32 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by PAUL SPELLA
CULTURE
FILE
THE
BOOKS, ARTS, AND ENTERTAINMENTAGENCEOPALE/ALAMY;^ SERGIESCRIBANO;^DAVID^CORNWELL/GETTY;JOHNMURRAYTHE OMNIVOREBroken Spies
for a
Broken England
Mick Herron is the
John le Carré of the Brexit era.BY JAMES PARKER
So when somebody writes a book that grips and settles me, that makes a reader
out of me again, I become quite helpless with gratitude. I feel this way about Mick
Herron. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, in England, and edu cated at Oxford, Her-
ron writes squeakingly well-plotted spy thrillers. More than that, he composes—at
the rate of a pulpist—the kind of effi cient, darkly witty, tipped-with-imagery sen-
tences that feel purpose-built to perforate my private daze of illiteracy. More than
that, he’s a world-bringer, the creator of a still-growing fictional universe with its
own gravity, lingo, and surface tension. He whacks his characters and winnows
his cast with real 21st-century anti-sentimentality, but there always seems to be
enough life-energy around to generate more stories. A TV series is in the works,
and a new novel, Joe Country, was published in June.
At the center of Herron’s mythosphere is a terrible, terrible office: Slough
House. Although ... can Slough House be at the center of anything? It’s a termi-
nus, permanently dislodged from—at odds with, even—the flow of existence. A
grimly nondescript building somewhere in the London borough of Finsbury, a
concrescence of London dilapidation and anonymity, Slough House is where
you’ll find the “slow horses”—the MI5 operatives deemed too dysfunctional,
addicted, high-risk, or failure-prone for anything but the most grinding busy-
work. J. K. Coe is there, monastically hoodied, sizzling with PTSD, listening to
Keith Jarrett in his earbuds and not talking to anyone. Shirley Dander is there,
always thinking about the wrap of cocaine in her pocket. (“It wasn’t like Shir-
ley was an habitual user. It was a weekend thing with her, strictly ThursdayA
R E Y O U a good reader, reader?
Patient, curious, broadly cultured,
and so on? I’m not—not anymore.
Decades of email-checking have
splintered my concentration; more
recently and speedily, I’ve rotted out my attention
span with Netflix and end-of-the-republic updates.
Of the new mind, the pro digious and fluently
networking postdigital mind, I am not in posses-
sion; I have only the perishing old mind, bleach-
ing in chunks like the Great Barrier Reef. To sit in
a chair, in a pool of educated light, and turn the
pages of a novel ... No chance. I twitch, I bounce.
I start reaching for things. Then I get groggy.