![]() ![]() ![]() Forget the Cold War Britain’s contemporary problems feel less like grand ideological struggles and more like persistent clerical errors. The failures of recent Tory rule seem all the more squalid when viewed through the conventions of genre fiction. National assets are sold off, extremists are indulged, and no one is trustworthy. The background is a quiet hum of institutional failure, political corruption, and hopelessness. In the foreground is a succession of double crosses, mole hunts, car chases, and assassinations. The humor is pitch-black, and the overriding tone is one of cynicism-the perfect match for post-austerity, post-Brexit, post–Boris Johnson Britain. In recent films, even James Bond has swapped glamour for grit, but Apple’s Slow Horses goes far beyond that. The Conservative Party has achieved Brexit and precious little else since 2010, leaving the country feeling pinched, and pessimistic, and stuck.įrom the October 2019 issue: The loser-spy novelist for our times Watching Herron’s stories unfold on-screen, I’m struck by what has-and hasn’t-happened since the first book in the series appeared. The reviews of the show’s newest season-which premiered late last month and is based on the third novel, Real Tigers-have been adulatory. After years of obscurity, his books are now best sellers, and Apple has so far adapted three for television under the name Slow Horses, after the first novel in the series. Herron’s spy-novel series is now 13 years old, the same age as Britain’s floundering Conservative government. On the top floor is the lair of the spymaster Jackson Lamb, stinking of “takeaway food, illicit cigarettes, day-old farts and stale beer.” ![]() “Instead, via a shabby alleyway, its inmates let themselves into a grubby yard with mildewed walls, and through a door that requires a sharp kick most mornings, when damp or cold or heat have warped it.” The rest of Slough House isn’t much better: a nest of abandoned keyboards and empty pizza boxes strewn around by agents who would rather be anywhere else. “No one enters Slough House by the front door,” the novelist Mick Herron writes in Dead Lions, the second book in his series about an “administrative oubliette” for useless spies exiled by MI5, Britain’s domestic-intelligence agency. ![]()
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