February 18, 2025
Slow Horses, by Mick Herron
Twice in the past 24 hours, the first time with a stranger while riding the subway and the second with my doctor while I was having an ultrasound on my neck, have I found myself enthusing about Slow Horses, the mystery series by Mick Herron that’s been turned into an acclaimed series on Apple TV, and about how the character played by Gary Oldman in the show (Jackson Lamb) is always farting. I absolutely love this in our age of fragmented culture, and wonder who I’ll be discussion Lamb’s flatulence with tomorrow.
Possibly I’m failing to impress upon you how good these books are…
Unlike those I was talking to, I haven’t seen the show, but did spend a cozy snowstorm long weekend with the first book in the series, which I loved. (My husband is currently reading Dead Lions, the second book, and he’s enjoying that one too.) It’s a novel about spies whose mistakes and misadventures have sent them to Slough House, the place where misfit MI5 agents go to die (and hence the name for them, the Slow Horses)…until a high profile kidnapping case ends up in their lap. Jackson Lamb is their most uninspiring boss whose faith in them is nil. And yet.
What struck me most about Slow Horses—in addition to it being quite gripping—was its prescience. Published in 2010, and including a narrative thread about a Boris Johnson-esque figure with his eye on Number 10, the idea of far-right racist views being held by mainstream figures might have seemed far fetched at the time, but not so much now. After a massive cock-up, Slow Horse River Cartwright has only managed to stay in MI5 because of his grandfather, a former agent, who, when the two are discussing a journalist exposed for gross racist and nationalist views, explains to him that “[the journalist] wasn’t excommunicated because of his beliefs. It was because there are certain beliefs you’re supposed to keep under wraps if you want to dine at the High Table.” Which, in light of the capitulation of so many (powerful) people to the current US administration’s terrifying authoritarian agenda, seems awfully true, and they’re not even hiding anymore.
