Launch: CITY OF LIES by Michael Russell

Review: SPOOK STREET by Mick Herron

Welcome to Slough House, ‘the administrative oubliette of the intelligence service,’ where the ‘slow horses’ – aka those British spies who are damaged, broken or simply useless – are put out to grass. Slough House provides the hub for Mick Herron’s ‘Jackson Lamb’ spy novels, of which Spook Street (John Murray) is the fourth, a series that is by some distance the most impressive new body of work in spy fiction.
  The novel opens at London’s Westacres shopping centre, where a bomb explodes and ‘something like the sun bloomed in all the wrong places.’ Meanwhile, David Cartwright, a legendary Cold War spymaster and the grandfather of ‘slow horse’ River Cartwright, is targeted for assassination. When River goes AWOL in France to investigate why the senile David was targeted, Slough House commander Jackson Lamb finds himself embroiled in a plot rooted in a post-Glasnost scheme to breed the ultimate ‘sleeper’ – the fanatical terrorist who believes he’s working for the other side.
  In synopsis it sounds like a typically modern spy novel, with its technological horrors and war-on-terror paranoia, but the Jackson Lamb novels are deliciously irreverent throwbacks. The tone is set by Herron’s characterisation of Jackson Lamb, a belching, farting, swearing sloth of a man who favours low cunning over high-minded principles.
  Herron, steeped in the genre, enjoys poking fun at his literary antecedents. ‘Bond never had this trouble,’ River Cartwright observes when he finds himself lost in France and struggling to communicate with a waitress. ‘Bond, though, would have been talking to a waitress twenty years younger, with inviting cleavage.’ There’s also a neat nod to John le Carré, when Louise Guy, another ‘slow horse’, notes that a Slough House operation ‘was like a circus would be if circuses involved fewer clowns.’
  A lesser writer might baulk at invoking le Carré, for fear of inviting odious comparisons, but Mick Herron is fully entitled to his indulgence (which extends to inventing his own vocabulary, as did le Carré: the novel is thronged with ‘weasels’ ‘stoats’, ‘slow horses’, and ‘vampires’). He is superb at evoking the le Carré-esque air of ennui, cynicism and self-loathing which permeates an intelligence service on its uppers, but which remains – the alternative being too awful to contemplate – duty bound to keep calm and carry on. Even so, the reader steeped in spy fiction may discover that Herron’s beautifully detailed characters more closely resemble the grubby, penny-pinching creations of Len Deighton, those put-upon civil servants charged with defending the realm despite a complete absence of the noble impulse.
  Either way, Spook Street is an absorbing tale peppered with fascinatingly flawed (and in some cases plain awful) characters, while the downbeat tone, and the paralysing self-doubt that afflicts many of the protagonists, is entirely apt for our turbulent times. Herron has a flair for the incongruously unsettling: in the midst of some office banter, during which two characters practise enhanced interrogation techniques, one of them declares that, ‘Blowing up forty-two kids in a shopping centre is murder. Waterboarding a suspected terrorist to death, that’s housekeeping.’
  That said, Herron also leavens the mood with flashes of mordant humour (‘The Dogs sniffed out all manner of heresies, from the sale of secrets to injudicious sexual encounters: the honeytrap was older than chess, but stupidity was even older.’), while the hilariously repellent Jackson Lamb – the anti-Smiley – is a constant source of politically incorrect one-liners.
  Most importantly, Mick Herron possesses that intangible gift given to all great writers, the ability to persuade the reader that he or she alone is privy to an intimate conversation. Here Herron draws his readers so fully into the world of Slough House that the incautious might find themselves slipping between the pages and transformed from reader to spook. Which wouldn’t be entirely surprising; as Jackson Lamb points out, ‘Spooks love their stories: it’s why they’re spooks.’ ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Event: ECHOLAND by Joe Joyce Chosen as Dublin’s ‘One City, One Book’ for 2017

Hearty congratulations to Joe Joyce, whose ECHOLAND (2013) has been chosen as Dublin’s ‘One City, One Book’ for 2017. Set during the WWII years of Ireland’s ‘Emergency’, ECHOLAND is a spy thriller featuring young intelligence officer Paul Duggan, and the first in a series that includes ECHOBEAT (2014) and ECHOWAVE (2015). Quoth Joe:

“I’m delighted and honoured that ECHOLAND will be Dublin’s One City, One Book for 2017. The city is an integral part of the book, not just the backdrop to a spy story. As I was writing it, I was very conscious of the hardships and great dangers of the Emergency period, faced — as always by Dubliners — with resilience and wit.”

  For a review of ECHOLAND, clickety-click here.
  For an interview with Joe Joyce, clickety-click here.

One to Watch: JOHN LE CARRE: THE BIOGRAPHY by Adam Sisman

It won’t be published until October, unfortunately, but I’m very much looking forward to Adam Sisman’s biography of John le Carré, which will be published by Bloomsbury. To wit:

John le Carré is still at the top, more than half a century after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became a worldwide bestseller. From his bleak childhood - the departure of his mother when he was five was followed by ‘sixteen hugless years’ in the dubious care of his father, a serial-seducer and con-man - through recruitment by both MI5 and MI6, to his emergence as the master of the espionage novel, le Carré has repeatedly quarried his life for his fiction. Millions of readers are hungry to know the truth about him. Written with exclusive access to le Carré himself, to his private archive and to many of the people closest to him, this is a major biography of one of the most important novelists alive today.

  I like the idea of the book promoting le Carré as ‘one of the most important novelists alive today’. All too often, when talking about le Carré, you hear that he’s a wonderful spy novelist, very likely the best of his kind and the man who spun literature from the Cold War conflict, but that the quality of his books has suffered in the Brave New post-Wall World. Stuff and nonsense, of course. As much as I love the Cold War novels, they were set during a period that to a large extent (and understandably so) characterised by a black-and-white, us-vs-them perspective. The latter work is far more fascinating, I think, ‘rooted’ as they are in the fertile but shifting sands of fluid conflicts, unlikely alliances and moral relativism.
  As for the idea that le Carré is a great spy novelist: he is, of course, but leaving at that is equivalent to saying that James Joyce was a dab hand at writing about Dublin, or METAMORPHOSIS is the finest possible example of a novel about bugs.
  As it happens, I’ve been on a bit of a le Carré binge this January: so far I’ve read OUR GAME, CALL FOR THE DEAD and SINGLE AND SINGLE. CALL FOR THE DEAD (1961) is a little out of place, of course, given that proceeds as far more a traditional investigation than le Carré would offer in later years (poignant to realise that the first character ever introduced in a le Carré novel, even before George Smiley puts in an appearance, is the perennially elusive Lady Ann Sercomb), but OUR GAME (1995) and SINGLE AND SINGLE (1999) both offer characters who are singularly and even self-destructively obsessed with achieving one good thing in a breathtakingly bleak and cynical world, despite their own awareness of how Pyrrhic their achievement might be. If fiction has more or better to offer than that particular kind of story, I really don’t know what it is. It helps, of course, that when it comes to the idea that character is mystery (to paraphrase John Connolly), le Carré delivers more value per line than any other writer I know.
  Here endeth my two cents. JOHN LE CARRE: THE BIOGRAPHY by Adam Sisman is published on October 22nd.