21 September 2017
I Spy
New work from Herron and le Carré
by J.R. Thomas
If the middle years of the last century were the golden years of detective fiction, the last fifty were those of the spy thriller. As Britain’s presence on the international stage slowly shrinks, the reader searching for perplexity seems to feel the urge for enlarged if obscured horizons. No longer the foggy backstreets of London or the decaying country house with that strangely behaved butler; the spotlight is now on the alcoholic Oxbridge languages graduate with suspect loyalty, working for a civil service department that looks just look like every other civil service department – except that its business is secrets and death.
It is of course not James Bond of whom we speak; his input of vodka martinis, however prepared, would certainly have made him an alcoholic in pretty short order, but our preferred modern spy does not drive an Aston or constantly risk his cover by pursuit of bikini clad lovelies. Instead he is divorced or separated, trying to keep up the payments on his ex’s Mondeo, and living in an untidy studio in Lambeth. Eric Ambler was perhaps the earliest entrant to this new realism in tales of espionage, but the true father of the genre is Len Deighton, the creator of the immoral and insubordinate Harry Palmer (named in the films, but anonymous in the books), hero of “The Ipcress File” and “Funeral in Berlin”. Palmer was the modern spy personified, endlessly chastised for not filling forms in on time, meeting his boss in the supermarket.
Deighton was not eclipsed but certainly challenged by John le Carré, who had had the advantage of having worked in MI6. His intense psychological studies of secrecy and treachery and the dull routine of much undercover work, became a mirror to post imperial Britain seeking her new place in the world. Indeed, le Carré is in many ways a modern Dickens; recording so much that is sleazy and uncomfortable about the way we live now, woven through with greed, betrayal, ingratitude; and a need to keep the filing in shape. Anthony Price, who we have praised in these pages before, is often overlooked, but he too took as his theme modern Britain played through a cast of alarmingly human spies. Graham Greene had worked in various capacities in the world of secrets and made it a stage for some of his best work; as has the American novelist David Ignatius, an American exponent of “Greeneland” across the Atlantic.
Spy fiction is a seam which shows no sign of being mined out; the combination of office life so familiar to us, and loners and misfits fighting danger and terrorism is irresistible. The practitioners themselves are not mined out either; Deighton and Price are still with us but seem to have thrown away their typewriters; Ignatius and le Carré are still at work, and indeed le Carré has just brought out a new novel, “A Legacy of Spies”. Which coincides tidily from your reviewer’ perspective with the release of a paperback edition of a rising star in the field, Mick Herron, his fourth volume, “Spook Street”, of his Slow Horses series.
Herron, the frontispiece tells us, is a professional writer and lives in Oxford, which does not tell us much. But he is shaping up to be a seriously powerful writer of modern spy fiction. His locus operandi is something which might well be MI6, operating from smart premises in Regents Park and bedevilled by all the usual office politics and budgetary constraints of modern government departments and big business. But Herron’s characters are not using flat screens in Regents Park; they are in some tatty building in Aldersgate, each having suffered some career disaster; which condemns them to non-jobs doing filing or surveillance, and perhaps a worse fate, to be managed by one of the most wonderfully appalling figures of modern fiction, Jackson Lamb. Lamb is one of those without whose remembrance of organisational history and corporate graves no office can work properly; he is also disgusting, foul mouthed, insensitive, and politically incorrect. Slow Horses his crew may be, but they still have their uses, to do Regent Park’s dirty work, reservists in the first line of fire, not least because of their expendability. Lamb sort of loves them, deep down, and protects them as best he can. In return they bicker and grumble; if they weren’t before, they are now flawed and bitter and working the system as best they can. Some are mildly dishonest; they have problems with money, sex, drugs, and alcohol, and with each other. They are full of human weakness and totally believable. Herron has made them into a cast of strangely likeable and sympathetic characters with whom it is alarmingly easy to identify.
Mick Herron is a writer who is exceptionally able to promote both a sense of place and a sense of person; his plots are satisfactorily convoluted if a little stretched in places. They are certainly the sorts of books that involve you sufficiently to prevent you noticing that your train home has not moved for twenty minutes, and to enable you to identify the River Cartwright and Shirley Dander in your life. Pray that you have no Jackson Lamb, though you probably have.
Herron has been described as the new le Carré, but that is not really fair to either of them. Le Carré is a much more serious writer, too serious some will say, with his pen a sharpened scalpel that he deploys in expressing his increasing sense of anger and injustice about modern Britain. He is a novelist who happens to use spies as a key part of the infrastructure of his writing, his own past full of dishonesty and betrayal but who still likes to think that the human condition can be made perfect, or that at least that we should try. Unlike Herron, who has that discerning insight into people and their behaviour, but who one suspects is as much amused by the human condition as disillusioned by it.
Le Carré’s new work is the latest and probably the last in what might be loosely called his George Smiley sequence. Those of us who are le Carré devotees first met Smiley as a minor character in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. When we really got to know him in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy he had already retired but was brought back to find the double agent inside British intelligence. Now we go back again to that spy from the cold – to deal with ambulance chasing lawyers who claim the Circus was in breach of its duty of care. Nobody can remember much; the files have disappeared; the heirs of the Stasi are unlikely to help; modern careers may be made or broken by what emerges. Peter Guillam is hauled out of retirement, but is he a reliable witness to anything?
This is classic le Carré indeed; wonderfully observed, carefully plotted, the nuances of life, the odd motives that drive behaviour, all beautifully regarded. And that anger about the sleek façade of a society that cares only for money, that despises the little people, where a sense of care and obligation is slipping away, boils away under the surface. Is le Carré “the most significant novelist of the second half of the twentieth century” as Ian McEwan claims on the book jacket? Mr McEwan is perhaps being too modest about his own claim to that throne, but insert “one of” and nobody could dispute it. This book proves why.
“Spook Street” by Mick Herron is published by John Murray, £7.99 in paperback
“Legacy of Spies” by John le Carré is published by Penguin Viking, £20 in hardback
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