The entertainment is of a rugged kind:
these books are not for the squeamish. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer,
courtesy of The Witness)
London
Rules is the fifth novel in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series of spy thrillers, and
for anyone keen to read them – and they are great fun – the best place to start
would be at the beginning. To be able to follow what is going on, knowledge of
the back story is vital.
The slow horses are a bunch of disgraced
spies who have been banished to a dismal, semi-derelict building called Slough
House in a gloomy part of London. They haven’t done anything bad enough to be
completely dismissed from the service, or else the service wants to keep an eye
on them, not cut them loose. Their boss is the utterly repulsive and fiendishly
clever Jackson Lamb, who once worked as a spy behind the Iron Curtain, and who
has enough skeletons in his cupboard to furnish a catacomb.
Britain is being targeted by a series of
terror attacks, vicious, not entirely competent and increasingly bizarre. It is
not something the slow horses have been asked to help with, but Roddy Ho,
possibly the oddest member of their odd crew, seems to be the target of another
not entirely competent killer. Inevitably, there is a link.
The cover blurb, from Val McDermid, calls
Herron “the John le CarrĂ© of our generation”, but he isn’t. His books aren’t
driven by the moral indignation that makes le Carré one of a kind and gives his
storytelling a fundamental seriousness. Sure, Herron is scathing about
contemporary politicians and politics and the spying establishment, and for
anyone who follows the news, there are plenty of recognisable figures in the
picture he paints, but the main thrust of Herron’s enterprise is entertainment,
not outrage.
The entertainment is of a rugged kind:
these books are not for the squeamish, and certainly not for those committed to
political correctness, but odd, damaged, and potentially psychopathic as the
slow horses are, you can’t help rooting for them. And mysterious and awful as
he is, Jackson Lamb’s one redeeming feature is that he watches over his team,
and can, more or less, dig them out of any trouble they get into. And trouble
follows them, in spades. - Margaret von Klemperer
London
Rules is published by John Murray. ISBN 978-0-241-32517-9.