about how he was an heir to John Le Carré in the genre of spy thrillers. OK, on that note, I went hunting for Herron's first book, and found it at Apparition Books in downtown Renton (who do not have a web site. Sorry). Apparition is a curated bookstore that has a lot of good books in good condition. On completing Slow Horses, I went back to see if they have the second book of the series. They didn't, but did have one of John Le Carré's last works. So I picked that up instead, and used it as my airplane book for the trip the Georgia.
(And yes, I prefer to read books on the plane as opposed to using the tablet. I don't worry about battery life or being distracted by other apps or having to turn it off during takeoffs and landings. And if the book is lost, it is OK - it's a paperback.)
Review: Slow Horses is Smiley's People meets The Office. No, really. The title is a play on Slough House, the nickname of a branch of MI5 that is so remote from the sources of real power in the Ministry that it might as well be in Slough. This is where they put the Joes that screwed up, the ones they can't fire outright. They give put them in the worst, most tedious, most menial jobs in the hopes that they will take the hint and quit. River Cartwright is one of those Joes who apparently screwed up and as a result he works grudgingly with others who have committed sins great and small, under the relatively inert leadership of Jackson Lamb. Their tasks are gruntwork - checking IDs, monitoring BBSes, investigating lapsed visas. They exist in the after-eleven world, where the threat was not communism but religious maniacs. They are prepared for foreign terrorism.
What they are not prepared for is the home-grown type. They also are not prepared for their own bureaucracy, more concerned for turf wars and protecting their own bureaucratic buttocks than in doing their jobs (actually, they feel that protecting their public-funded posteriors IS their job). The mayhem that ensues is mostly self-inflicted, but it is the Slow Horses, and Jackson Lamb in particular, who ultimately triumph. Mostly.
I like the characters and the plot. The author drives me particularly crazy by having the characters learn things which are then not shared with reader. We are frozen out. Someone is about to share some important bit of information and the scene changes. Someone dies - Who? Tell you in about 20 pages as an offhand remark. And the author deliberately misdirects, so that you think one thing when the truth is elsewhere. These literary trick raises tension through this concealment, but it excludes the reader from the journey. That's a personal peeve, but it caused me to roll my eyes a few cycles.
One thing I did like was the sense of place, in the Modern London. William Gibson is one of his books described London as an alternate reality to the States. Things are the same, but also very different. And that alien familiarity may account for some of the popularity of all things British on this side of the pond, from Monty Python to Harry Potter. Things are familiar, but different, a modern fantasy setting of sorts. Herron describes and describes well and sells the setting hard. I know the area that Slough House is located, as the original Grub Street (now Milton Street) is in the area, as I walked that area of London the last time I was there.
Let me praise with faint damns - It was worthwhile, and I will probably hunt down the next one.
But with all that in mind, I turned to A Legacy of Spies, going to original-flavor spy novelist Le Carré in one of his last books, published seven years after Herron's first, and quite frankly, discover that the original version still has the juice after all that time. Le Carré is the grand old man of spy fiction, defining a lot of the terms used and setting the entire sphere of post-war spycraft as a blatantly amoral game where the greater good outweighed any personal qualms. At its core has been (often) George Smiley, who has been the master web-spinner at the heart of the Circus.
And Peter lies. But unlike the lies Herron presents, Le Carré takes us hostage within Peter's narration, so that we KNOW he is lying (usually when talking with the lawyers and the modern agents). Peter dodges, he takes refuge in semantics, he seeks to protect Smiley (who may or may not still be alive at this point), he tries to protect the legacy of the dead. As a result, you the reader are let in on what is going on, or at least, what Peter thinks is going on. And to be frank, it feels at the end as if Peter is disassociating completely from reality, and this most unreliable of narrators may be utterly unreliable.
And its is great stuff. Yeah, knowledge of what has gone before is helpful/recommended (I brushed up against it back when Alec Guinness was playing the role), and the book does a lot to provide connective tissue for a lot of the other series. But Le Carré remains an amazing writer and his work is an engaging as his characters are morally grey. It feels like the wrapping up of loose ends (Le Carré died in 2020, and while this is not his last book, it is the last one featuring Smiley's People).
So, end result? Herron is perfectly fine if you're willing to be brought along for the ride. Le Carré remains the champion, in part by laying things out exactly, and letting you come to your conclusions.
More later,
