Trigger warning: the new Slough House novel shares its name, I assume accidentally, with a particularly bleak soft-play centre on London’s North Circular Road in which sticky under-fives circulate through an infernal apparatus wailing and stabbing each other with plastic forks while the grownups sit at plastic tables drinking horrible coffee and waiting for death. Just a glimpse at the dust jacket sent me back a decade to that environment of grubbiness, boredom and mild peril. It’s not that big a leap, mind. There’s something of the knockabout quality of a soft-play centre in Mick Herron’s fictional world: all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
That said, as far as I know, none of the injuries in the real-world Clown Town will have been occasioned by the victim being held down so the front wheel of a Land Rover Defender can be driven over their head – which is the attention-grabbing scene with which Herron opens this latest instalment. As often, Herron’s plot takes off from real-world events: the Stakeknife scandal – in which it turned out that MI5 had been protecting a murderously vicious IRA enforcer as an intelligence asset – appears here in the story of Pitchfork, whose signature “nutting” technique of killing during the Troubles was running over people’s heads.
Pitchfork’s story was covered up – until it wasn’t. His old handlers have come out of the woodwork and, to mix metaphors, the sky soon grows dark with chickens coming home to roost. Herron’s hero River Cartwright (whose late grandfather’s archive, we discover, contained crucial material about Pitchfork) starts pulling on a thread. The Service’s First Desk, the machiavellian Diana Taverner, launches another of her fiendish schemes and is soon once again sparring with the Slow Horses’ profane ringmaster Jackson Lamb.
Over the last decade this series of novels about a community of cashiered spies has made the transition from “well-kept secret” to “household name”. Herron is now an authentic megastar of the genre, and since the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses every reader (and I expect the author) will have recalibrated their mental image of Jackson Lamb from Timothy Spall to Gary Oldman (early novels likened Lamb to Spall “gone to seed”). But the books are still the main event – because it’s Herron’s line-by-line writing that really makes them stand out. Has there been a more magnificently bossy narrative voice since Dickens? Or one more in love with the baroque flourish? Here, for instance, is the first sentence in Herron’s now-traditional slow-burn walking-tour introduction to Slough House:
What you see when you see a blank page is 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 aisle; 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.
The “blank page” reference – along with a missing book from an old spy’s library being a MacGuffin, and a handful of other references to writing – hints at Herron’s lightly metafictional bent. These books are a strange and addictive hybrid. The bones of any Slough House novel are those of a classic spy story: there will be bad actors, buried secrets, hidden agendas, opaque and shifting stratagems and, sooner or later, gunplay or chases or kidnappings or eruptions of semi-competent violence. But the self-seriousness of most spy fiction is not present. The surface fizz is more like a sitcom: the back-and-forth of witty insults and off-colour jokes, sight gags and character work – Herron’s oddball cast chafing against each other while they sit in their shabby office opposite the Barbican, suffering through their make-work day jobs.
River is recovering from a brush with a Russian nerve agent. Sid is recovering from getting shot in the head. Shirley Dander is still pushing people who annoy her through windows. The reliably awful computer whiz Roddy Ho has acquired a tattoo. Lamb is continuing to produce cigarettes from unlikely places (inside his shirt while scratching himself, mostly). Catherine Standish, sober alcoholic, is still playing the long-suffering grownup, the straight woman to Lamb’s sour comedy.
It’s not quite a sitcom in structure, though. In a sitcom, the cast remains more or less stable and each episode stands alone. But over the course of these books, characters age and die, governments change (tracking, roughly, the government of the day; an unnamed Keir Starmer has an unflattering walk-on) and longer story arcs develop. The new reader would do best to start with the first one, Slow Horses, and read in sequence.
Is the formula showing signs of fatigue? Not by my lights. If it has a weakness – and it’s not much of a weakness, because Herron is a deft enough writer for the most part to get away with it – it’s a tonal limitation. The tug towards flippancy makes it tricky, sometimes, to shift gear into real pathos or real peril. Lamb is comical, but the stories insist that he’s also dangerous. He is callous, but the stories insist he is also, in his way, conscientious. There’s a question mark over how much the reader is asked to mind when characters die, grieve and mourn, since there’s always a one-liner around the corner.
But what one-liners; and what sharp corners. I hope it won’t count as a spoiler to say that the conclusion of this one brings a dramatic development to the series. Gosh. Fun and games, like I say, until someone loses an eye.
• Clown Town by Mick Herron is published by Baskerville (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
