London Rules

In the murky world of the British secret service, there’s a tacit understanding that everyone plays by London Rules. These aren’t the ones neatly compiled in official binders. No, these are the unwritten rules, the real ones. #1: Cover your arse.

And when it comes to MI5, it doesn’t matter whether you work at Regent’s Park or Slough House. The former is where all the cool kids get to be spies. The latter is home to agents who’ve screwed up royally but can’t legally (or at least, quietly) be killed.

As the book opens, Regent’s is on high alert. A group of armed men drove into the centre of a village in Derbyshire & opened fire. People died, the men vanished & Islamic State claimed responsibility.

News of the attack doesn’t show more exactly brighten the current mood In the UK. The public is still bitterly divided over Brexit, right wing politicians are pushing their xenophobic agenda & previous attacks have left everyone a tad jumpy. MI5 desperately needs a win but before they literally have a clue, a second attack takes more lives. Regent’s Park #2 Diana Taverner is running on fumes & the last thing she needs is to deal with Slough House’s resident fossil, Jackson Lamb.

Lamb’s not sure if he has a problem or not. It seems someone may have tried to run over Roddy Ho. “The Rodman” (as he thinks of himself) is Slough House’s IT guy. He has 2 gifts. The first is his way with computers. The second is an unshakeable belief he’s a chick magnet with basic social skills. Lamb’s at a loss. Why would a stranger want to kill Ho? He’d understand if it was someone who knew him. Everyone at Slough House has thought of killing The Rodman, pretty much on a daily basis. Colleague Shirley Dander was the one who saved him & she’s already apologized.

From these 2 threads the story goes haring off in multiple directions before doubling back to give you the big picture. There are several new characters added to the returning cast of (ir)regulars & as usual, not everyone will survive. A couple of things make this outing a little different than the others. We get more one-on-one time with each of the Slow Horses as they reflect on personal problems & the remnants of their career. These more serious moments add layers that make us sympathize with their situations. Well…except Ho. But you do have to admire his refusal to let reality dent his delusions. Herron also shines a light on current issues such as government bureaucracy, the rise of overt racism & how easily the media can influence & manipulate public opinion.

I don’t have a great track record when it comes to slowly savouring Herron’s books & once again I failed. It was just too damn good to put down. It’s well paced & full of colourful characters. Many come across as thinly veiled stand-ins for some of the country’s well known figures & you get the sense it’s Herron’s chance to take satirical jabs at some of the ridiculous behaviour of late. The dialogue is clever & frequently laugh out loud funny. Each of the characters has a personal tic that helps bring them to life or in the case of Lamb, a whole herd of them. They alone ensure this is an entertaining read. What elevates the book is smart, intricate plotting that will have you scratching your noggin as you try to figure out how the story lines tie together.

This is book #5 of what has become my favourite series (Heron also has a number of stand-alones). I adore black humour & for my book dollars, you can’t beat smart & funny. So…you may have caught that I’m a fan but this is just me babbling. If you’re interested, pick up “Slow Horses” & see if it suits.

Before I go, I’d like to apply what I learned here & add 2 new rules to the playbook: Never turn your back on a can of paint. Avoid penguins. show less

I’m struggling to write a review of London Rules. On the one hand I love it so much I want to tell you all about it. On the other there are so many clever twists that I don’t want to give anything away at all.

If you’re new to this series, it features the ‘slow horses’, intelligence service staff who, for a variety of reasons – trauma, addiction or just temperament – have been deemed unsuitable for their occupation. They are kept on the payroll but are exiled to Slough House, a rundown building where they are expected to do mind-numbing tasks bereft of danger or challenge.

In London Rules, Britain is in the grip of Brexit madness, random terror events and most shocking of all, slow horse Roddy Ho, computer genius and social show more failure, has got a girlfriend. And slightly less shocking, someone is trying to kill him. The slow horses feel bound to intervene, and chaos ensues as they are not only up against killers, but their own employer.

From the stunning prologue to the long, leisurely first chapter worthy of Dickens, the prose is beautiful and creates a pleasing tension. You want to race ahead to what happens next but also to savour what you’re reading now. The political characters are brilliantly – if brutally – observed and would make you weep if you weren’t already laughing out loud.

Most of all, for me, it’s the series characters that keep me reading – their talents, their flaws, the endless machinations of the people in power and the bloodymindedness of those pushed out.

When I finished reading, I immediately felt bereft and eager to know what’s coming next.
*
I received a copy of London Rules from the publisher via Netgalley.
This review first appeared on my blog katevane.com/blog show less

I think "London Rules" is the best Slough House book so far. It brings together the same elements used in the earlier books but each element has grown stronger, is used with greater assurance and has been combined with its peers perfectly to make the ultimate Slough House book.

"London Rules" has a violent prologue that reminded me of one of those young woman / old woman optical illusion drawings. I saw the scene perfectly in my head, tragic but familiar, up until the last paragraph, when everything changed and yet everything remained the same. This way of leading me to see the familiar differently and surprise me while he does it, it what makes Mick Herron's Slough House books so appealing.

After the prologue, the book returns to the show more usual pattern of starting and ending with an almost whimsically lyrical description of Slough House. This time it is not the wind that is visiting Slough House but personifications of Dawn and Day and Dusk. These pieces are well enough written to be memorable in their own right but they are more closely integrated into the story's content and tone than in earlier books so that what might seem sardonically decorative becomes a kind of Greek Chorus, obliquely guiding the reader.

One of the things I enjoy about the Slough House books is how fearlessly, sometimes even viciously, they comment on the current British political culture. The most brutal and most nuanced assaults are made by Jackson Lamb and so might be seen as part of his irascible persona ("There's a Donal Trump Junior?", Lamb said, "And just when I thought things couldn't get any worse.") but the disdain for the people who made insanity of Brexit and Trump possible is shared by most of the characters in the book except for the shamelessly self-serving Pols themselves.

This contemporary pulse-taking is also more than decorative. It provides the issues that drive the plot, giving the plot more credibility and showing us the damage that these people of "middling ability but supreme self-confidence" are doing to us.

The plot is clever and is rolled out with such skill that events continue both to make sense and to surprise. The tension is high right up to the final page. There is intrigue and violence and betrayal and that's just between people on the same side. The terrorist threat here is sadly credible and disturbingly plausible.

I've seen American booksellers refer to the Slough House books as the "Jackson Lamb Series". This labelling demonstrates the same unwillingness to embrace what English books are really about that led to US publishers changing "Rivers of London" to "Midnight Riot" and "The Philosopher's Stone" becoming "The Sorcerer's Stone", because the crowning glory of the Slough House books are the characters that populate them.

Jackson Lamb's gravity bends the orbit of the people around him and sets the rhythm of their lives but these books are not really about him. They are about the idea behind Slough House, a purgatory for spook screw-ups, the people that would stay in such a place and the culture that would find such a place necessary.

The result is an ensemble cast inside both Slough House and Regent's Park (where the shiny, haven't-screwed-up-yet spies live) that gets stronger with every book.

In "London Rules" we do see more deeply into Jackson Lamb but we spend most of our time looking through the eyes of broken spies, whether they live in Slough House or not, and see how they live with the war between their weaknesses and their hopes. We learn a lot about desperation and self-delusion, leavened occasionally with a little hope. I particularly enjoyed seeing Roddie Ho so deeply engaged in self-deception that he becomes impervious to interrogation techniques designed to play on his fear and doubt.

"London Rules" is an excellent spy novel and a good action-packed thriller but it is also a mirror to our current times and an invitation to recognise that self-delusion, confidence without ability and the pursuit of personal power at the expense of personal integrity are a plague on our society. show less

In this fifth outing Roddy Ho is pursued by bad actors and there is a spate of terror attacks across the country. Could the two be connected?

I always enjoy Mick Herron's Slough House novels – they mix a plausible plot and fast pace with memorable characters and grim humour. The latter is especially in evidence here in the plot threads focusing on Roddy Ho and the death of far-right politician Dennis Gimball (no prize for guessing where the author's leanings are on the political spectrum). The fact that Herron interweaves true events in British history with fictitious ones makes the terror elements in this novel scarily realistic.

There are also intriguing power dynamics at work. Herron has already established the petty squabblings for show more power among the government politicians and Diana Taverner's ambition to become First Desk in previous novels. In London Rules we're also seeing the slow horses – by which I mean agents relegated to Slough House, and not Jackson Lamb and Catherine Standish – split in two, with both Shirley Dander and J. K. Coe not being taken seriously and dismissed as fruitcakes. It will be interesting to see where Mick Herron takes the latter relationships next.

On the other hand, it is stretching credibility slightly that all the trained minds at the Park haven't been able to predict what the terrorists are planning as their ultimate attack, and I feel that Mick Herron needs to be careful that some of the male characters in power don't descend entirely into caricature, though it looks like at least one of them is not going to feature so prominently (if at all) in any future books. show less

Mick Herron conjures a world of unethical, scheming, corrupt, murderous fiends. Then he puts them in charge of the British security services. On the other side, the bad guys, while bad, are somewhat inept. Then there are the politicians, which are – oh, it goes without saying.

And of course the Slough House crew, led by Jackson Lamb. Normal people, screwed up in various ways, eking out an existence in the garbage pit of MI5. Lamb, at the top of the heap, is reviled by most, underestimated by the uninformed. He seems to be exactly where he wants – lording it over his misfit brain trust.

When an unprecedented terror attack occurs in England with the promise of more, Lamb and his group, although officially sidelined, are in the middle show more of the response - and subsequent mistakes. Maybe one of them inadvertently provided some information leading to the attack.

Although he’s discussing one member of his staff after it’s all over – it could be any of them, including himself: “Recent reports claim he’s a hero.’ Lamb yawned. ‘Familiarity, on the other hand, suggests he’s a dick. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle. As usual.” show less

OK, I’ve said this before and I have to say it again: plot is not Mick Herron’s greatest strength. In this book, the fifth in the Slough House series, a bunch of terrorists blow up some penguins, and the most significant murder is the result of an accident — by one of the heroes. And I think Herron is running out of bad guys. This time, it’s some inept North Koreans who’ve been living in England. All that having been said, the book is great fun and tells the continuing story of Jackson Lamb and his “slow horses”. You either enjoy listening to Lamb insult people in increasingly bizarre ways, or you don’t. And Roderick Ho — or “the Rodster” as he is known by no one — is one of the great comic creations in show more literature. I’ve already begun the sixth book of the series … show less

Another terrific book featuring the group of MI5 screwups known as slow horses who have been relegated to the backwater of Slough House. Whether at Regent's Park or Slough House everybody follows the unwritten London Rules and Rule #1 is to "cover your arse". IT whiz Roddy Ho has an unshakeable belief that he is super cool, after all "the Rodster" has a girlfriend. Roddy should have remembered rule #1. Meanwhile second in command at Regent's Park "Lady Di" Taverner is just waiting for first desk Claude Whelan to make a slip so that she can quickly step into his shoes, that she believes should have been hers anyway. This modern spy series is brilliant, concerned with serious contemporary issues, while being laugh-out-loud funny and show more without resorting to slapstick (even considering a unique murder weapon here). As usual Jackson Lamb is his delightfully repugnant self, but still the most irresistible character. show less