Beating Slow Horses

Brad East in The Hedgehog Review: The conceit at the heart of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels is simple. There is a house in London for misfit spies. When MI5 is unable, for one reason or another, to fire failed employees, it opts to send them there. The exile is permanent, though the losers who suffer it do their best to pretend it isn’t. It’s a win-win for the service, in any case. No one gets sued. HR is pacified. And banishment proves either so unbearably dull and humiliating that the misfit spies voluntarily quit, or they remain there forever, whiling away the hours without hope of redemption. It is said of the souls in Dante’s purgatorio that the unhappiest are happier than the happiest on earth. Conversely, the happiest in Herron’s inferno are unhappier than the unhappiest outside its walls.

After all, there is no garden atop this mount and certainly no Virgil or Beatrice. Only a hulking demon, pitchfork in hand, keeping the drudges circling beneath him. The paradiso of Regent’s Park is lost forever. Only after some time does it dawn on the damned that their perpetual expulsion means they’re in hell.

Hell’s name is Slough House. Herron has written eight novels in the series since 2010, plus enough novellas to make a ninth book. Two further standalone novels belong to the same universe, and a twelfth entry, set thirty years in the past that fills in the backstory of certain characters and events, was published last fall. Starring Gary Oldman, a series based on the books premiered on AppleTV+ in April 2022; the plan is to adapt one book per season. Three seasons have been released so far, and the fourth has already been filmed. There seems no stopping this spy world’s massive success, on either side of the Atlantic.

The novels have for years been hailed as the next big thing in spy fiction. Herron is sometimes called the new John Le Carré. His prose is stylish and funny; his plots are tight and unpredictable; his characters well drawn, in one case indelibly; his tone is unremittingly mordant. The conceit of Slough House and its slow horses is seemingly inexhaustible in its power to drive new narratives as well as comment on the absurdities of spydom and especially of British politics. The novels began less than a decade after the attacks of September 11, 2001. But in response to the global Zeitgeist, they quickly emerged from the cold shadow of jihad, the Iraq War, and the July 7, 2005, London bombings into the light (or is it heat?) of right-wing demagoguery.

Spy fiction always keeps its finger on the pulse of politics, or tries to, anyway. Even when the geopolitics are pure background for popcorn entertainment, the background is there and has to be intelligible, at a minimum. The better authors in the genre have something to say. At the very least, their protagonists and stories end up saying something—whether as a kind of intervention, in bitter dissent from the status quo, or as celebration of that status quo, or as wish fulfillment. This last type is exemplified in Ian Fleming, whose Bond series is more fantasy than spycraft: world building on a par with the work of J.R.R. Tolkien (in The Lord of the Rings) and Frank Herbert (in Dune), except that Fleming’s world is supposed to resemble our own. Perhaps, then, the better comparison for Fleming’s MI6 is to Hogwarts, with M and Q as peers not so much of Maxwell Knight and Kim Philby as of Dumbledore and Hagrid: a world within our world, a world we cannot see but which men like Fleming wished were real in the crumbling empire of postwar Britain.

More here.