Clown Town by Mick Herron evaluation – extra enjoyable and video games with the Slow Horses | Thrillers

Trigger warning: the brand new Slough House novel shares its identify, I assume unintentionally, with a very bleak soft-play centre on London’s North Circular Road by which sticky under-fives flow into by an infernal equipment wailing and stabbing one another with plastic forks whereas the grownups sit at plastic tables consuming horrible espresso and ready for dying. Just a glimpse on the mud jacket despatched me again a decade to that surroundings of grubbiness, boredom and delicate peril. It’s not that massive a leap, thoughts. There’s one thing of the knockabout high quality of a soft-play centre in Mick Herron’s fictional world: all enjoyable and video games till somebody loses an eye fixed.

That mentioned, so far as I do know, not one of the accidents within the real-world Clown Town can have been occasioned by the sufferer being held down so the entrance wheel of a Land Rover Defender might be pushed over their head – which is the attention-grabbing scene with which Herron opens this newest instalment. As typically, Herron’s plot takes off from real-world occasions: the Stakeknife scandal – by which it turned out that MI5 had been defending a murderously vicious IRA enforcer as an intelligence asset – seems right here within the story of Pitchfork, whose signature “nutting” strategy of killing throughout the Troubles was working over individuals’s heads.

Pitchfork’s story was lined up – till it wasn’t. His outdated handlers have come out of the woodwork and, to combine metaphors, the sky quickly grows darkish with chickens coming house to roost. Herron’s hero River Cartwright (whose late grandfather’s archive, we uncover, contained essential materials about Pitchfork) begins pulling on a thread. The Service’s First Desk, the machiavellian Diana Taverner, launches one other of her fiendish schemes and is quickly as soon as once more sparring with the Slow Horses’ profane ringmaster Jackson Lamb.

Over the final decade this collection of novels a few group of cashiered spies has made the transition from “well-kept secret” to “household name”. Herron is now an genuine megastar of the style, and because the Apple TV+ collection Slow Horses each reader (and I anticipate the writer) can have recalibrated their psychological picture of Jackson Lamb from Timothy Spall to Gary Oldman (early novels likened Lamb to Spall “gone to seed”). But the books are nonetheless the principle occasion – as a result of it’s Herron’s line-by-line writing that basically makes them stand out. Has there been a extra magnificently bossy narrative voice since Dickens? Or yet one more in love with the baroque flourish? Here, for example, is the primary sentence in Herron’s now-traditional slow-burn walking-tour introduction to Slough House:

What you see once you see a clean web page is way what you hear once you hear white noise; it’s the early shifting into gear of one thing not able to occur – an echo of what you are feeling once you stroll previous sights the eyes are blind to; bus queues, whitewashed shopfronts, adverts pasted to lamp-posts, or a four-storey block on Aldersgate Street within the London borough of Finsbury, the place the premises gracing the pavement embody a Chinese restaurant with ever-lowered shutters and a light menu taped to its window; a down-at-heel newsagent’s the place pallets of off-brand cola cans block the aisle; and, between the 2, a weathered black door with a dusty milk bottle welded to its step, and an air of neglect suggesting that it by no means opens, by no means closes.

The “blank page” reference – together with a lacking guide from an outdated spy’s library being a MacGuffin, and a handful of different references to writing – hints at Herron’s flippantly metafictional bent. These books are an odd and addictive hybrid. The bones of any Slough House novel are these of a basic spy story: there will likely be unhealthy actors, buried secrets and techniques, hidden agendas, opaque and shifting stratagems and, eventually, gunplay or chases or kidnappings or eruptions of semi-competent violence. But the self-seriousness of most spy fiction will not be current. The floor fizz is extra like a sitcom: the back-and-forth of witty insults and off-colour jokes, sight gags and character work – Herron’s oddball solid chafing in opposition to one another whereas they sit of their shabby workplace reverse the Barbican, struggling by their make-work day jobs.

River is recovering from a brush with a Russian nerve agent. Sid is recovering from getting shot within the head. Shirley Dander continues to be pushing individuals who annoy her by home windows. The reliably terrible laptop whiz Roddy Ho has acquired a tattoo. Lamb is constant to supply cigarettes from unlikely locations (inside his shirt whereas scratching himself, principally). Catherine Standish, sober alcoholic, continues to be enjoying the long-suffering grownup, the straight girl to Lamb’s bitter comedy.

It’s not fairly a sitcom in construction, although. In a sitcom, the solid stays roughly steady and every episode stands alone. But over the course of those books, characters age and die, governments change (monitoring, roughly, the federal government of the day; an unnamed Keir Starmer has an unflattering walk-on) and longer story arcs develop. The new reader would do greatest to start out with the primary one, Slow Horses, and skim in sequence.

Is the formulation displaying indicators of fatigue? Not by my lights. If it has a weak point – and it’s not a lot of a weak point, as a result of Herron is a deft sufficient author for essentially the most half to get away with it – it’s a tonal limitation. The tug in direction of flippancy makes it difficult, typically, to shift gear into actual pathos or actual peril. Lamb is comical, however the tales insist that he’s additionally harmful. He is callous, however the tales insist he’s additionally, in his approach, conscientious. There’s a query mark over how a lot the reader is requested to thoughts when characters die, grieve and mourn, since there’s all the time a one-liner across the nook.

But what one-liners; and what sharp corners. I hope it gained’t rely as a spoiler to say that the conclusion of this one brings a dramatic growth to the collection. Gosh. Fun and video games, like I say, till somebody loses an eye fixed.