Joe Country by Mick Herron
In Mick Herron’s hilarious spy thriller, secrecy is “the Service’s watchword,” but what it’s best at is “leaking like a sieve.” Life on Spook Street is rough: if you don’t wind up with more enemies than friends, you haven’t done things properly. There’s also a class system. The high flyers work at Regent’s Park and get all the perks. Relegated to Slough House are the “slow horses.”
Temporarily compromised or permanently disgraced, these spies occupy a dilapidated building in Central London where the stairs respond to any tread with “an irritated didgeridoo solo,” and the boss’s office has a grossly inadequate heating system that fills the air “with the smell of fried dust.” It seems “a flamethrower would improve matters.”
Throughout the Service, secrecy is paramount. If you get shot, the Park cannot “bring you back to life,” but it can “cover up the fact that you’d ever actually died.” Above all, what it really likes to cover up is “the notion that a mistake had been made, ever.”
Thus, when an agent is gunned down in a London street, there’s no record of his “ever having been admitted to that hospital, in that ambulance.” Conclusion: the body might have been whisked away and the Park found something better to do with it: “for instance, not have it appear in a headline, anywhere, ever.”
Herron’s language is snappy and clever. First Desk Diana Taverner from the Park attends the funeral in the company of a “suit,” with “only the pinstripes holding him upright.” Richard Pynne escapes into a bar when he feels he’s being followed, but finds that “if he had a tail, it didn’t wag.” When Lech Wicinski is found groaning in a wheelie bin after a vicious attack, the boss hauls him out and carries him inside “like a rolled-up carpet.” The late David Cartwright “had been mostly cunning and fear, the two sides of his nature entwined, and snapping at each other like fox cubs.”
In this story, practically all the folks who work for the Secret Service are suffering from post-traumatic stress, which they cope with any way they can. They lie, drink, smoke and snort coke, and they trash talk each other with abandon. They also betray their country to become double agents, triple agents, and mercenaries. In short, much of their behaviour is less than admirable.
Fortunately, they also stick together and help each other out. In Joe Country, handlers look after their own. One old hand even brings roses and chocolates to his young asset, in the hope that in their their clandestine park bench information sharing meetings, they’ll be mistaken for a May - December romantic couple.
Meanwhile, back at the Park, “Lady Di” Taverner tries to consolidate her power by invoking the Fugue Protocol, but the bean counters won’t have it. Worried that decisions she currently has control over may in future be decided by a committee, she occupies her mind deciding who she can use, how she can use them, and who should be cut loose.
While the Park’s mistakes are routinely erased, the egregious errors of the lower-class spies at Slough House are memorable. The morning papers have a field day reporting one hapless agent’s blunder — leaving a top-secret file on the Tube for all the world to see. Another slow horse disrupts a fellow-spy’s funeral at St. Leonard’s (aka the Spooks’ Chapel), by jumping over the open grave to pursue an unexpected visitor.
In case of hostile contact, the protocol is to call in and then go dark. On a rescue mission in snowbound Wales, Louisa fails to call in before going dark, and fellow agents arrive from London to help her fend off mercenaries and double agents who are trying to kill someone and make it look like an accident. For Louisa, hostile contact involves giving one of the bad guys a concussion. For this, his bad-ass boss berates the injured man and refuses to supply him with a gun, telling him he can’t be trusted “with an electric toothbrush,” and to “try not to get hit by any more monkey wrenches.”
Mick Herron has peopled his action-packed scenes with an array of fascinating characters. The dialogue between agents is colourful — most often blue, and descriptions are witty and evocative, making the story great fun for readers who enjoy verbal gymnastics. More than once, the bons mots had me laughing out loud. Herron has plenty of words to keep readers on their toes. On Spook Street, the insiders’ jargon is so extensive that it can be “a full-time job keeping up with the acronyms,” and Herron doesn’t stint in using them.
When Emma Flyte reminds a colleague she used to be a cop, she’s asked whether they let her “keep her crystal ball.” JK Coe cannot earn the trust of his colleagues because he lacks a “mental handbrake.” Jackson Lamb, the chief of the slow horses, berates them endlessly, expressing his own disillusion in comments such as this: “The tooth fairy takes backhanders from dentists, and the Park does not have your best interests at heart.”
After her long years on Spook Street, dry alcoholic Catherine Standish muses on the “many things age could do to you” and the relatively little you can do in return, concluding that the only option is stay on your feet as long as you can, then "take the rest lying down.”
River Cartwright knows he’s “going to have to do something about his life soon,” though at the moment, he’s “too busy negotiating his way through it.”
However, as Fredrik Backman rightly tells us, Stories often end up being about other things than we expect. There’s more to Herron’s book than spoofing the genre. The weapons used in this story include guns, knives, crossbows and straight razors. But beyond the routine violence expected in a spy thriller, we glimpse many of the troubles of contemporary life: from casual rudeness to distrust of democratic government and the insanity of Brexit. Untrustworthy and immoral people earn vast sums through criminal activity, and those who have way too much money and power rarely hesitate to use it for their own ends.
In Joe country, any stranger is hostile, and even though Wales has “the air of a forgotten nursery,” when the danger-seeking play of coked-up rich boys and powerful men bloated on entitlement gets out of hand, nobody “calls for a grown-up,” and nasty consequences ensue. If you’re low on the food chain, a powerful class of Park type can take your life apart for trying to look at a flagged secret file. And the way they do it, you never even know what hit you.
There is a certain truth in Herron’s portrayal of how the world’s secret service organizations operate, and we must be thankful to him for using his freedom of speech to tell a story that raises our awareness of the world we live in now: dominated by money, manipulated by secretive oligarchies, and influenced by wealthy criminals.