Review: Slow Horses

Slow Horses by Mick Herron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There are a lot of good ideas percolating in this one, and that gives me enough optimism that I’m tempted by its sequel, but there are also a lot of deep problems that keep this from being an especially memorable work as it stands.

Above all, the great idea is that our collective protagonists are a group of MI-5 British intelligence agents who have all screwed up in one way or another. One shut down the London tube for a day when he had his squad hold a gun to a suspect a with a blue flannel over a white t-shirt when the real suspect had the reverse colors. Another slept with the wife of the Venezualan consul. Another drank too much. And another simply forgot a confidential file on the bus.

They’ve all been exiled to the dead end of “Slough House,” a place named after the suburb so awful and backwater that it’s where they set the British version of The Office. (And the American version chose Scranton, where I work and think of at least partly as home.) The idea is that, while others do the glamorous work of spycraft, they’re left to push paper and occasionally sort through rubbish for old credit card statements. They are the titular “slow horses,” suspect figures doomed to depressing careers and held hostage by the promise of modest pensions.

When a seeming group of National Front-like anti-immigrants determine to kidnap a young Pakistani-English man and promise to cut his head off, though, it’s the Slow Horses who have a better chance to make things right. Like Derek Raymond’s The Devil’s Home on Leave – though better than that one (while less good than Raymond’s amazing He Died with His Eyes Open) – this gives the underdogs a chance at solving a crime other law enforcement people have overlooked.

At the heart of this, that anger, that barely repressed sense of the fundamental unfairness of life, permeates the novel in interesting ways. Our potential victim, Hassan, doesn’t deserve what happens to him any more than anyone else. And we come to see that many of the fortunate thrivers don’t deserve their luck either. In a flickering way, it conjures what noir has to do (at least as far as I’m concerned): raise ideas of fundamental morality in the context of crime and the specter of amorality.

There are two major problems with this iteration of the experiment, though.

First, it’s irritating to see Herron switch perspectives as frequently and erratically as he does. The scenes here are almost all short and choppy, and he way overplays the pregnant pause; there are simply too many instances where, right before a big reveal, he changes scene. And, even more frustratingly, he’ll often rewind a bit when he returns to the thread he’s dropped. In small doses, that can work; overdone like this, it’s irritating.

Second, too much of what actually happens is contrived. Above all, [MAJOR SPOILER:] the plot to kidnap Hassan turns out to have been hatched as a counter-espionage effort by an MI-5 official who wants to frame the anti-immigrant right and, in foiling them, to win credit abroad. That’s such a bad idea that it undermines the effect of the whole set-up here; the “winners” in the race for espionage careers may not be any smarter than the Slow Horses themselves, but surely they can’t be that stupid.

And that problem persists in less structural ways too. For instance, two different characters trip during crucial physical showdowns, keeping their good-guy antagonists from having to kill them. That’s a clear failure of imagination on Herron’s part, and it’s too bad because it seems as if he could push this just a hair farther to something more compelling. We don’t need LeCarre level inspiration at every turn, but a little more attention can bolster the whole.

As I say, though, those real flaws may simply be growing pains. There’s a kernel of real inspiration here and, given the good reviews I see of the sequel, I have a sense that Herron may have moved beyond them in his later work.


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