Tag: book-review

Slough House by Mick Herron

This is the seventh in the Slow Horses/Jackson Lamb series, which probably needs no introduction. The 309 pages continue the downbeat, yet lethal, espionage world of the marginalised Secret Service employees located in London’s fictional Slough House.

Thrown together as Service almost rejects the inmates of Slough House suffer a living purgatory, grotty conditions and their own mixture of dangerous delusions, flaws and addictions. They are united only in cowering under the tyranny of their older boss ex-cold war veteran and spectacularly gross anti-hero Jackson Lamb-unvarnished inter-generational friction. The urban settings and relationships depicted must owe something to Hogarth.

Novichok poisonings, Brexit and insidious populist politics all combine to propel a suitably toxic plot to a partial resolution. The characters are careened along by a mad situation and cope by making desperate decisions. Can Jackson Lamb right his ship?

Dark humour and dry satire are fused, sparking, into the writing.

Politician, entitled (thinks he is a) fixer and “ITS ALL ABOUT ME” character Peter Judd plays a prominent part, which Herron presents as a prolonged satirical performance. No prizes for guessing which UK politician Judd must have been based on!

Immediate uninhibited dialogue, description and narration keep the story racing along as another metaphorical earthquake hits the slow horses in Slough House. Slow horses being the term for the marginal Secret Service no hopers, the series has developed its own idiom.

This book is set pre-Covid as is book eight “Bad Actors”. The stories are an antidote to the suave fantasy of James Bond. Herron presents a cracking spy thriller and a wicked political satire for the price of one. Go and slouch about in Slough House, just watch where you step!

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

A 2022 Booker shortlisted work, apparently the shortest ever nominated, at 110 pages. This flags quality over quantity.

The third person narrator entirely follows the protagonist, Bill as he goes about an Irish country town in the run up to Christmas 1985. He is a family man part of a close knit community. The old and new Ireland are uneasily meeting, but tradition and the power of the church are still strong. Stigma still attaches to unmarried mothers, contraception and abortion. Economic insecurity haunts the town.

The plot unveils as Bill is accidentally faced with realities about the local convent laundry in a first hand way. Does he intervene to stop abuse to a girl, or remain silent? As Christmas nears the internal moral pressure on him builds. What was half known and veiled is now real to him. He has to be grateful for an intervention in his own early life. A moral dilemma builds quietly. Will he act, or settle for the complicity all around him?

Keegan references “A Christmas Carol”, this is about good and bad, acting or not acting, though without the extravagance and theatricality of Dickens. Rather, the writing is precise, focused and very human. No scene is wasted. The circumstances of the wider issues are clear and brought down to the individual, small actions are large for the person, individual actions make change. The locality and characters are skilfully drawn, dialect is present lyrically. The psychology of mental preoccupation in a time of seeming happiness and the weight of the unsaid are palpable. There is a town bridge, a Rubicon, to cross, will Bill cross it, will his country?

The cover of this edition depicts a snowy Bruegel landscape with hunched black figures, which reflects the real dark issues addressed in this book of fiction. Keegan shows us, as good writers do that the best fiction is never “only” fiction.