What you see when you see a blank page is very much what you hear when you hear white noise; it’s the early shifting into gear of something not ready to happen – an echo of what you feel when you walk past sights the eyes are blind to: bus queues, whitewashed shopfronts, adverts pasted to lamp posts, or a four-storey block on Aldersgate Street in the London borough of Finsbury; where the premises gracing the pavement include a Chinese restaurant with ever-lowered shutters and a faded menu taped to its window; a down-at-heel newsagent’s where pallets of off-brand cola cans block the aisles; and, between the two, a weathered black door with a dusty milk bottle welded to its step, and an air of neglect suggesting that it never opens, never closes.
Mick Herron’s readers know immediately where they are; outside Slough House, home to Jackson Lamb and his crew of MI5’s duds and failures. They are known as the ‘slow horses’, and widely regarded in the secret service as a pack of bumbling, incompetent clowns. But they are Lamb’s clowns. Anyone who messes with them, messes with him, too. And for an overweight, out-of-condition, flatulent, nicotine-dependent, down-at-heel functioning alcoholic, he does a good job of dealing out retribution.
All the books are based on this premise, but so far, it hasn’t got stale.
In this instalment, the loathsome former politician Peter Judd – who must be modelled on Boris Johnson – and First Desk ice-queen Diana Taverner are duelling yet again. The action unspools from one small detail, a missing book in River Cartwright’s grandfather’s library. And that’s all I’m saying. No spoilers.
My older brother, who loaned me this one, tells me he rates Herron A+ – up there with John le Carre – because the writing, the characterisation, the dialogue, the setting, the back-stories, the plots all dovetail together seamlessly. No hitches or hiccups in the reading experience. Perfect examples of their kind. And with a kind of cliff-hanger at the end, there’s the extra pleasure in knowing that there are more Slow Horses to come.