34 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTICLike le Carré,
Herron is
obsessed
with that area
of the human
brain where
paranoia
overlaps with
vigilance.to Tuesday.”) The manager of Slough House, its
twice-as-toxic David Brent, its stained and fart-
ing Buddha, is Jackson Lamb. Once a formidable
“joe”— Herron-speak for an agent—at Berlin Station,
Lamb is now a chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking
shambles and a creature of coal-black cynicism.
Herron’s slow horses are always being pulled into
plots, called upon to exercise their latent joe skills.
As rejects, they are the natural enemies of the elite.
They can smell a false-flag oper ation a mile off. No
fake news for these genuine losers. In Joe Country,
a hunt for the missing son of a deceased slow horse
leads to an encounter with the most infernal eche-
lons of the Establishment.
Herron has written 13 novels—six in the Slough
House series—but he began his literary career as a
poet. These are the opening lines of Joe Country:
The owl flew screaming from the barn, its wing-
tips bright with flame. For a moment, silhou-
etted against the blank sky, it was a dying angel,
scorched by its own divinity, and then it was
just a sooty husk, dropping like an anvil into the
nearby trees.Angel/anvil, ascent and gravity in paired syllables.
Let’s hear it for the poet’s ear. The previous Slough
House novel, 2018’s London Rules, kicks off with an
assault-weapon attack on an English village: “The
jeep, which had idled throughout the brief carnage,
spat stones as it accelerated away.” It could be a
scene from the British poet David Harsent’s apoc-
alyptic 2005 sequence, Legion: “We cut our engines,
then, and the dust / settled in silence.” It’s the
same wiry language, the same sensation of shock
acting on space.
Espionage is a shadow battle; it looks like the
psyche. “On a normal day,” muses a spy in Joe
Country, “London was bright and busy, full of open
spaces and well-lit squares. But it was also trap
streets and ghost stations; a spook realm below the
real.” In this realm, people change shape; graves
open and dead things rise; stories turn inside out.
Like John le Carré—with whom he has been much
compared—Herron is obsessed with that area of
human experience, that area of the human brain,
where paranoia overlaps with an essen tial, feral
vigilance. “Since leaving the Park he’d had that
uneasy sense of footsteps in synch with his own.
There were tricks you could pull—double back
to check a shop window, pause to fix a shoelace,
halt at a bus stop ...” No such thing as coincidence.
Ordi nary, bovine, walking-down-the-street life is
an illusion, a sleep-state. Don’t get caught standing
around: bad tradecraft.
Now and again le Carré’s Cold War—that ’70s
Eastern Bloc dowdiness, all those strange drawl-
ing characters sipping their tea in a fuggy room in
Cambridge Circus—reaches with long fingers intothe Slough House milieu. Reckonings occur, de-
cades delayed. The grandfather of one slow horse
is a George Smiley–era spy sinking into dementia;
narratives and counternarratives are coming loose
in his head. But Herron was on the Underground,
going to work, when London was bombed on July 7,
2005, and the mood of his spies is un–le Carré: a
jazzy, jangled hyperalertness. Carnage is only a
heartbeat—a switch, a trigger—away. The London
where the slow horses live is an invisibly fanatical
city: jihadists, rogue actors, wandering nodes of
annihi lation approaching the zero hour.
Working as fast as Herron does, you can stay
close to life as it’s being lived and close, also, to
the hallucination known as current events. “My
feeling about Brexit,” he told The Irish Times ear-
lier this year, “is people with vested interests have
manipulated and lied to large sections of the com-
munity. There is a part of me that would like to
go back and burn down the bastions of privilege
that allowed these people to take over in such a
self-serving way.” Well, there are several Brexits,
but one of them, indeed, is the kind of elitist con-
spiracy that the slow horses—in their cack-handed,
explosive way—are constantly uncovering.
The installation of Boris Johnson in 10 Downing
Street will have done nothing to appease Herron.
Peter Judd, the bicycle-riding, conscience- free
home secretary in 2016 ’s Real Tigers, is less a cari-
cature of Johnson than a police artist’s sketch: “He
was a bulky man, not fat, but large, and though he
had turned fifty the previous year, retained the
schoolboy looks and fluffy-haired manner that
had endeared him to the British public.” Isn’t that
Johnson, lasering toward power under his halo of
bumble? His fellow Brexiteer Nigel Farage makes
an appear ance, sort of, in London Rules, as the pop-
ulist Dennis Gimball: “What should have been a
cameo became a career, and the whole thing went
on for what felt like decades.” Spoiler alert: Gim-
ball gets his head knocked off by a falling paint can.
The novelist’s revenge.
Herron has been praised for the wit and velocity
of the workplace banter at Slough House— the in-
fighting, and the awful, un-PC things that come out
of Jackson Lamb’s mouth: “I’m an ardent feminist,
as you know. But haven’t you girls got better things
to worry your little heads about?” A little of this, I
find, goes a long way. Sections of London Rules in
particular seemed to me to be rather clogged with
Ve e p-like repartee. Joe Country corrects the error.
The slow horses are drawn out of fast-talking Lon-
don and into wintry Wales, land of snowy ditches
and burning owls. The bastions of privilege are
casting their long shadow. And in joe country—the
place, the mind-set, where the spies live—there
are ironies and inversions, but no jokes.James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic.THE OMNIVOREJOE COUNTRY
MICK HERRON
Soho Press