Slow Horses

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, and death by suicide.

Slow Horses makes continual reference to the Cold War spy thrillers that precede it, particularly the novels of John le Carré, to set up a contrast between the old days of spying and the modern nature of espionage. The characters also speak about the Cold War with nostalgia and regret as a lost time when the spy’s mission and purpose was clearly drawn. The Slough House series takes place in 2010, the modern era of forever wars, foreign terrorism, and cyberattacks, where the old Cold War distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys are blurred, at best. Shifting geopolitical allegiances and destabilized centers of power have fundamentally altered the ways in which spies operate, within their own bureaucracy and out in the field.

It is no wonder, then, that Jackson Lamb’s Slough House environs are dominated by gloom and decay. Not only is the location considered a backwater, far from the central hub of Regent’s Park, and populated by exiled agents, but it is also a place that symbolizes the arc of Lamb’s career as an aging Cold War “warrior.” Thus, Slough House becomes “Jackson Lamb’s new kingdom: a place of yellows and greys, where once all was black and white” (17). It is not merely that the physical place shows signs of wear, “white exhausted by stale breath and tobacco” (16), but also that Slough House, like Lamb, occupies a moral limbo. The agents who work for Lamb are routinely humiliated (often by Lamb himself) and reminded constantly of their uselessness. They are very far from the heroized James Bond figures of action, glamour, and global travel. Rather, they are bureaucratic pencil-pushers.

Regent’s Park, meanwhile, operates in a mode of moral superiority, though that is eventually undermined by Diana Taverner’s ambitious scheming. According to the rumors that River Cartwright has heard, Taverner is frustrated with the ways in which the Service is currently run. Thus, she justifies her increasingly immoral actions. River notes that, even if Taverner were Service Head she would not have the kind of power that the old guard did: “there were Boards to answer to these days” (48). The bureaucracy has superseded the moral mission, not to mention the glamour, of the Cold War years. Even River himself harbors a nostalgia about those times, partly fostered by his grandfather, long retired from the Service. As River realizes, “No Service Head had been given free rein since Charles Partner [. . .]. But then, Partner had been a Cold War warrior from his fur-lined collar to his fingerless gloves, and the Cold War had been simpler” (48). It was East versus West, Communism versus Democracy, Moscow versus London. These lines are now not clearly delineated. River knows that his own experience will be markedly different from his grandfather’s: “The O.B. had spent his working life in the service of his country, when the battle lines were drawn less crookedly than now” (85). Taverner herself understands that the spy game is much more complex than it used to be, not only muddled by shifting geopolitical concerns but also hobbled by bureaucratic entanglements: “Her apprenticeship had been served in the fag-end of the Cold War, and it sometimes felt like that was the easy part” (105). Then, at least through the lens of nostalgia, things were simpler, and the enemy was already identified.

It is significant that the terror threat in the novel is from British citizens, and citizens who define themselves by their Britishness. This intentional choice underscores the changing nature of the threats faced by the nation and its Service. When Taverner tells Lamb, “[T]here’s a war on, Jackson” (202), she refers to the security threat of the culture war that is being waged between conflicting ideologies amid shifting geopolitical realities. Unlike the Cold War, when allegiance was split down national lines and shared sense of “Britishness” and patriotism was assumed against a common enemy, modern threats are expressive of factions within Britian, which contest the very meaning and nature of patriotism and British identity.