Slow Horses captures a nation beset by institutional failure, political corruption, and hopelessness.
“No one enters Slough House by the front door,” the novelist Mick Herron writes in Dead Lions, the second book in his series about an “administrative oubliette” for useless spies exiled by MI5, Britain’s domestic-intelligence agency. “Instead, via a shabby alleyway, its inmates let themselves into a grubby yard with mildewed walls, and through a door that requires a sharp kick most mornings, when damp or cold or heat have warped it.” The rest of Slough House isn’t much better: a nest of abandoned keyboards and empty pizza boxes strewn around by agents who would rather be anywhere else. On the top floor is the lair of the spymaster Jackson Lamb, stinking of “takeaway food, illicit cigarettes, day-old farts and stale beer.”
Herron’s spy-novel series is now 13 years old, the same age as Britain’s floundering Conservative government. After years of obscurity, his books are now best sellers, and Apple has so far adapted three for television under the name Slow Horses, after the first novel in the series. The reviews of the show’s newest season—which premiered late last month and is based on the third novel, Real Tigers—have been adulatory.
I live in Britain. Watching Herron’s stories unfold on-screen, I’m struck by what has—and hasn’t—happened since the first book in the series appeared. The Conservative Party has achieved Brexit and precious little else since 2010, leaving the country feeling pinched, and pessimistic, and stuck.
From the October 2019 issue: The loser-spy novelist for our times
In recent films, even James Bond has swapped glamour for grit, but Apple’s Slow Horses goes far beyond that. The humor is pitch-black, and the overriding tone is one of cynicism—the perfect match for post-austerity, post-Brexit, post–Boris Johnson Britain. In the foreground is a succession of double crosses, mole hunts, car chases, and assassinations. The background is a quiet hum of institutional failure, political corruption, and hopelessness. National assets are sold off, extremists are indulged, and no one is trustworthy. The failures of recent Tory rule seem all the more squalid when viewed through the conventions of genre fiction. Forget the Cold War; Britain’s contemporary problems feel less like grand ideological struggles and more like persistent clerical errors. We are a nation of slow horses.
When I first read Herron’s books, I wondered if the murk and mildew of Slough House were an elaborate cover. What better disguise for a great spy than masquerading as a terrible one? But the decrepit building isn’t a novelist’s ruse; the agents working there really are no-hopers, misfits, and has-beens cast out of Regent’s Park, MI5’s gleaming headquarters. “The Park” is everything Slough House is not—a high-tech paradise of ambitious Millennials wearing sharp suits and headset mics. Here is the difference between Britain’s self-image as an international colossus and the reality of its poor productivity and stagnant living standards.
If this were a more conventional spy drama, the hero would be River Cartwright. Played in the Apple series by Jack Lowden, he is the grandson of a former head of the intelligence services: smart, impulsive, and faintly arrogant, and still clinging to idealism. In Herron’s universe, however, Cartwright was robbed of his nepo-baby potential and sentenced to Slough House after shutting down an airport during a training exercise. Over the course of more than a dozen books, he is joined in the crumbling building by a constantly changing cast of addicts, dropouts, the wrongly accused, and the doomed. (Compared with Herron, the Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin is an amateur at killing characters.) Everyone at Slough House clings to the hope of redemption, in the form of a summons back to the Park, while torturing their fellow rejects with their mere presence.
I only picked up Herron’s books two years ago, after the weight of friendly recommendations became too much to ignore. My late arrival reflects his slow-burn career. A former copy editor, he started to write on the long commute to the office, and initially struggled to find an audience. Slow Horses sold so badly that he couldn’t find a British publisher for the sequel, Dead Lions. He was rescued when his American editor nominated the work for a crime-fiction prize, the Gold Dagger, which it unexpectedly won. Bigger sales followed, as did a new novel or short-story collection almost every year.
The TV version, adapted by the English satirist Will Smith, is just as good as the books, not least because Apple managed to get Gary Oldman to play Lamb. For an actor who likes to disappear into his role, this one is a gift-wrapped delight. Oldman’s transformation—lank hair, bowling-ball belly, elderly-badger stubble—involves the kind of punitive grotesquery that used to win attractive actresses an Oscar. The dandruff and dirt matter, because Lamb is the center of the story arc. In a bleakly cynical world, he follows a strong, if quixotic, moral code. Slough House might be hell, but it’s also a family. Lamb continually insults his employees—in the latest season on Apple, he tells two of them: “I’ve got hemorrhoids that are more fucking use than you.” But the show’s plotline revolves around his efforts to rescue his deputy, Catherine Standish, from a bungled kidnapping. (When he succeeds, he goes right back to taunting her about her alcoholism.)
Lamb understands that his superiors at MI5 are out for themselves. “If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse,” Herron writes in Slow Horses. “Moscow rules had been written on the streets, but London rules were devised in the corridors of Westminster, and the short version read: someone always pays. Make sure it isn’t you.” But Lamb isn’t scheming for promotion. He knows he is a knife in the hands of the security services, and the point of a knife is to be used.
He is also the only character who knows that escape from Slough House is impossible. Over the course of the books, we learn that Lamb is a relic of the Cold War, who was stationed in Berlin just after the Wall came down. He has watched Britain’s decline from postimperial power to rainy Brexit island. The world of Slow Horses has plenty to say about the danger of angry young men—the thugs of the far right, for instance—but it’s also haunted by old ones, the clapped-out survivors of an existential battle who are now moldering away on meager military pensions. (Herron’s female characters are equally flawed: One of the most ruthless backstabbers of the lot is Diana Taverner, ice queen of the Park, played in the television series by Kristin Scott Thomas.) The inevitable comparison is with John Le Carré, and sure enough, River’s grandfather David Cartwright is named after the novelist, who was born David Cornwell. But whereas Le Carré showed a country in decline, Herron’s Britain is fully decayed. In the Cold War, some defectors at least betrayed their country for an ideology. Now the rewards are only power and money.
British writers have a recurrent grumble that television adaptations funded by American money tend to Yankify their characters and settings to suit U.S. audiences. The disastrous film version of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, which turned a story saturated with English folklore into a showcase for irritating American child actors, is an obvious example. Even the smart, fun dramedy Sex Education uses the trappings of an American high school despite its setting in rural Wales. Thankfully, Apple has declined to Americanize Slow Horses, which would lose both its charm and its satirical sharpness if transplanted to Pittsburgh or Pensacola. Its version of Britain makes the entire country seem somehow provincial—low-rent, run-down, closed early on Sundays.
Herron has named Slough House after a commuter town in southern England that the poet John Betjeman once suggested was so ugly and depressing that it should be razed to the ground: “Come, bombs and blow to smithereens / Those air-conditioned, bright canteens, / Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, / Tinned minds, tinned breath.” Although Herron lives in Oxfordshire—in a house with no Wi-Fi—he has also made London itself a character. The real-life British capital rarely feels dangerous, but parts of it certainly seem down-at-the-heels, which fits a series where bike accidents and bureaucracy can be as fatal as gun battles.
Slough House sits opposite the Barbican, a housing estate that architects hail as a brutalist masterpiece and that my brain associates with a fruitless struggle to find the entrance. The area is just north of the City of London, a mixture of sterile skyscrapers and warrenlike alleys with names like Knightrider Street. In one episode of the latest season, Lamb peers into a cake shop in pessimistic, and stuck.
Leadenhall Market, the spiritual home of men in pinstripes boasting about their bonuses. “London was more than one city,” the narrator in Real Tigers declares. There was one “whose views were spacious and [whose inhabitants] spoke in agreeable accents of wealth and plenty”; meanwhile, “the other was cramped, soiled and barbarous, peopled by a feral race who’d strip you bare and chew the bones.”
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Luckily, the books are funny, or their vision would be unremittingly bleak. There is no justice in the world of Slough House: Bad people prosper and the good die young. (Even worse, the mediocre and cowardly—that is, the most relatable characters—also die young.) A recurrent theme of the series is the privatization of government, a process that Herron presents as arrogant predators streamlining an organization so it is briefly more efficient—read: profitable for them—before it collapses into dust. Herron is not reflexively liberal, however. Of Britain’s only left-wing broadsheet newspaper, he writes: “Martin Kreutzmer liked to read The Guardian, because it kept him in touch with that strain of self-lacerating smugness which hoped to inherit the earth, but would have no clue what to do with it.” Still, Herron’s most compelling villain is the fictional right-wing politician Peter Judd, a chilling portrait of how much more destructive Boris Johnson could have been if only he had an attention span. Judd wants to get rich by breaking up the intelligence services and selling the parts to his cronies; Johnson lacked that level of focus, and was reduced to asking for loans from rich businessmen to meet his child-support payments. But both men mask their overweening ambition with an unserious persona and fake bonhomie.
Britain is Slough House: damp and drafty, creaking along, with its basic infrastructure gummed up by neglect, and a ruling class that has insulated itself from failure. Like the Park, the country proceeds seamlessly from screwup to cover-up. If only there were a Jackson Lamb somewhere out there, sitting in a fog of smoke and yesterday’s curry fumes, ready to sort the problems out.
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