The EconomistAugust 17th 2019 Books & arts 652
1schoolboys all—upholding the values of
imperial England by dint of superior intel-
ligence”. Mr Herron, she says, broke the old
boundaries by introducing a set-up in
which the spies serve “venal politicians
with no values other than the grabbing of
power and survival”.
He leavens this sardonic disenchant-
ment with a dark seam of comedy, in metic-
ulously sculpted prose. He is “a master of
timing, word by word, sentence by sen-
tence,” says Andrew Taylor, a crime novel-
ist. “His language creates its own world,
with streaks of satire and loss.” In a solemn
genre, “it’s refreshing to find a series that
makes you regularly laugh out loud.” Mr
Taylor reckons that spy fiction may at last
have found an author who will move it be-
yond the formidable legacy of John le
Carré, its master craftsman.
For his part, Mr Herron thinks of him-
self as an outsider in the world of espio-
nage. After all, “so many writers of spy fic-
tion are writing from a certain kind of
knowledge”, either as former practitioners
(like Mr le Carré) or as journalists. Born in
Newcastle upon Tyne, he studied in Oxford
and stayed there, working as an editor for a
London legal publisher. After four Oxford-
set mysteries, he devised Slough House
and decided, “I like this world. I’m going to
stay in it.” Some of the conflicts explored by
Mr le Carré—a writer he reveres—endure
among his downbeat rejects: “My charac-
ters are mired in the past. The big beasts
among them are cold-war relics.” Perma-
nent East-West tension is to them the natu-
ral state of affairs; history shapes their pre-
sent. “Sudden events that blind us with
their light”, thinks one elderly spymaster,
“had roots in the slowly turning decades.”
Looming over each twisting plot is Jack-
son Lamb, the scruffy and flatulent Falstaff
of the undercover world. This dinosaur
spook, once based in Berlin, runs his “crew
of misfits” with a heavy yet protective
hand. An “overweight, greasy has-been”,
Lamb is a grotesque and a flawed champi-
on. Mr Herron stresses that “I’m not into
wish-fulfilment. I don’t think a bunch of
heroes will save society.” Lamb, though,
will cross almost any line to save his own
agents. Even they, sociopathic losers and
charmless geeks alike, strive to do the de-
cent thing. “There’s a level of romance op-
erating there,” he admits. “Their frustra-
tions and thwarted desires come from
wanting to do good.” Cynicism and hypoc-
risy intensify the higher readers ascend on
Mr Herron’s ladder of power.
External threats—far-right thugs, rogue
veterans, even North Korean honey-
traps—do impinge on Lamb’s shabby do-
main. When Brexit begins to loom over the
clandestine affairs of an “increasingly iso-
lated island state”, espionage by and
against other European powers comes to
the fore. Mostly, though, Mr Herron’s dys-functional crew suffers from a sort of auto-
immune condition. Their closed commu-
nity generates toxic antibodies that devour
it from within. The self-inflicted chaos,
suspicion and inertia—and the brutal self-
interest that lurks beneath—acidly capture
the national mood.
Although their comic zest seldom fal-
ters, the topical bite of the books has sharp-
ened. “Joe Country”, in which one of Lamb’s
underlings imagines a country led by Judd
as “a mash-up of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and
‘It’s a Knockout’ ” (a notoriously puerile
British game-show), feels like the bleakest
volume yet. Its gags still sparkle. The stage,
however, darkens. “As a human being, and
a citizen of this country, I deplore almost
everything that’s going on in public life,”
Mr Herron says. “As a novelist with a bent
towards the satirical, it’s a gift.” 7A
worldwithoutnuclearweaponsstill
seems far-fetched. But in October 1986
it was closer than many realised. In his
book, Guillaume Serina tells the tantalis-
ing story of the Reykjavik summit between
the Soviet and American leaders, Mikhail
Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, who came
within a whisker of a ten-year deal to elim-
inate both countries’ arsenals.
Agreement was desirable yet impossi-
ble. Both sides were aware that they had far
more nuclear warheads and missiles than
they needed. The Soviet side also knew thatthe cost of maintaining nuclear weapons
was crippling the economy. Less fully ap-
preciated was the fragility of the balance of
terror, which was at risk less from warmon-
gering than from misunderstandings,
glitches or accidents. On several occasions
during the cold war, only thin threads of
luck and good judgment averted the apoca-
lypse. But agreement meant crossing ice-
sheets of mistrust. And on the American
side, Reagan’s fixation on the Strategic De-
fence Initiative, or Star Wars—space-based
missile-busting lasers—proved an insu-
perable obstacle.
The Soviets offered the United States a
big concession: to let it continue with “lab-
oratory” testing of this new scheme. The
definition of that proviso could have been
stretched to meet all practical require-
ments (33 years later, the Star Wars technol-
ogy is nowhere near useful deployment).
But Reagan had set his heart on a futuristic
system that would make his country safe
for ever, and did not want to return home
seeming to have given it away. As Roald
Sagdeev, a Soviet nuclear expert, puts it:
“The Americans oversold the Strategic De-
fence Initiative, and the Russians over-
bought it.”
Mr Serina’s account, first published in
French three years ago, draws on declassi-
fied archives and interviews with witness-
es to paint a vivid and valuable picture of
the two-day meeting in the Icelandic capi-
tal, despite the occasional redundant flour-
ish and some unfamiliarity with the tech-
nology he mentions. He is a leading French
correspondent dealing with the United
States, not the Soviet Union, which some-
times shows. Moreover he blithely as-
sumes the anti-nuclear case is self-evi-
dent, and is prone to unthinking moral
equivalence between the communist em-
pire and the free world. Dialogue indeed
helps clarify disagreements and build
trust. All the same, Reagan’s views of a ma-
levolent Kremlin were well-founded.
If, just if, the summit could have goneCold-war summitryDancing on ice
An Impossible Dream: Reagan,
Gorbachev, and a World Without the
Bomb. By Guillaume Serina. Pegasus Books;
256 pages; $25.95. Biteback Publishing; £12.99Reagan and Gorbachev, so near and yet so far