the times | Saturday April 30 2022 saturday review 19
A feast of big characters with bigger appetites
This joyous, high-energy debut gets
a chef ’s kiss from me, says John Self
And the mirrorball it creates of this
black community reflects all its aspects.
The men are feckless at best. “Terrible
trouble with our men,” one of the narrators
in Jael says. “The good men died young,
and the terrible ones stayed just long
enough to make you wish they would die.”
But that love of life means that every down
comes with an up: when a man dies, it
brings his daughters together — until one
of them is propositioned by his friend at
the funeral (“So what you doing later
on?”).
Sometimes Philyaw stretches herself in
ways that don’t work: one story in list form
feels schematic next to the fullness else-
where. And she writes best at length,
giving time to develop the relationships,
so her shortest stories are less satisfying
than others.
Philyaw’s fear that the book would be off-
putting to some seems unfounded. I am as
unlike the black American women in this
book as anyone, but I saw things through
their eyes and delighted in their funny, af-
fecting company anyway. That is the mark
of a real writer. And if books have taught us
anything, it’s that even though we’re all
different, we’re all finally the same.But the food is also a token of love: in one
of the best stories, Peach Cobbler, the
mother of the narrator, Olivia, seduces the
local pastor with her cooking.
It starts out like a joke — Olivia in child-
hood thought Pastor Neely was God
because when he retired to the bedroom
with her mother, she could hear her crying
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” — but matures into
something richer, when Olivia is sent to
tutor the pastor’s son and finds a compro-
mise of her own.
Food isn’t the only thing Philyaw’s char-
acters have an appetite for. They watch
trashy 1980s soaps (Dallas, Dynasty, Knots
Landing); and then there is the sex. They
share it (in Instructions for Married Christ-
ian Husbands), shout about it (Snowfall,
where Leelee’s mother complains about
her daughter “running off from here with
some girl you met on the internet”) and get
sneaky: in Eula, two female friends in their
forties are having an affair. Everyone’s at it:
even “the pastor’s wife. That smile of hers.
Like her secrets got secrets.”
All this is delivered in vivid language and
rambunctious dialogue: “Your glasses so
thick you can see the future,” goes one
insult. Or as granny asks in Dear Sister,“Didn’t y’all have another sister... the
fat one?” These are stories that, like the
people in them, say what they mean:
it plays out on the page, not in understated
subtext. (You can see why they are
being adapted for television.) “You may be
thinking that this situation is a hot mess,”
says one narrator. True, but what could be
more entertaining?W
hen this debut collection
of stories was published
in America, the author
said she had been afraid
that a book so “unapolo-
getically black” as hers wouldn’t find a
publisher. But reading The Secret Lives of
Church Ladies, it’s hard to see how anyone
couldn’t be charmed by it.
Despite the title, the stories are linked
less by characters than by the character
of the writing and setting. It’s a book
in love with life, describing people living
at full speed, and the style captures
their energy.
Deesha Philyaw’s central characters, all
women, have a greediness for living, in-
cluding for food, which is consumed with
enthusiasm. “Had to take a little break,”
says a woman writing to her sister. “Fixed
me another plate.” Often it’s comfort food
— “bowl after bowl of banana pudding” —
as a salve to life’s difficulties and a way of
remembering childhood and home.
The Secret Lives
of Church Ladies
by Deesha PhilyawOne, 224pp; £14.99winning recipe Deesha Philyaw’s
women have a greediness for livingemollient Claude Whelan, to investigate
whether de Greer has been illegally spirit-
ed away by the spooks of MI5.
As so often in the novels, the real enemy
lies within, and Taverner must reluctantly
work with the Slow Horses of Slough
House and their malodorous boss, Jackson
Lamb, to save all their skins.
If the adaptation starring Gary Oldman
as Lamb has brought you to the written
series, Bad Actors may not be the best
introduction to its undoubted joys. Start
with the 2010 thriller Slow Horses, the firstThe glacially cool Taverner — Kristin
Scott Thomas in the TV series and here in
full nuclear winter, The-Devil-Reads-
Pravda mode — finds herself the target of
twin threats. Her opposite number in Mos-
cow unexpectedly turns up in London.
Meanwhile, the prime minister’s Svengali-
like adviser, Anthony Sparrow (“nasty,
British and short”), is scheming to take
over the security service. His pet super-
forecaster, Sophie de Greer, has vanished
and may not be who she says. Sparrow
brings in Taverner’s predecessor, theNot just a spy
saga: it’s how
we live now
W
hen you are a thriller
writer, book titles are hos-
tages to fortune. As his
Slow Horses series about
washed-up British spies
canters on to Apple TV+, what then should
we make of Mick Herron’s choice of name
for his latest instalment? Herron shoos
away the obvious joke himself in the
book’s acknowledgments.
Bad Actors, which turns on power plays
at Westminster, is the equivalent of that
difficult eighth album for the band from
Slough House, as the grim office of MI5’s
reject agents is called. The challenge for
Herron now is to sustain our interest, and
indeed his, in his cast of misfits a decade
after he first showed he could mix espio-
nage with political satire.
He does this as any good soap opera will,
by culling and adding characters and
adopting the perspective of different
ones for each story. With the series’
principal boy, River Cartwright, now out
of action, the protagonist this time is the
Horses’ nemesis, the head of MI5, “Lady
Di” Taverner.
in the sequence. Long-term fans will enjoy
catching up with the gang, but much of the
fun depends on knowing their history and
well-established failings. The cocaine-
loving Shirley Dander, who shares the
spotlight here, has for example finally
wound up in rehab.
She is deftly drawn, but the novel suffers
somewhat from the absence of Cartwright
as a would-be hero trying to prove himself.
Certainly, there are fewer straight thriller
elements in Bad Actors than in some
earlier titles, and less legerdemain in the
storyline.
Herron’s great strength remains his gift
for rapid-fire repartee. For all that it flirts
with caricature at times, it brings to mind
classic screwball films such as The Front
Page and makes you wonder why he hasn’t
written for the stage or screen.
The star turn is still the politically incor-
rect Lamb, the best source of one-off liners
since Harland & Wolff. A spy who thinks
they are “the hottest property since
Anthony Blunt was keeping Her Maj’s
nudes well hung” gets as little respect fromhim as a cabinet “a few boats short of a
ferry company”.
At least there’s no doubting Herron’s
intelligence. Will he prove to be our age’s
Anthony Trollope, recording how we live
now as his characters warn of — surely
outlandish — schemes by politicians to
profit from privatising the civil service?
Few other contemporary thrillers, at any
event, would have the confidence to make
a plot point of the post-Brexit residency
status of some of Lazio’s hardcore Curva
Nord football fans.
The muted timbre of Bad Actors com-
pared with previous instalments means it
won’t prompt standing ovations, but it de-
serves the bouquets that will come its way,
and Herron is building a series with lasting
resonance. We’ll miss it when some day he
decides to bring the curtain down.With its quick wit
and sharp political
satire, Slow Horses
sums up our era,
says James Owen
Bad Actors
by Mick HerronBaskerville, 352pp; £18.99lamb hot plot Gary Oldman and Jack Lowden in the TV adaptation of Slow HorsesJAKE CHESSUMHerron’s strength is
his gift for rapid-fire
repartee, like classic
screwball comedy