Astute political commentator in the guise of a thriller writer
The hilarious shenanigans in Mick Herron’s latest spy thriller feel up to the minute. His fictional portrayal of COVID, Brexit and internet hate speech feel uncomfortably close to reality. With effortless precision, he skewers the old boys’ club that runs things from behind the scenes. Protagonists are failed MI5 spies; antagonists are government aides and advisers.
The government looks bad from Spook Street. Sociopathy has “long been recognized as a handy attribute in politics,” but has only recently “been considered worth boasting about.”
Claude Whelan used to work in a department called Scenes & Ways — “Schemes and Wheezes, in the jargon.” This is “a cut-throat division, its original brief having been to plot assassinations.”
But Whelan has aged, and times have changed. In his early years in the Service, “destabilization scenarios were the hot-button issue; leverage applied by major players to keep the ragamuffin nations to heel.” But after “the internet levelled the playing field, the old rule-book was trampled underfoot.”
In a world where “minnows” can transform themselves into “rogue nations,” keyboards are “weaponized.” Moreover, after “decades of the arms race,” it turns out that the best way to inflict damage on a state is to ensure it is “led by an idiot.”
Retired from the service, Whelan now passes the time sitting on committees. However these are “largely decorative.” The Pandemic Response body, jocularly called the Stable Doormen, is only one of such bodies “whose findings had been determined before their instigation, but whose existence had been deemed necessary to deflect attention from the issues they considered.”
Meanwhile, life in London remains largely unchanged as “the same old tidal pull…amplifies the Thames.” For those who know where to look, “in the building sites, in the long black cars, in the designer suits and jewelled throats, in wristwatches and cufflinks, tattoo parlours and nail bars, in a million glittering windows and a billion slot machines” a constant sound is heard: “the tumbling wet slap of money being laundered, over and over again.”
Number Ten comes in for direct criticism. Reference is made to a prime minister “whose sole qualification for the job was the widespread expectation that he’d achieve it.” Finding himself “clearly dumbstruck by the demands of office,” he relies ever more heavily on a series of unelected advisers. They have him “reform” government departments to give them more power. Even the soundbytes the PM “continues to rack up on a regular basis” are dictated by his puppetmaster.
The man behind the scenes has the unlikely name of Sparrow. His political philosophy is simple. He believes — perhaps because he’s read it on a blog — that every national panic is useful, because it permits a government “to lace its boots tighter.” Ergo, every government needs “a visionary unafraid to sow chaos.” We don’t have to look far to see how that’s been applied in the real world.
Along with the pungent commentary on the state of the nation and the world, the novel is strong on plot and action. Cars speed, a jogger tails a suspect on foot; safe houses take in and disgorge a sequence of fugitives. Back at Slough House, our old friends the second-tier spies struggle on, following and being followed through the night, getting rescued as much by luck as skill. After smashing his car saving two colleagues, tech geek Roddy Ho returns to the office. There, in a quiet moment, he ponders the value of his current task: listing down the “noms de web of barely hinged individuals who’d dropped from social media after a flurry of hate-filled rants.” He wonders whether they’ve “become radicalized and vanished undercover,” or “just got laid and calmed down.”
When a would-be kidnapper attempts to have a certain female foreign national extracted from a quiet sanatorium at night, it turns out he’s been misinformed. Instead of his quarry, the heavies he’s hired find themselves trying to grab the traumatized operative Shirley Dander, who’s been sent there to overcome her addictions. Turns out Shirley loves fighting as much as she loves drugs, meaning the hired muscle men have their hands full. In the melee, Whelan, who had formerly thought of himself as “a pencil-pusher, pointless in a brawl,” surprises himself by “finding his inner Tarzan.”
Mick Herron’s tragic and funny series has now been made into an Apple+ TV series called Slow Horses.