selenak | Slow Horses (TV Series)

I can see why the first novel, which

kathyh gave to me, has blurbs with Le Carré comparisons, and there are literal Le Carré shoutouts in both the novel and in the tv show, what with Grandpa Cartwright cheering up River by pointing out how many times Smiley came back: Slow Horses is definitely in the school of "secret services are full of pathetic screw ups, they do dastardly ruthless stuff just like the ones they're fighting, and also fixing their own mistakes causes as much, if not more trouble than the nominal opposition does" along with the double and triple twists of the narrative revealing that while you thought what's going on was x, all the time what's really going on way y, and maybe y and z, and the clues were there!" Which if done well makes for compelling stories, and this tv show (I've only read the first novel and just finished marathoning all three seasons) is done very well. Where it differs from Le Carré is the far more overt black humor, plus no character is into German literature, there are more important female characters and way less digs at the Americans; in fact, the overseas cousins might as well not exist in terms of plot and screen/page relevance. (This is also one of the big differences to, say, Spooks, where you can tell the Howart Brenton origin from the Americans are the worst!" dogma.)

The basic premise: "Slough House" is where MI5 agents who are deemed have fucked up too often (and who don't have enough useful connections) are banished to, in the hope that the sheer awfulness of their existence there will encourage them to quit/retire; as civil servants, they're very difficult to get rid of otherwise. It's headed by Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman as the anti-Smiley in manners but not in hidden-at-first-glance competence; the performance is also the exact opposite of Oldman's Tinker Tailor Spy the movie one), who used to be a big thing at MI5 until for reasons later revealed he ended up in Slough House, and each season sees our (anti)heroes engaged in some humiliating task which then turns out to be important and/or involves them in the kind of suspense filled adrenaline pumping operation the spy genre can't do without. My favourite among his staff is Catherine Standish, on-the-wagon alcoholic and chronically underestimated organizer and secretary. By season 3, Louisa has become my second favourite, though. As mentioned before, fighting terrorists or Russians takes only up half of the time (if not a third); the rest of the time is devoted to struggles with "the Park", MI5 Central, which is headed by a) Ingrid Tearny (Nina Sosonya, only present briefly in season 1, not at all on screen in s2 but in every episode of s3) and b, as "Second Desk" and present in all three seasons, Diana Taverner, played by Kristin Scott Thomas. Both Tearny and Tavener as presented as political animals looking for scapegoats to throw under the bus in their place when things inevitably go wrong, very ruthless and looking out for No.1., but Diana Tavener is the less worse in that she stlll seems to have some red lines and awareness that the Unwanted Crowd at Slough House are fellow agents, too (so far). They're also rivals with each other. This means you as the viewer can enjoy Kristin Scott Thomas verbally spar with both Gary Oldman and Nina Sosonya, the former on a regular basis, and it is great fun. The relationship between Lamb and Tavener comes across as my kind of "disdain for each other as people pared with grudging respect for each other's abilities and awareness they need each other" type, and I am very amused that they do the thing Terry Prattchet and Neil Gaiman parodiied in Good Omens the novel and which is definitely a fine long traditon of British spi fiction, i.e. having regular kind of secret meetings on park benches.

What saves the show from being as cynical as a lot of its main characters is that it very much respects actual human suffering. For example, S1 has an important kidnapping-and-threatened-murder plot, and while the narrative is satiric about the kidnappers, it never is about their victim. And what makes the titular "Slow Horses" (i.e. the agents who ended up at Slough House) easier to root for than their opponents is that they are still capable of compassion, and don't go for the "bad guys shouldn't be taken alive, only dead, because they're bad guys" school of thought (which, btw, is very much the norm in their genre. All in all: the show is very watchable to me, honestly more than the first novel was readable. (It's the narrative voice in the later that just gets me the wrong way, I think.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yeah, I really enjoyed the show. It felt it almost magically recaptured the Le Carre feel in the present day. And yeah, in some ways I liked it more than Le Carre, because although everyone is a screw up and the spying itself is cynical, you can empathise and root for the characters and what they're trying to resolve right now.

I think the difference is, it comes up with some plot which we do care about, OTHER than britain out-spying the USSR, which is less traditional but actually more engaging.

In fairness to Le Carré, he himself did move on from Cold War plots post 1989 (to the Pharma Industry, international arms trading etc.) but his imitators usually didn't, so Slow Horses very firmly rooting itself in the here and now, the big backstory secret of Lamb's move to Slough House not withstanding, is very welcome.

you can empathise and root for the characters and what they're trying to resolve right now.

I thought that was very present in Tinker Tailor, especially the sections about Jim.

I thought that was very present in Tinker Tailor, especially the sections about Jim.

I tend to think of le Carré's theme as the collateral damage of spying, which Jim prominently qualifies as.

(I haven't read the novels by Mick Herron, but have now loved three seasons of Slow Horses.)

Yeah, my point was you can certainly empathize and "root for" Jim as he tries to rebuild his life, although his using the schoolchildren as amateur lookouts is certainly wrong. And he inflicts damage on Bill, through Bill's seeing the gun, and by the end Bill has convinced himself he didn't see what he did, out of love (just as Smiley ignores Ann's infidelities -- and Bill is explicitly seen as a kind of junior Smiley). Le Carre doesn't blame all this on just spying, though; it's his view of how people are. Collateral damage is his human condition.

To be fair to le Carre the books everyone associates him with are the Smiley ones. He wrote many other books about the Balkans, Israel, his own personal history refracted through spying, and so on. There's also a final Smiley volume where he talks a lot about the *aftermath* of the cold war and spying generally, through a protege.

It amuses me to think that River's grandfather is an affectionate piss-take of Le Carre but that's just me.

I love those books! He's one of the few authors (Christopher Fowler is another) that sends me happily
to the dictionary every other page.

It kinda baffles me to hear him called more empathic than le Carre, though. Roddy Ho is treated really unpleasantly as the books go on, and a big theme is how far people will go to compromise themselves, or save their self-worth (also a le Carre theme). But I think that's a consequence of me reading the books and not seeing the show. Some of le Carre's nastiness was toned down for the original TTSS too (particularly Connie). Visual adaptations can seem less cynical and more sympathetic just as a medium, because there's no subjective voice, just the eye of the camera.

Re: more emphatic, you’ll have to ask the commenter, because I certainly didn’t call him that - in fact, that’s one of the reasons why I liked the tv show more than the (one) book I read. It’s not that the characters act any differently on screen in the first season than they do in the first book, but because of the difference in medium and the lack of narrative voice, it feels like you’re freer to make up your own mind about them, and there are such things as silent reaction shots where the book doesn’t care/ doesn’t tell, etc.

BTW: just realised that Catherine Standish is played by the same actress who played Lady Jessica in the 2000 Dune miniseries, Saskia Reeves. (She was good there, too, but the miniseries is a mixed affair, not least because of Alec Newman’s Paul; paradoxically, its follow up, Children of Dune, which adapts both Dune Messiah and Children of Dune the novel, is truly good, but there Saskia Reeves is replaced by Alice Krige as Jessica.)

We enjoyed the show very much, especially the clever episode ending cliffhangers. Gary Oldman is a treasure.