Bad Actors is the next instalment of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series, now a successful Apple TV programme starring Gary Oldman.
Herron writes about the secret world of spies, government ministers and civil servants, and the plots unfold against a background of contemporary political events. In Real Tigers a dishonest politician, someone quite a bit like Boris Johnson, created chaos the slow horses needed to sort out. In Bad Actors Sparrow is a kind of Dominic Cummings, ripping through the British establishment like a dose of salts. Cummings wanted to turn the civil service from a politically neutral bureaucracy, hard for governments to manage, as in the TV programme Yes Minister, into something more malleable, and directly controlled by Number Ten. He planned to introduce radical thinkers from different walks of life to challenge what he described as the inflexible civil service group think that was stopping the country from making its Brexit freedoms work. (Pass me a bucket please.) It would have been another Conservative step towards fascist autocracy.
Acting in the spirit of Cummings, in Bad Actors Sparrow employs a futurologist to join the cabinet and sort out the country’s future, but it turns out she is the daughter of a former KGB spy. She goes missing and it looks like Diana Taverner, head of the secret service, has set in motion a rarely used protocol that involves kidnapping and murder. Sparrow sees his chance to denounce her for unauthorised use of power and appoint a stooge of his own to run the service. He knows his friends in the right wing press will be happy to help him with free publicity.
Once again it’s down to the slow horses to sort things out. Sparrow employs Italian football hooligans to try to retrieve his futurologist from MI5’s rehabilitation centre – a stately home quintessentially and beautifully English – but the slow horses intervene. There are enough scenes of mayhem and violence here to satisfy most tastes, but the best thing about Herron is his ability to create a diverse range of amusing characters. The focus is on playing with the stereotypes of the genre by creating heroes who triumph despite their incompetence. Only Jackson Lamb is on top of his game, farting, drinking, smoking, grubby, and not much of a hero by Bond’s standards, but always able to get one over on Westminster’s chattering classes.
It’s not only the characters in Herron’s novels that challenge genre stereotypes. He creates images of twenty first century London – down at heel and deliberately unromantic, which set the tone for the series, though you could argue that Len Deighton got there first with Harry Palmer.
Herron is always willing to kill the slow horses, and that makes the novels unpredictable to some extent, but the latest to be rubbed out was a real loss – at the heart of all the previous episodes, and as near a hero as the format allows. It was hard to bear, though in fact the book was just as good without him, and there were a couple of tantalising appearances to suggest he might be back next time.
Even more reason to read the next episode.
Despite the unusual narrative structure – Act 2 comes first, followed by Act 1, then an intermission followed by Act 3 – Bad Actors is one of the best in the series and much easier to follow than some of the others.
Highly recommended.
Senior Reader 