57 pages • 1 hour read
Mick HerronSlow Horses
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Subverting the British Spy Thriller
Slow Horses employs the action and pacing of a thriller, including the genre expectation of double-crossing and intrigue. The novel heavily utilizes generic tropes as misdirection, subterfuge, and a specifically British espionage jargon. At the same time, however, this novel and the series that follows it upends those conventional tropes, especially to challenge the traditional spy narrative themes of clearly delineated right and wrong, patriotism, and heroism.
Jackson Lamb’s character is reminiscent of previous down-on-their-luck spies in English spy literature, including Maurice Castle in The Human Factor by Graham Greene (Our Man in Havana, The Quiet American), or George Smiley in several novels by John le Carré (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, A Perfect Spy, The Constant Gardener). Indeed, Apple TV+’s adaptation of Slow Horses certainly played on the marked influence of the George Smiley novels in casting Gary Oldman, renowned for his 2011 portrayal of Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Unlike Greene or le Carré, Herron does not have a personal background in espionage, and it follows that his creation of a convincing spy world and characters draws on elements of iconic previous works likely to resonate with his audience, as well as independent research.
This sense of shared cultural points of reference is explicit, as Herron makes internal references and allusions to his literary influences in Slow Horses. These are in-jokes for an informed reader, but also enfold connotations from the original works. When River Cartwright and Sid Baker discuss the legacy of River’s legendary grandfather, River says that his grandfather’s choices for River’s childhood reading were le Carré’s Collected Works and “Kim. […] Conrad, Greene. Somerset Maugham” (100). Rudyard Kipling’s Kim famously concerns itself with the Great Game, a struggle between Great Britain and Russia over dominance in Asia that relied heavily on tricks of espionage. Similarly, the English novelists Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and Somerset Maugham all wrote works that touched on espionage and were cultural products of British imperialism. These references play into the novel’s treatment of Nostalgia, Patriotism, and the Post–Cold War Period, creating a sense of a decline in espionage’s purpose and certainty from the “simpler” days of River’s grandfather.
Although growing out of the traditional British spy thriller, Slow Horses is also a departure. From the beginning, the novel engages in audience misdirection based on generic expectations: the “slow horses” who will occupy the central narrative of the novel are inept, disgraced, and banished, not the suave and highly capable agents such as Ian Fleming’s James Bond, for example. Herron’s preface to the edition of Slow Horses referenced in this guide helps to explain the unusual mundanity of his spy world and the outsider status of his eponymous agents:
The life of spies, whether the James Bond copycats with their jetpacks and exploding wristwatches, or the down-at-heel dogsbodies of Len Deighton and John le Carré, were foreign territory to me, but I knew what went on behind ordinary doors; I knew about office life, about office politics (x).
Herron gives the readers a cast of characters who are embroiled in the tedious administration and internecine professional battles of the Service, cast by Herron as a form of modern corporate business, obsessed with bureaucracy and reputation. Herron employs the conventional tropes of the spy thriller while also subverting such traditions by interweaving them with the recognizable experiences of non-spy life. The effect is that, rather than being escapist in the spy thriller tradition, Slow Horses relies on a significant level of realism and relatability.
Cultural Context: London and Slough House
Much of the juxtaposition in Slow Horses is encapsulated by the use of its setting and place names, especially their cultural meaning in Britain. Herron’s use here creates British in-jokes that add humor for a British reader but are also part of the novel’s serious creation of a realistic world. This sense of subculture is linked to the slow horses’ role as outsiders and to the novel’s self-conscious reference to the British literary tradition it draws on.
In Slow Horses, MI5 is based in Regent’s Park, rather than the factually accurate Thames House: a deliberate alteration. Regent’s Park is an extremely expensive area of London developed in the early 19th century as grand houses for members of the British social establishment and elite. Very few people can afford to live in the Regent’s Park area, and its properties are mostly owned by embassies or by international millionaires and billionaires, very few of whom spend much, if any, time living in them. The buying up of London property by wealthy foreign investors is the source of longstanding cultural anxiety in the UK, as it inflates the cost of London property far past the resources of local people. In the book, therefore, Regent’s Park is expressive of a sense of old establishment status combined with modern disenfranchisement, key to its portrayal of “the Park” as snooty, inaccessible, and in many ways a sellout.
Slough House, as the book says, “is not in Slough, nor is it a house” (13). It is framed in negative terms to connote a non-place, supporting its role as a secretive spy office but, more significantly, as a deniable, expendable alternate location, whose members have non-careers.
Slough is an unremarkable town 20 miles outside London. It is associated in the UK with the humdrum experience of middle-class British urban-provincial life. This connotation comes from John Betjeman’s 1937 satirical poem “Slough,” which opens with the line “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough” and laments the drab industrialization of mid-war England. This poem entered the popular consciousness. A lot of Betjeman’s humor relied on snobbery, and today his joke is referenced more to laugh at the defensive cruelty and outdated English superiority often expressed by his class and generation than to ridicule Slough itself.
Another in-joke Herron creates by choosing Slough is its common mispronunciation by non-British people. Slough the place rhymes with “cow” and is not said like “slow” or like “slew” or like “slough” (“slough” in British English rhymes with “trough”). The name Slough is quite funny in Britain because of the Slough/slough coincidence: to “slough off” means to shrug off or discard something undesirable. This double meaning may be why Betjeman chose it. Herron’s humor also partly relies on the trap of the placename’s pronunciation, which creates a sense of those “in the know.” Choosing a deliberately tricky name plays into a self-deprecating recognition of Britain’s reputation for Betjeman-like ironic superiority, as well the acknowledged perversity of the English language, which also forms part of the British sense of identity. Herron augments this joke with the nearness of “Slough House”/“Slow Horses,” which further misleads the unwitting reader.
