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.
Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Slough House”
Prologue Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide describes portrayals of racist and sexist attitudes and language, and expletives, and makes reference to alcohol dependency, extremist terrorist activity, kidnapping, threat, violence, violent death, death by suicide, and gory detail.
River Cartwright is looking for a target: It is early on a Tuesday morning, and London’s King’s Cross station is crowded with commuters. He is told to be on the lookout for a young man in a blue shirt with a white T-shirt underneath. While he is looking for the target, he thinks about his latest assessment, to follow a public figure without being spotted: His chosen figure happened to have a stroke, so River took the initiative to follow Diana “Lady Di” Taverner, Second Desk at Regent’s Park. He was successful.
River spots his own target and takes him down; he searches the man’s belongings and finds nothing. River then sees a man in a white shirt with a blue T-shirt underneath: He realizes that his handler, James “Spider” Webb, has fed him the wrong information. River chases the correct target through the station, but it is to no avail: “The target pulled a cord on his belt. And that was that” (10).
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Slough House is located in an unglamorous part of London, flanked by the New Empire Chinese restaurant and by a grocer’s. The building looks neglected and lifeless. Slough House is where disgraced MI5 agents are sent to work out their careers. It is run by Jackson Lamb. River has been sent here following the disastrous training simulation in the preface. Lamb has sent River to collect the garbage of a journalist. River sifts through it in the office he shares with Sidonie “Sid” Baker, not knowing what he is looking for. Lamb gives him no clues, and River wonders whether he is being teased or tested.
Meanwhile, the journalist in question, Robert Hobden, visits a coffeeshop, Max’s, as he does each day. He is no longer the esteemed journalist he once was, but he is still hard at work on something. A young woman with red hair sits in the corner with her own laptop. The girl in the café asks Hobden to borrow one of his newspapers, and he grudgingly obliges. In the process, she spills her coffee everywhere. It ruins the newspaper, and the proprietor fetches a rag to help them clean everything up. She offers to buy him another, but he refuses.
Roderick Ho, self-described tech genius, considers the flaws of his colleagues at Slough House. Catherine Standish, Lamb’s assistant, is quiet and rule-abiding, Min Harper is anxious and forgetful, and Louisa Guy has a temper. Struan Loy is the office joker, and Kay White is noisy. He finds Sid Baker mysterious because he cannot figure out why she has been banished to Slough House. Jed Moody, who used to be one of the Dogs (MI5’s security personnel) always shows up late. Ho dislikes him the most.
Jackson Lamb thumps on the floor above River’s head, summoning him. Lamb asks if River has found anything in the journalist’s garbage. When River says no, Lamb calls him useless. River remembers one of the first conversations he ever had with Lamb: Lamb had made it clear that it is only because River’s grandfather was an esteemed member of the Service that River has ended up in Slough House, rather than fired altogether after the training exercise.
The woman from the coffeeshop shows up in Lamb’s doorway. Sid Baker has returned from her mission, laptop in hand.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Sid has stolen the files from Hobden’s memory stick, as per Lamb’s orders. Lamb packs up the laptop and Sid’s memory stick into a secure flash-box and sends her and River away so he can make a phone call. When Sid sees (and smells) the garbage piled in their office, she leaves in disgust. River is left to deliver the flash-box to Regent’s Park instead of Sid. He realizes that Lamb is happy to send him on this errand: River must deliver the package to James “Spider” Webb, his former friend—and who River suspects sabotaged his training exercise. River opens the flash-box, keeping the memory stick and putting the laptop in an envelope. He and Spider exchange barbs as River hands over the package. Spider does not question the lack of a flash-box, accepting River’s excuse that Slough House lacks the resources.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Catherine Standish returns home to her flat, thinking about the past. She is approaching 50, and feels disappointed. Years ago, she was assistant to a spy called Charles Partner; the two started an affair, and Catherine was in love with him. She had taken care of him and protected his career from the likes of Diana Taverner. One day she found him dead in his bath, where he had ended his own life. She was heartbroken and her exile to Slough House feels unjust, but there were those in the Service who believed she could have prevented Partner’s death. Catherine is in recovery for alcohol dependency and has achieved 10 years of sobriety.
Min Harper ends his evening with a phone call to his children, who live with their mother, his ex-partner. He is at Slough House for leaving a classified CD on a train, and this derailed his personal life. Louisa Guy is alone in her flat, drinking. She thinks she should quit MI5, rather than spend the rest of her career at Slough House. She remembers her downfall: losing a target who eventually flooded the black market with guns; she was accused of racism, in not being able to differentiate one Black man from another.
Jed Moody, meanwhile, meets up with his old boss from the Dogs, Nick Duffy. He tells Duffy that Lamb might be running an operation to do with a washed-up journalist. He hopes that he can return to the action and be reinstated as an active agent. Duffy tells him not to hope and that Lamb has no authority to be running anything.
Roderick Ho is home alone—a home which he owns. His neighborhood is filled with renters and students, so he plays his music as loud as he wants, staying up through the night. Earlier that night he lured a woman out on the pretense that he was selling a used car, in the hope of sleeping with her. She was uninterested and annoyed, which riles him. He distracts himself by searching the personnel files of Slough House. He wonders how he would be different if his parents had never left Hong Kong, but he knows that he would still be hacking systems no matter where he lived.
Jackson Lamb is on his way home when he realizes he is being followed. Lamb lays a trap, but the follower turns out to be a teenager. Lamb gives him his loose change and waits for the kid to disappear and his heart rate to slow before he returns home. The teenager is a 19-year-old stand-up comic wannabe. He is abducted by three men in ski masks, stuffed into a trunk, drugged, and then dumped into a dank cellar. He has no idea what they want from him.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
River Cartwright goes to his grandfather’s house to check on him and talk. River’s mother calls him “the Old Bastard,” while River prefers “the O.B.” The O.B. understands that River is frustrated with his role at Slough House and reassures him that he will not be exiled forever. The O.B. also knows the journalist, who once boasted a promising career. He suggests that, if the journalist is under investigation, it is wise to take it seriously. Hobden once had some powerful connections.
River remembers how he become close to his grandfather: His mother dropped him off one afternoon and disappeared for two years. River, at nine, was shy at first but came to love his grandfather. Because of his grandfather’s past—a legendary agent during the Cold War—River decided he wanted to join the Service.
The O.B. notices that River has injured his hand, and River confesses to the incident with the flash-box. The O.B. admonishes him. River promises to be more careful.
Thinking about this conversation as he returns to work in the morning, River finds everyone gathered in Ho’s office. They are all staring at Ho’s monitor, where a hostage, hooded and in orange jumpsuit, holds a copy of that day’s newspaper. The only information that has been relayed is that the kidnappers are threatening to cut off the hostage’s head.
Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 4 Analysis
The first few chapters of the novel establish the setting, the plot, and the characters, while revealing how all of these elements are intimately bound up with one another. The initial sketches of the characters inform the mood of the setting, and vice versa. The machinations of the plot are also dictated by the situation in which the characters find themselves, utilizing realist devices of believable cause-and-effect. In this first section, this approach is particularly apparent through the character of River. He believes that James “Spider” Webb deliberately sabotaged his training exercise. As such, the camaraderie that developed between the two during training blossoms into full-blown rivalry, replete with suspicion, jealousy, and even hatred. Spider is shown in the opening chapters as River’s foil. He has landed at Regent’s Park, taken under Diana Taverner’s wing, while River is exiled to Slough House. Herron leaves open the possibility that River is wrong, however, showing that even River doubts his own instincts, worrying that he is “paranoid” (49). The sense of division and conflict in Slough House is exemplified by the rivalry River also begins to nurture with Sid Baker, who appears to be Lamb’s favorite. He offensively accuses her of using her “[f]eminine wiles” to procure the journalist’s memory stick (42) and complains about Slough House to his grandfather. The O.B. warns him not to act rashly, and this sets up the role of his voice in the narrative as River’s moral compass. River is desperate to leave Slough House, jealous of Sid, and willing to take huge risks, like stealing classified information. In this way, the novel links the characters’ emotions and motivations to the thriller plot, creating a convincing interplay between these elements.
The novel introduces the characters in ways that emphasize their lack of cohesion. Among their differences is the level of sympathy and pathos with which they are portrayed, which is key to the novel’s theme of Forgiveness, Redemption, and Second Chances. Min Harper is cast as hapless and gentle: He absent-mindedly left classified information on a train, and his divorce adds to his pathos, as his wife has abandoned him in his difficulty. Catherine Standish is shown as self-aware and regretful, and her backstory is designed to garner sympathy. After a decade of bereavement and sobriety, “Slough House felt like a deferred punishment for a crime she’d already atoned for” (61). Especially, Catherine accepts her challenges, introducing herself to Rivers with the line “My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic” (61). But she believes she was loyal to her former boss, Charles Partner, and could not have prevented his suicide. In strongly portraying Catherine’s conscience and reflection, the early chapters set up a sense of mystery around the nature of Partner’s death, as her perspective is generally shown to be reliable. On the more morally ambiguous side, Louisa Guy was accused of misidentification due to race-based assumptions, and this possibility, unclarified by the novel, makes her a deliberately challenging character to judge at this point in the novel. Roderick Ho is overtly unlikeable. He actively despises everyone with whom he works and is shown in the opening chapters to be arrogant and presumptuous to a potentially disturbing level, as seen in his behavior toward the woman he misleads and his characterization of this as an “unsuccessful date.” At this point in the novel, the reason for Ho being in Slough House is unknown, leaving open the possibility that it is something truly immoral. Each of these characters has their own mysteries, withheld from the reader. The novel thus builds tensions and places the reader in a position of uncertainty over whom to trust, a mirror of the characters’ own dilemmas.
In the first chapters, Slough House is established as the central spoke around which all the characters and events revolve. The novel uses the setting of Slough House to contextualize the characters and their situations without the need for extensive overt exposition. For example, the interior of Slough House is filled with “functional” furniture, likely “commandeered from the same institutional source: a decommissioned barracks, or a prison administration block” (15). This explicitly compares the place to an abandoned military bunker and to a prison: a “dungeon” (16) far from the bright lights of MI5 HQ at Regent’s Park. That is, the characters who populate Slough House are marginalized and scorned, not “deemed as being of account” (15). The novel makes explicit that these characters are considered redundant, “a post-useful crew of misfits [who] can be stored and left to gather dust,” like the outdated paperwork they file (16). Their essential centrality to the novel, however, sets up a structural uncertainty about what the novel will ultimately reveal these characters as, particularly whether their stigmatization is an exploitative move by MI5 to allow deniability and scapegoating. While funny, the opening’s plot drive and serious psychological characterization makes clear that the novel is intended as more than a spy thriller parody and that these “misfits,” therefore, are more than their unfortunate circumstances suggest.
