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The new Slough House novel...
Jul. 18th, 2019 04:33 pmJoe Country, by Mick Herron, is easily the best so far.
Of course there are miserable deaths, and sparkling dialogue as counterpoint. And some good jokes. When you read the extremely dodgy politician Peter Judd's dialogue it really should be heard in the inner ear as speaking with Bojo's voice. Also, the spook's church being St. Leonard's; I'm sure Elmore would have approved.
Slough House is at the lower end of purgatory, one step up from the least awful circle of hell, just behind the Barbican. The stories from there are getting better and better. If Pratchett had ever attempted the spy novel, he'd have to have been on top form to get close to this. I wonder, what are the requirements for good spy writing? Dense yet traceable plots? Dialogue? Characterisation? Villainous good guys and sympathetic bad guys?
Well, none of Herron's characters is anything other than flawed; excepting a blameless incidental chap who gets scarred for life. The only innocent in the whole novel gets shafted, as is good and proper in a spy novel; but it's not really about him as he's just collateral - again, as is good and proper... etc.
To those of us who grew up on Le Carré and his cold-war novels of moral equivocation will get the seediness of the milieu. But Slough House is many ranks lower than the Park or Le Carré's Circus.
Satisfying in all the wrong ways.
Of course there are miserable deaths, and sparkling dialogue as counterpoint. And some good jokes. When you read the extremely dodgy politician Peter Judd's dialogue it really should be heard in the inner ear as speaking with Bojo's voice. Also, the spook's church being St. Leonard's; I'm sure Elmore would have approved.
Slough House is at the lower end of purgatory, one step up from the least awful circle of hell, just behind the Barbican. The stories from there are getting better and better. If Pratchett had ever attempted the spy novel, he'd have to have been on top form to get close to this. I wonder, what are the requirements for good spy writing? Dense yet traceable plots? Dialogue? Characterisation? Villainous good guys and sympathetic bad guys?
Well, none of Herron's characters is anything other than flawed; excepting a blameless incidental chap who gets scarred for life. The only innocent in the whole novel gets shafted, as is good and proper in a spy novel; but it's not really about him as he's just collateral - again, as is good and proper... etc.
To those of us who grew up on Le Carré and his cold-war novels of moral equivocation will get the seediness of the milieu. But Slough House is many ranks lower than the Park or Le Carré's Circus.
Satisfying in all the wrong ways.
