It’s a lovely window into the mechanics of good writing. He’s talking about one of my favorite authors, Mick Herron, who wrote the Slow Horses series that is now serialized on Apple TV.
What’s So Great About ‘Slow Horses’? This Scene Says It All.
The British spy show owes its sarcasm and wit to Mick Herron’s novels. Our critic A.O. Scott breaks down a few sentences from Herron’s latest, “Clown Town.”
A couple dozen pages into “Clown Town,” Mick Herron’s latest novel, two veteran spies share a bench in London. They’re Jackson Lamb and Diana Taverner, notorious fictional fixtures of MI5, the British intelligence service. Fans of “Slow Horses,” the Apple TV series adapted from Herron’s earlier Slough House books, will recognize the pair as the characters played with brisk professionalism and callused gravitas by Kristin Scott Thomas and Gary Oldman.
Those incomparable actors are a big part of the show’s appeal, but the Britain they inhabit — weary, cynical, clinging to the tattered scraps of ancient imperial glory — is built out of Herron’s witty, corkscrew sentences.
And this bench, like others where Lamb and Taverner meet with some regularity on both screen and page, is hardly an incidental bit of urban furniture. It holds not only their aging bureaucratic bums, but also a heavy load of literary and sociological significance.
The bench occupies a notably unlovely scrap of London, alongside a canal near Regent’s Park, where MI5, in this fictional universe, has its headquarters.
Herron’s prose fairly sighs at the drabness of the scene.
The bench itself is hardly blameless, part of a landscape constructed in a spirit of active malevolence. This isn’t a corner of the city that’s fallen into ruin. It was designed with alienation, ugliness and ill humor in mind.
Even the placement of the bench seems sinister.
And not having blown up the buildings that blight this place counts as a triumph for the enemies of civilization, as if the terrorists had decided that letting them stand would do more harm.
As for the sworn defenders of that civilization, they can barely manage to be civil at all. When Jackson and Diana finally speak, it’s to exchange barbs, the kind of sarcastic banter — the proper Britishism is “taking the piss” — that in Herron’s books is the lingua franca of the secret service.
She said, “There’s a rumor those things are bad for you.”
“And there’s statistics prove healthy people die. What’s your point?”
“Forget I spoke.”
“Already done.” He inhaled, exhaled, admired his own prowess, then said, “You look like you found a condom in your cornflakes, Diana. You going to tell me about it or just piss off back to the Park?”
Colleagues at every level of MI5 speak to one another in ways that make the phrase “hostile work environment” redundant. The ones who rise the highest — or at least live the longest — excel at invective, insult and humiliation.
How does Herron acquaint us with these characters? Not by festooning them with adjectives or evoking their physical attributes, but in relation to each other.
Jackson is seen through Diana’s eyes, his defining traits filtered through her perceptions. That he’s fat is conveyed without using those words, through a counterfactual proposition.
So too is his stinginess: The orange Jackson declines to share doesn’t actually exist.
The way Diana informs us of Jackson’s slovenliness and his ungenerosity reveals some of her own unappealing foibles. We might share her disgust, but we also notice her squeamish boundary-setting, her hypocrisy and her passive-aggressiveness.
Instead of simply asking for a cigarette, she will spend two sentences worth of mental effort noticing — but not complaining, not exactly — that Jackson didn’t offer her one.
And then she’ll scold him for smoking.
To sum up: Here are two unpleasant people who don’t much like each other converging in a rather squalid place for some rude conversation. And of course all this is what makes “Slow Horses” irresistible.
Yes: The plots are reasonably twisty and the spycraft is pretty good fun. There is generally enough present-day resonance in Herron’s tales to render the external threats and insider scheming credible, but not enough to make anything too grimly topical. His real skill is satire.
An ambient sarcasm hangs in the foul air around his characters. Nearly every word is freighted with a mockery that is indistinguishable from judgment. Herron’s prose bristles with the kind of active, restless grudge against the world that is the sure sign of a moralist.
While spies, bureaucrats and especially politicians come in for comic scolding, the real target of his satire is an administrative regime that will be familiar to many readers and viewers who have never cracked a code or aimed a gun. In interviews, Herron has often noted that unlike John le Carré, to whom he is often compared, he has had no first-hand experience of espionage. But he has spent enough time toiling in offices to understand the absurdity — the banality, the cruelty, the cringeiness — of modern organizational life.
“Slow Horses” is a workplace comedy, and Diana and Jackson — nightmare colleagues and bosses from hell — are its flawed, indispensable heroes. Their nastiness to each other and everyone else is a reflection of their circumstances, but also a form of protest against the ethical rottenness of the system they serve.
The gimlet-eyed Diana, managing up from a precarious perch high in the organization, must contend with the cretinous crème de la crème of the British establishment. The epically flatulent Jackson, a career reprobate exiled to a marginal post far from the center of power, manages down, wrangling MI5’s designated misfits, the Slow Horses who give the series its name. Those poor spies need to be protected from external savagery, internal treachery and their own dubious instincts.
Jackson and Diana seem to share a cynical, self-serving outlook, but what really unites them is that they care enough about the job to do it right. More than that: They may be the last people in London who believe in decency, honor and fair play, embodiments of the humanist sentiment that lurks just below the busy, satirical surface of Herron’s novels. Not that they would ever admit as much — especially not to each other, planted on a public bench, where anyone could be spying on them.
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