London
Rules mean
cover your arse (as
opposed to Moscow Rules:
watch your back) and
are a specialty of Jackson
Lamb and his crew of espionage
rejects. Herron opens
his newest novel with his signature prowl through a dawn Slough
House: delightfully literary satire sets the tone. Not that the slow
horses are ever given anything faintly important or active to do as
MI5 Service members, but then somehow find themselves ever on the
short end of a greasy operational stick. In this case, the
normally-ignored Roddy Ho's massive ego leads him obliviously,
blissfully, into a honey trap. Seems Ho has been pillow-talking,
bordering on treason; now someone is trying to kill him which would
likely satisfy his team members.
The pundits at "Five" are busy trying to contain terrorist attacks. The mystery perpetrators seem to be working to a plan unearthed by Ho and passed to his girlfriend. When the connection is made, Emma Flyte appears as the new head of the MI5 Dogs ‒ internal security ‒ to lock down Slough House. Those of us faithful readers know how well that will work. Stopping the terrorists' destablization plan is a serious effort; slow horses disperse to protect politician targets. The political commentary is sly but pointed, as always. Preparing for the MI5 blame game to land on Slough House, Lamb is weaving his own web to protect his "joes" who are inept at hiding anything from him. Best suggestion: Do not read this book until you get the first in the series: Slow Horses. Guaranteed you can't stop.
Word:
apophthegm ‒ an aphorism, a maxim
One-liners:
● At
other times, Lamb prefers the direct approach, and attacks the stairs
with the noise that a bear pushing a wheelbarrow might make, if the
wheelbarrow was full of tin cans, and the bear drunk. (9)
● Never
did harm to be seen shopping where ordinary people did, provided they
were the right kind of ordinary. (46)
● He
wasn't sure how long he could keep this pretence up, where he was
nominally one of the nation's protectors but actually an irrelevant
drone. (158) River
● The
guard probably had him down as a local joe, working undercover in a
food bank queue. (213)
It
was as if she were perpetually geared up for departure, and always
knew where her nearest exit was. (221)
Two-liners:
● "We're
Slough House. We're pretty much made to measure, if they're looking
to hang someone." (222)
● Now
was not the time to see her boss sink beneath the waves, not with
them both on the same liner. She wanted him around until a lifeboat
moved into view. (260)
Lamb-isms:
● "I'm
bloody glad I'm not you." (15)
● ...
events so painfully compromising to the intelligence services as a
whole that—as Lamb had observed—it had put the "us" in
"clusterfuck." (18)
● "It's
been brought to my attention that you arsewipes are not happy
bunnies." (29)
● "He's
left for the evening," Catherine said. "I know. I felt the
average IQ rise." (61)
● "You
look like all your birthdays came at once." (82)
● "Slaughtering
a bunch of pedestrians is one thing. But they failed to whack Ho
twice, and let's face it, he's a walking wicket." (146)
● "Well,
I'm an incurable optimist, as you know," he said. "But I
expect it'll all go to shit, as usual." (146)
Slow
horses' comments about each other:
● Shirley
Dander was unnervingly calm; the kind of calm Catherine imagined
icebergs were, just before they ploughed into ocean liners. (12)
● Louisa
might be an ironclad bitch at times, but at least she doesn't think
with a dick. (24)
● "He's
a brand ambassador for twattery." (67)
● Plus,
of course, he'd murdered that guy not long ago: three bullets to the
chest of an unarmed, manacled man. (136)
● "I
bet his phone's smarter than he is." (142)
● It
was like being trapped with an eight-year-old. (142)
● So
descending through a skylight was Shirley's idea of subtle. (154)
The
quiet bit:
In some parts of the world dawn arrives with rosy fingers, to smooth away the creases left by the night. But on Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, it comes wearing safecracker's gloves, so as not to leave prints on windowsills and doorknobs; it squints through keyholes, sizes up locks and generally cases the joint ahead of approaching day. Dawn specialises in unswept corners, in the nooks and chambers day rarely sees, because day is all business appointments and things being in the right place, while its younger sister's role is to creep about in the breaking gloom, never sure of what it might find there. It's one thing casting a light on a subject. It's another expecting it to shine. (7)
MI5
honchos:
"You're going to have to decide which flag you're flying. The Service doesn't exist to further the interests of the party in power. In fact, the party in power is arguably our natural enemy. Given that it's holding the purse strings."
"We serve the nation, Diana," Whelan said. "And the party in power is democratically elected to lead that nation." He turned back to the glass wall, and the worker ants beyond, but continued talking. "I tried to get hold of Flyte earlier, but she's not around. I was told you had her on something."
"She's at Slough House. It's in lockdown. And can stay that way until we've determined what connects Jackson Lamb's pet nerd with Abbotsfield. Has he talked yet?"
Whelan said, "I was leaving him to soften up. A crew was sent to his house, they've collected his IT. Quite a lot of it, apparently." (205-6)
Paul
Bowles. "A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard," (1950),
Bowles, Collected Stories and Later Writings. USA: The Library
of America, 2002.
Let's
face it: I am a philistine when it comes to some wayward literary
icons. Bowles' sensibility leaves me cold. A friend pressed me to try
him on, wearing down my resistance (The Sheltering Sky never
appealed to me with its aimlessness) because of the magic word
camels. "A
Hundred Camels in the Courtyard" consists of four short stories
with zip-all to do with camels. I do appreciate the sole
mention expressed by one character who muses, "A pipe of kif
before breakfast gives a man the strength of a hundred camels in the
courtyard." The stories are largely underlined by mostly idle
men finding the day's supply of kif and/or finding the money to pay
for it. Not that I'm against self-medicating or medical cannabis
usage, and I try to comprehend descriptions of altered reality or
outright hallucinating, but ... not my world.
Of
the four stories, the most incomprehensible is "He of the
Assembly." I really had trouble with shape-shifting characters.
Lines like these:
"The
sky trembles, and the earth is afraid, and the two eyes are not
brothers." (242)
"Hashish
in your heart and wind in your head." (245)
"The
eye wants to sleep but the head is no mattress." (246)
Oh
well. I'm not spending a lot of time on this. "A Friend of the
World," "The Story of Lahcen and Idir," and "The
Wind at Beni Midar" are the other three stories. They do make
some sense but it's a threadbare life. Bowles is considered "one
of the most powerful writers of the postwar period." Yes, of
course the man writes well ... if in long, long paragraphs. Does he
try to capture fundamental Moroccan society, the place he chose to be
light years away from his American upbringing? ... not his primary
intention, perhaps. The men depicted (all at one time or another
bemoaning, or enjoying, the effect of kif in my head) seem to
run on crude instinct alone, mere instruments of folly. Their actions
and occasional thoughts expose banal lives they scarcely control in
an obscurely ominous universe. Pipe dreams, I say.
Dinner
for two. Carmel, California. And thus unspools the fictitious but
realistic story of an airplane hijacking at Vienna's Flughafen; four
terrorists end up killing the entire planeload including themselves.
Henry is an experienced "joe" ‒ longtime CIA agent ‒
posted in the Vienna embassy. Celia had been admin in the same venue.
Years later, Henry is wrapping up yet another investigation to
determine who betrayed their own agent on that plane. Celia is now a
contented mother and housewife, having mysteriously aborted her
former relationship with Henry. What really happened the night of the
hostage-taking summons both facts and emotions in their dinner
meeting. The savvy reader will eventually understand what has to
happen.
Each
one of the group of CIA personnel present in Vienna on the fatal
night is under suspicion. The initial investigation was a whitewash.
Duplicity ‒ what else? ‒ is the reigning modus operandi in
espionage. And of course, cover your arse is imperative when
something goes wrong. Henry grills them all again seeking the truth,
with Celia last on his list—Celia, the love of his life. Steinhauer
is a master at shifting the perspectives and timeline while details
of the event slowly emerge over fine food and wine. Sheer reading
pleasure but ... (shudder) an off of writer.
Word:
aniconism – denial of representational art, as in some religions
One-liners:
● Perhaps
it's only those who don't know us at all who are able to see us most
clearly. (6)
● "He's
building a case off of a terrorist's disinformation." (15)
● I've
ended up in a town that pities gin drinkers. (35)
● "The
ability to admit ignorance," Vick says philosophically, "is
a rare and beautiful virtue." (84)
● She
found a crucial piece of evidence and went out of her way to keep it
under wraps. (219)
Two-liners:
● "I
got married, I moved back to a country I hardly know anymore. My life
is upside down." (40)
● "Welcome
to California. Don't take any of us at face value." (40)
Brass
tacks, almost:
"I never said I was a good drone."
She shakes her head. Chestnut spreads across her shoulders. "You cover your butt," she says. "That's the first rule of office life, and if you haven't figured that out you're going to end up without a pension. If someone in the embassy is leaking information to terrorists, the very first thing you do is keep it to yourself. The second thing you do is scour the phone records, because if you don't your ineptitude is going to come out somewhere along the way. Some joker from Interpol, say, is going to point it out years later and smear your name all over the diplomatic cables."
I nod, point taken. "Did you find anything?"
"Of course not," she says. "But I was obliged to try."
She's lying, of course. This is why I've come to her doorstep. (140)
Their
former chief, Bill:
He looked so damn old. An old man whose life was dictated by the whims of his wife. Whose life once represented the pinnacle of national service. Whose hands once sifted through the dirt of international affairs. Now he was a shadow of all that grandeur: a too-pale man hunched over his pint. He looked scared, and in a way, I was too. I was taking my baby steps toward freedom, and here I was faced with a man who had given up all his freedom. It was all too easy to imagine myself looking like him one day. (142)
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