The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Please sir, can I have some more Lamb?
Gary Oldman is superb on TV, but for real Mick Herron addicts only a new novel will do – and this one has a spooky Russian twist
BAD ACTORS by Mick Herron
352pp, Baskerville, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £9.99
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The eighth novel in Mick Herron’s Slough House spy series arrives just as Slow Horses, the Apple TV+ serial adapted from the first book, comes to an end. But even those of us who have gorged ourselves on Gary Oldman’s performance as the scrofulous spymaster Jackson Lamb will still fall ravenously on this new book.
For the true Herron fix, we need the action to be couched in his distinctive narrative voice – deadpan for jokes, rising at other times to a sort of sardonic lyricism. In Herron’s novels, as in all the best fiction, style works in harmony with character and plot to convey a unique vision of the world.
It’s a blissfully eccentric vision, conveyed through a hystericalrealist take on the espionage thriller that, even more boldly than le Carré or Len Deighton, strives to embody the genre’s rituals and rhythms while simultaneously sending them up.
I don’t believe in Slough House – a crummy offshoot of MI6 to which employees who don’t cut the mustard are exiled to carry out demeaningly low-pay-grade tasks – in the sense that I think such a place exists in real life. Nor do I believe its monstrous head honcho Jackson Lamb, who bullies his team with a vituperative eloquence that makes Malcolm Tucker seem like Mary Poppins, is representative of the senior staff of the British intelligence services. But I believe in them as I read, because Herron invests both his setting and his characters with a vitality that leaves reality looking flat and pallid.
That’s not to say Herron’s books are hermetically sealed off from reality; in fact, they often give the impression of having been written with the aid of a crystal ball tuned to whatever will be dominating the headlines at the time of publication. Here, just as reports reach us that Putin has put one of his most senior spymasters in prison, Herron presents us with a head of Russian intelligence who is living in fear of an increasingly paranoid and erratic president turning against him.
Looking for an exit strategy “in case his boss took it in mind to examine his innermost thoughts, perhaps by spreading them across a carpet”, Vassily Rosnokov turns up in London, a city where, courtesy of many of his compatriots and their enablers, “the tumbling wet slap of money being laundered” is the constant backbeat.
Rosnokov’s plan involves the manipulation of Anthony Sparrow, a ghastly squirt of a government special adviser (“a home-grown Napoleon: nasty, British and short”) who assigns the prime minister his policies. It is up to the reader to decide how far the Russophile Sparrow (who is a prolific blogger, favours the employment of “weirdos and misfits” in policy-making units, and prefers satchels to briefcases) may be meant to recall any recent occupants of unelected high office. The plot is a latticework of blackmailing, double-crossing and dead-cat-throwing as the interested parties attempt to stitch up their enemies, with the staff of Slough House, eager as ever to escape their desks, soon muscling in on the action.
If the previous volume was too short on mayhem for my taste, Herron compensates here with some gloriously chaotic set-pieces. I love the leisurely style he brings to his scenes of violent action. For instance, when a man plunges through a closed window, “the noise he made passing through it had an orchestral quality: one big boom accompanied by a thousand tinkling minims” – few writers can be simultaneously so funny and so thrilling. The novel is also moving in an understated way, as Herron’s penchant for ruthlessly killing off his leading characters starts to take an emotional toll on the surviving Slow Horses.
Eight books into the series Herron somehow still manages to find comic mileage in Jackson Lamb’s foul personal habits, but alongside all the un-PC jokes, the note of fury at the disruption of the world order by various selfinterested parties is growing ever more insistent.
Still, like Dickens, Waugh or Amis, Herron knows that it is the most serious subjects that are the best material for jokes. This novel confirms that one of the major compensations for living through our times is to see
what hay Herron makes of them.
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