[This 2022 novel is in three ‘Acts’, and as I finished reading each of these I wrote about it before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
3rd February 2023
Prologue, Act II, Intermission
This is fun. I’m not a diehard Mick Herron fan, but I read Slow Horses when the paperback came out and enjoyed it (here). There have been six other Slough House novels since then, which I haven’t read. I get the feeling Mick Herron hit his stride some time ago with this series, and I bet he can turn out this stuff without a huge amount of effort now. But that’s OK. The tone is knowing, cynical, confidential. And if the characters think they know what’s going on, they’re almost bound to be wrong. That’s the game they’re in, as one of them muses following a meeting he’s just had with the deputy who took his job some years before. Is Diana Taverner, the current ‘First Desk’ at MI5, involved in some shady business? He still has no idea.
‘Diana thinks, or wants me to think she thinks, that I’m really looking into Waterproof and not de Greer. Which means she either wants me to do that, because she doesn’t want me looking into de Greer, or she doesn’t want me to do that, and is only letting me think she thinks that’s what I’m doing in order to make me think she doesn’t care if it is. So she either wants me not to look into Waterproof, or she wants me not to look into de Greer. / Nice to have clarity.’
In 100 pages or so, this is the most convoluted, but also the most carefully detailed, exposition of how it works in this business. And it’s a reminder to the reader that the whole point of these novels is to play the game of working out who’s wrong-footing who. Having missed out on six novels in the series, I don’t feel at a terrible disadvantage even if, sometimes, I wonder if a particular reference means nothing to me only because I missed it in an earlier novel. I suspect that in most cases none of Herron’s readers know yet. It would account for the fact that Act II comes first. Jackson Lamb (remember him?) lets Diana Taverner know that what he is about to tell her—i.e. the 60 pages of Act I, which follow immediately after—is ‘a long story. And it requires a flashback, a voiceover, and all sorts of technical shit.’ This might be the straightest thing anybody has said in the novel so far… or it might not. Jackson and Lady Di go back a long way, and she knows he knows where some of the bodies are buried. But she doesn’t always know which bodies, or when he might use any of them against her.
One of the bodies is, or might be, that of Sophie de Greer. She is a Swiss academic, a ‘superforecaster’ currently spending time with the Dominic Cummings character, Anthony Sparrow. Three days ago, she went missing, and Sparrow has called on an MI5 department head called Nash to have a little root around. It might be a smokescreen. Sparrow is happy to let Nash know that he has his beady eye on MI5, and wants to turn it into another Downing Street puppet. (It’s an open secret that by Downing Street, he means himself. ‘I’d prefer First Desk to display a little more enthusiasm for the government she served,’ he tells Nash, who doesn’t miss that it’s ‘a first-person preference.’) Nash, or somebody, wonders if Sparrow might even have stage-managed the disappearance in order to blow open a few MI5 doors before the long-needed ‘reorganisation’ he’s aiming for.
Herron doesn’t bring us to this point quickly. In fact, it’s fairly near the end of ‘Act II.’ First, we get a long introduction to the current batch of ‘slow horses’ working at Slough House, each of them getting a three- or four-page, third-person limited thumbnail sketch of the inside of their heads. A typical, shitty morning, the injustice of their wasting their lives in such a place and, sometimes, a detail or two of their downfall. Jackson Lamb doesn’t get this treatment. As in Slow Horses and, no doubt, the intervening novels, all we are offered is the slobby, farting persona he chooses to present. At first, only readers of at least one previous novel would guess that there’s a lot more to him than he lets on. Or that it isn’t beyond his power to choose exactly who he wants at Slough House. I suspect Ashley Khan, the latest very angry (and very young) recruit, is there because he wants her there. She must be good at something.
It’s after this scene-setting chapter that Herron introduces the Sophie de Greer thread. Nash, long before we get the flashback detailing his meeting with Sparrow, has asked Claude Whelan for ‘a favour.’ (He’s the previous First Desk, no doubt shafted by Taverner.) No, thinks Whelan, he’s not going to be a soft touch and give in. And then he agrees. We find out about de Greer and her disappearance and, interspersed among other chapters and their sub-sections, we’re with Whelan as he follows a single lead. It later turns out to be false, but I’ll come to that. He has to pull all the weight he can as the previous First Desk—not much, because he left under something of a cloud—to speak to Taverner and get her to let him have a file all recent phone records. Herron, as always, gleefully parades the petty hierarchies and clubbiness of ‘Regent’s Park’, his version of MI5’s HQ. Whelan has to wear a visitor’s badge—a favourite Herron trope, which I remember from Slow Horses—but he is firm enough with Taverner to get what he wants.
The single smoking gun he finds among the thousands of numbers—he gets it by searching for de Greer’s own number, given to him by Nash—is that the last call she made before her disappearance was to Jackson Lamb. He follows this up by shadowing Catherine Standish, one of the few slow horses to have been at Slough House from the start, after she leaves the office. She’s the reformed alcoholic we met in the first novel, and we are inside her thought-stream as Whelan takes her to the first bar she’s been to in years. Herron is good at this kind of unglamorous detail, like Nash’s food obsession and Whelan’s fixation on sex. He can’t even look at the waitress without taking in every detail of how well she fills her clothes. But, after the waitress has left, Standish can’t tell him anything about the phone call. Either Lamb answered it, or he didn’t. She thinks about how her first drink in years might be in circumstances like this, but not tonight. She finishes her water and scurries home…
…for her seat to be taken, not long after, by Jackson Lamb. Whelan, shadowing Catherine, had neglected to check behind himself, so here is Lamb to tell him off for stalking his staff, to drink the expensive whiskey he orders on Whelan’s tab, and tell him he never got a call from de Greer. Whelan decides he’s lying. If we think he’s right, it’s because we haven’t yet heard Taverner tell somebody—Lamb himself, maybe, I forget—that she planted the call in among the files for reasons I haven’t quite fathomed yet.
Meanwhile… how many other threads? Aside, that is, from the sad little ongoing satire that is office life, both at Slough House and Regent’s Park? The most important one is to do with Taverner’s opposite number in Moscow. He’s arrived in London under the radar—you should have been at Regent’s Park when Taverner discovers how easily he slipped in—and she decides she will go to the Russian Embassy bash that night, after she’d previously decided to snub as usual. He’s there, she knows, posing as an expert in Russian cinema, and although he’d been shadowed for a day or two, nobody had realised who he was. Then, led by Taverner in a Regent’s Park meeting looking at footage from a spy camera he’d clearly noticed, the penny drops –‘a whole bag of pennies’—one by one. She turns to the hapless shadow. ‘Yes, Dean. He’s grown. A beard.’ Not that Dean would have recognised him anyway.
So here she is, at the Embassy, talking to Vassily Rasnokov. How does Herron describe it? a Jane Austen quadrille, with everybody making their predictable moves and scoring their points in the politest way imaginable. This is what these two First Desks do and, by the time Taverner leaves, it’s Rasnokov who has come out with most points. First, he tells her that he’s spoken to Sparrow recently—but no, not in London in the last couple of days, in Moscow. She doesn’t yet know how much danger she’s in from Sparrow, and she is very pissed off by his flouting of all the protocols. He hadn’t mentioned any such meeting in his report of the so-called trade mission he’d been on. Worse, just before Rasnokov ends their friendly chat over the champagne and canapes, he wrong-foots her even more worryingly:
‘And do relay to your Mr Sparrow that I trust his association with Dr de Greer is working out to his satisfaction. It was most interesting, our discussion about her work. I can see that, in the right hands, her talents would pay dividends.’ / ‘She had to hand it to him: his timing was immaculate.’
Other threads. One is the detailed description of a killing in a cheap rental place near the Westway. A man is in a near-coma, two empty bottles of unfeasibly expensive whiskey near his bed, as a chip-pan in the room gets so hot it begins to spit hot fat on to the newspapers left around it deliberately. Later we hear of the fire, which led to one fatality. Another thread is ‘what happened in Wimbledon’ two or three days before the novel opens. Some of the slow horses had been involved, notably Louisa Guy, who (I gather) had always been close to River Cartwright before his death. Lech Wicinski, the one whose face had been carved to spell out PAEDO in a previous novel—he had added to the mutilation with more slashes—so now another Slough House veteran, the tame IT genius and hacker Roddy Ho, calls him hashtag-features. One Shirley Dander had also kicked off at the time, and is now in the ‘San’ for heavy-duty rehab that she has no intention of cooperating with. Lamb seems to know about the fiasco, but we don’t know if it had been his idea.
And then there’s the (fairly broad) political satire. Maybe it was this that made me think Herron doesn’t have to try too hard to turn out stuff like this, because he says little about Sparrow and the (unnamed) ‘PM’ in 2021, when this was written, that hadn’t been the stuff of online memes and jokes since before the pandemic. Heron has added a layer to Sparrow, in that the (untitled) prologue has him fighting in some kind of football-gang melee between English and Italian fans. Is it real, or virtual? Herron isn’t telling us, but it reveals the level of contempt Sparrow feels for absolutely everybody, including his compatriots. And the way he takes a call from the PM during it shows how he regards his supposed boss. He’s already been rude—‘You pick your moments’—and then he slips the phone into a chest pocket: ‘he could speak and be heard and mostly hear, a long-established set of priorities.’
Anything else? There’s that reference to ‘Waterproof,’ a method allegedly favoured by a previous First Desk. It involves disappearances arranged by way of rendition and incarceration in some unnamed Eastern or Central European jail, and was consigned to the confidential no-go files labelled NH—Never Happened—some time ago. So why had Nash, no doubt at Sparrow’s instigation, alerted Whelan to the possibility of its revival? And another thing. Taverner is involved with Peter Judd, another narcissistic Tory, no longer as powerful as he was but still making his presence felt.
There’ll be other things, but I need find out what Lamb needs to tell Taverner to bring her, and us, up to speed.
5 February
Act I, Intermission
Did Herron write this section first? He makes no concessions to the idea in the first ‘Intermission’ that this is Lamb giving Taverner the back-story, at his instigation, in a London park. The entire 60-odd pages are in standard-issue Slow Horses style, often following the petty-minded, second-rate thought-streams of one or other of these self-deceiving no-hopers. Herron has most fun with Roddy Ho, the archetypal incel. The part he plays in the events in Wimbledon is very minor, not that he realises it—he’s always the hero of whatever situation he finds himself in—but it’s his web-inspired fantasies of success that seem to fill the most space. Shirley Dander, who has twisted his arm to drive her to Wimbledon in pursuit of the others, is another basket case. Her coke habit, which costs her far more than she can afford—a typical Herron low-life touch—whips up her fear of missing out to a dangerous level. She gets a lot of space too. I suppose it’s part of Herron’s conspiratorial tone that the reader feels in cahoots with him, looking down and sagely understanding what fools these mortals be. It’s all part of the entertainment.
The ’others’ that Shirley Dander is in pursuit of are Lech and Louisa. Herron has carefully constructed what appears to be a typical slow Horses-style wild goose chase to cover the twin facts that a) these two are far more competent than we might have realised and b) the wild goose chase is no such thing. It has been carefully orchestrated by—guess. We think it’s all down to happy coincidence that the two agents find who they are looking for, but in fact it’s Jackson Lamb who has sown the seed, and who has relied on their competence to bring about the outcome he had been looking for. The mishaps along the way are not their fault, and the way Herron interleaves them with the Laurel and Hardy antics of Roddy Ho and Shirley Dander is a smokescreen. Both he, Mick Herron, and Jackson Lamb need it all to look accidental. Lamb is careful to preserve the fiction that he is a washed-out old time-server in charge of a bunch of nobodies, but he has a real job to do. In this case, he’s nipping something in the bud before it can bring MI5 into such disrepute that Sparrow will be able to dismantle it piece by piece.
But I’m not telling you the plot. Sophie de Greer has disappeared because Lamb realises she needs to. We don’t know how he knows who she is, or how he gets Bachelor, the burnt-out part-timer still doing child-minding work for the Service, to spin Lech a line that leads him to de Greer. Herron is presenting it to us as a genuine query that Bachelor has about her. Why does she look almost identical to a high-up female KGB officer he met on some bread-and-butter errand he was running 30 years before? It’s just enough information for Lech, aided by Louisa, to play a little game with Roddy Ho to hack into the files to find out the name of the officer. After some more rooting about—I forget the details—they realise de Greer is the woman’s daughter. Don’t ask me why they feel they need to check her out at her temporary Wimbledon address, but they do…
…and she’s just going out for a run in the dark. Luckily, Louisa is a runner herself, and sets off to shadow her. Rather optimistically, she tells Lech not to lose sight of her as he follows her in the car but, inevitably, he does. Soon it’s just Louisa doing her best not to lose sight of a woman who has clearly done this run often… and then there are two other runners, men who soon turn out to be wanting to overtake de Greer. Louisa knows how to take care of herself, but things aren’t going well when a) Lech, now on foot, phones her that he’s spotted her and is on his way and b) Roddy Ho is driving towards the spot, guided by a tracking app he’s secretly installed on her phone because he’s pretty sure she fancies him. He’s left Shirley behind by now—his clown-car story has been running alongside the main one—facing the police after she’s smashed the windscreen of a bus with an electric iron she happened to bring in the car. She’d had enough of the irate bus-driver abusively annoyed by a near-accident caused by Roddy’s incompetent driving….
Enough of that. It seems shambolic, but the men both run off, and the slow horses convince de Greer that she must be in some danger. The outcome is that Lamb has her installed in an MI5 safe house with, acting as her minder, none other than Bachelor. Which is when we realise he must have been working for Lamb all along….
So what’s going on? Who is Sophie de Greer, and why is Rasnokov so gleeful about being able to name-check her with Taverner at the Embassy meeting, three days after the disappearance? Does Sparrow know who she is? And who were the not very competent would-be abductors on Wimbledon Common? Definitely not agents from either side, because they aren’t nearly professional enough. Men sent by Sparrow, to bring about a disappearance that would be highly embarrassing for Taverner? And why does Lamb mention, in the Intermission that bookends this section, the two bottles of whiskey no longer to be found in Rasnokov’s room—the same brand as the two bottles lying next to the soon-to-be incinerated comatose body in the house near the Westway?
But I see that Act III is nearly as long as the other two put together, so I’d better make a start on it.
7 February
Act III…
…which is as long as it is not because Herron needs all that time for the working out of the plot—although there is plenty of plot to be worked out—but because he really, really likes to describe in detail the clownish/almost competent capers of his slow horses. Even readers new to the series would know before reaching Act III that however useless everybody presents them as being—Including the narrator—they get the job done. Through a mix of happy accidents, industrial-strength coincidences and the incompetence of others, Herron can manage things so that they come out on top every time. Literally.
In the first major set piece in this section, the same useless/useful two play their part in rescuing Diana Taverner from the claws of Anthony Sparrow and the Service he’s turned against her. Louisa doesn’t have a plan, but a clever move on Taverner’s part helps bring about the escape that neither of them could have managed alone. The rest of Act III mostly follows the same pattern, so there’s really no jeopardy at all, and I think this is something of a pity. The comedy often becomes deliberately farcical, so whatever happens, we know it’s going to be all right in the end. In other words, despite what Shirley Dander keeps saying, nobody’s going to die.
But Herron still has a job to do to bring about those happy outcomes. He’s already laid some clues—it is a thriller after all—and not until the last few pages do things come home to roost for Sparrow in ways that seem almost plausible. The way things are worked out is part of the fun.
The main thread is that Rasnokov, somebody realises, is as much of a ‘disruptor’—Sparrow’s proudly trumpeted USP—as Sparrow himself. As Taverner has pointed out to him at the Embassy, and as everybody knows, to be First Desk under Putin is probably the most lethally precarious job in the world. He had seemed relaxed about it, and it’s Jackson Lamb, I think, who realises why. Information is coming in, and Lamb is the first to come up with the theory—which turns out to be almost certainly correct—that his reason for coming to Britain had been to fasten his new identity in place. The man in the bedsit near the Westway, living in London and spending years creating all the identity baggage that goes with modern life, was always going to be killed off when Rasnokov needed to take over his past. (The victim might even have known this was the deal, Lamb muses, having been offered that or a terrible time in some Siberian jail.) His killer, working entirely alone and under everybody’s radar, was ‘the fireman’—his first KGB handle—Rasnokov.
But that’s not all. He must have wanted to leave on a high, because he masterminded the placement of Sophie de Greer in Sparrow’s thinktank. Her hyped-up reputation, based on pseudo-scientific tests of her accuracy as a forecaster, must have seemed perfect to Sparrow. It was no secret that his long-term aims had always been to destroy long-standing state structures, so he was bound to go for a woman showing great approval for all his prejudices. All along, she was nudging him in the direction most convenient for the Kremlin.
But that wasn’t the most important part of Rasnokov’s plan for her. When he mentions both Sparrow and de Greer in the same meeting with Taverner, it’s to drop a broad hint that his main plan is coming to a head. When it becomes common knowledge that Sparrow has hired a Kremlin stooge he’ll be in trouble—unless he can pre-empt it by slinging mud at Taverner. The disappearance, he’s saying—as, no doubt, Rasnokov knew he would—is MI5 dirty tricks. Unfortunately for Sparrow—and, to be honest, it doesn’t matter whether Bachelor’s heads-up to Lech was true or a Jackson Lamb fairy tale—Slough House gets to de Greer before Sparrow’s amateurish thugs on Wimbledon Common.
It means that Act III is largely about the battle of the incompetents. Just after Lamb has left Taverner in the park following his revelations—I think it’s at this point that she feels she’s always a beat behind everybody else—she gets a call from a Regent’s Park insider in a hurry: ‘Red Queen!’ This is the Park’s in-joke that a head is about to roll—how we laughed—and the head will be Taverner’s. We aren’t in on the joke, but we start to guess something like it when, after Taverner has taken out the battery from her phone, she dumps it in a bin. She has another ‘burner’ phone, the one that only Peter Judd uses, and it’s him she asks a favour of as she uses all her old joe skills to make herself invisible. He sends her to an obscure club where the bartender will have the cash she says she needs.
The club is up a couple of flights of stairs, and all’s well—until the first crew of incompetents arrive below. It’s a good job it’s Sparrow’s men—really, men he’s borrowing from Benito on the sincere understanding that he’ll give them all the help they need with their post-Brexit visas. Up another flight of stairs, she’s lucky to stumble on the hidden key to the roof, and luckier still—this novel’s like that—the thugs don’t guess she might have got through the locked door marked ‘Private’. And she knows the cavalry are on their way, slowly, because, luckily, she had found the last working payphone in London and she’s made a call to Lamb. Unluckily, rather quicker horses arrive from Regent’s Park, and they won’t be so rubbish, especially as they’ve also sent a drone that has by now spotted her on the roof. Luckily—I could keep this up all day—Louisa has put on a burst of speed but (etc.) she admits to Lech she doesn’t really have a plan. She has trouble bluffing her way beyond the first of the Dogs, and those upstairs have got Taverner by now anyway. Luckily, Taverner has her wits about her, alerts them to who Louisa is—which causes enough confusion for the two women to get as far as the unmarked SUV. Also luckily, a traffic warden had been helping Lech distract the driver’s attention from the door to the club. In minutes, after Taverner has spent a moment convincing both the driver and the traffic warden that they really, really don’t want to get in her way if they want to keep their jobs, they’re out of there. You can see what I mean by farcical.
More plot business. Whelan has swallowed Lamb’s bait, the unlikely arrival of a female denizen of Slough House at the San a short while after Sophie de Greer’s disappearance. ‘Shirley Dander,’ which might or might not be a name Whelan recognises, is obviously really de Greer, and he tells Sparrow. However—Herron needs a big, chewy however at this point—he starts to regret being so definite about it. It would be a disaster for him if he was wrong, so he decides to drive to Dorset, where the San is located, to check. Unluckily (sorry, but this is the novel it is), he arrives minutes after Benito’s crew. And, with variations, melee No.3 is a more spectacularly clownish replay of melees 1 and 2….
Shirley Dander goes almost immediately into a kind of coke-starved withdrawal-driven frenzy, and a happy mix of this, her own undeniable street-fighting skills, the muscle-memory moves of some of the other inmates—especially the twitchy one with the heavy bedside lamp—and Whelan’s own willingness to throw himself highly uncharacteristically into the fray lead to… another happy outcome. There’s a lot of comedy action-movie stuff, like bodies flying out of windows and landing on car roofs. One of these saves Whelan’s skin, because the current occupant of the roof had been about to drag him through the windscreen, but now that particular Italian is struggling to breathe. There are so many comic little moments I wonder whether Herron might already have had an episode of the TV series in mind as he wrote it. A small crew of MI5 Dogs, who have arrived late and have enough on their hands dealing with a mob of untrained hooligans, let one of the Italians’ vehicles slip through their fingers. It’s being driven by Whelan, and he guesses, correctly, that Shirley Dander is hiding in the back. Phew.
Meanwhile… plenty. All along, de Greer has been in the safe house. Lamb clearly has more clout than anybody realises, and we don’t need to think about how or why just now. Bachelor is a more burnt-out case than anybody at Slough House, and she can wind him around her little finger. (I think it might be Lamb who draws his attention to this later.) But she’s happy to be kept hidden, plays the part of the innocent, nervous victim… and then Lamb turns up. He tells Bachelor to take a walk, and she drops the pretence. She’s not nasty—she’s been blackmailed into working for Rasnokov, who will turn her now fragile mother on to the streets if she doesn’t. Eventually, after at least one more meeting, she agrees to speak before the kangaroo committee—chaired by Sparrow, of course—that is planning to get rid of Taverner next day for her dirty tricks. The suspended First Desk can’t be accused of waterproofing de Greer if the woman is there, telling them how comfortable she’s been. That storyline comes to a head near the end, when Sparrow picks her up from a night café after she’s left the house. Which wasn’t her plan….
There’s a back-story that makes it all very urgent for Taverner. What Peter Judd has on her is a link to China via some dodgy funding deal that I assume has been trundling on since long before this novel. He’s helping her now, but has let her know that if she goes down, she’ll take all blame for the China deal with her. She’s able to offer de Greer safe passage if she’s still First Desk after the meeting tomorrow, so de Greer’s safety now is crucial. Has all their work—Lamb’s, the slow horses’, Taverner’s, even Whelan’s—come to nothing? As Benito himself, accompanied by two of his men, go towards his car with de Greer and Sparrow, it’s looking bad. And there are only a handful of pages left….
She is about to get in the back of the car with the two thugs, but—‘What am I, a taxi-driver?’—Benito wants her in the front. It’s Sparrow in the back instead, and still I didn’t get it. Neither does Sparrow… and then he does. He notices they aren’t going in the right direction, the thugs on either side of him start to squeeze him between them and, after Benito has dropped off de Greer where she wants to go—or maybe before, I forget—Benito explains to Sparrow that he’s decided to listen to people who seem as though they might keep a promise, and won’t keep dropping him and his men in the shit. They take Sparrow to the woods where they usually have their free-for-alls, and gives him a few minutes start. The last we see of Sparrow is him blundering through the woods wondering whether they’re really coming after him, and what they’ll do if they get him.
And in the final few pages, Herron brings everything back to its former state. Life is going on more or less exactly as it was before in the two parallel universes of the Park and Slough House. Taverner hasn’t changed at all as a boss—although we do see her fulfilling her part of the promise to Benito, overriding any objections there might be to those visa applications. Jackson Lamb is on the top floor of his own domain, smoking and farting, and the ongoing joke of the new girl’s mission to catch him taking her lunch from the fridge reaches a satisfactory punchline. (Before the denouement of the Sparrow/de Greer plot, we had been in Roddy Ho’s room to witness his head practically exploding after he has innocently accepted some of her salad. She’d tried the toxic chillies trick on Lamb, but it’s obviously pointless trying to get anything at all past a boss who’d seen everything. But that was only the set-up. The punch-line is that we’d already seen Ashley interrupting Roddy ’s pathetic attempts at Zoom dating, and after the chillies incident she sets him up with the woman he’d been failing to impress. The date quite likes him, as long as he can hardly speak following the chillies thing. But over some days his mouth gets better, and after the third date he comes back with a black eye. How we laughed.)
And so on. We don’t hear anything of Sparrow, beyond the fact that his little plot to take over MI5 has come to nothing. Rasnokov—who knows? He could be anywhere, including the bottom of the sea. Except I bet he’s fine. Sophie de Greer is OK, Peter Judd is back in his box for now, and the PM is making his latest announcement—about another world-beating achievement a post-Brexit Britain will soon be capable of, a running joke throughout the novel. We even get a teasing little titbit, perhaps to set up the ninth novel in the series. Louisa (I think) is making sure River Cartwright’s desk is cleared, ready for his return. But Rivers is supposed to be dead, as dead as Sherlock Holmes after the Reichenbach Falls incident with Moriarty. What’s going on?
Who knows?
We can read it for you wholesale 