The Drop (Slough House)Mich Herron
John Murray, 1 November 2018
HB, e 104pp
TRANSMISSION BEGINS+++
I received this short report through the usual means (brown envelope through letterdrop, handoff, no contact with operative making drop - although I suspect that originating officer was codename YASSINE - recommend congratulations for excellent work).
Have reviewed contents. File contains extensive background information compiled by operative codename HERRON concerning SLOUGH HOUSE, alleged outstation of REGENT'S PARK to which deprecated operatives are consigned.
Suspect new recruit to SLOUGH HOUSE following events recorded in file LONDON RULES.
Recommend opening new file and close consideration of report at earliest opportunity upon wider distribution, currently scheduled 1 November.
TRANSMISSION ENDS+++
Well. I didn't expect this book, didn't know it was coming out, but I'm SO glad that John Murray sent me a copy.
The Drop is a novella set in the world of Herron's Slough House stories - home to the Security Service's misfits, dropouts and no-hopers (Herron's argument that people like this couldn't just be sacked, and need housed and occupied seems frighteningly plausible).
The book isn't about Slough House itself, or its collection of off-the-boil assets, though its subjects could well belong there - Solomon Dortmund, a retired spook pottering around Marylebone in his decline and ex agent John Bachelor, kept on the payroll to look after those like Dortmund, ensuring they have what they need and don't speak to the wrong people.
The joke is that Bachelor's life is in a spin and he's virtually homeless, resorting to bunking down in the ready room at Regent's Park, HQ of the Service. So when Dortmund thinks he's witnessed a drop and reports it to Bachelor, it's not exactly item number one on Batchelor's to-do list.
In many ways this is a gentle comedy of spy manners, as much about our times as it is about putting one over on the opposition. There is a real agent in play here, actually a double agent, and the way they're being handled shows old alliances shifting, the spooks looking to an uncertain future and trying to get pieces in the game with a very different Europe taking shape.
As intelligence analyst Lech (or Alec) notes "...whereas the general attitude among the boys and girls was that right would ultimately triumph, something in [his] bones sang of doom, or whispered along with the chorus... [he] couldn't entirely suppress the fear that sooner or later... they'd all fail, that their home skies would look down on cataclysm."
Against that doomy background, Herron weaves his normal spell, albeit on a smaller scale and with lower stakes. No other writer I've come across has honed a voice so well to portray a world, developing a vocabulary redolent of the closed world - "...the older knew that Spook Street, like Watling Street, runs backwards and forwards in time"as well as a wicked streak of dry humour -
" 'It was felt that Batchelor wasn't up to the job"
'Why?'
'Because he wasn't up to the job.' "
- and a disturbing insight into character. Batchelor briefly considers suicide, rejects the idea, but knows the thought will come back "...he knew that a seal had been broken, and that he'd be forced to dip into this dark jar again in the future, probably at night."
It's a book about how one is never, never out of the spying game. Even as new contests, new opportunities are born - and new fears - the old players are still in the game, if barely. and when one of them departs, " [he] had finished his journey. This had started many years before, very far away, and ended where the floor began."
One journey ends, another begins. Elsewhere in London is a fresh spy, one who, Herron suggests, will rise to the top of the game: "She was good at this, he registered... Whether she'd had this story up her sleeve, whether it had actually happened, whether she was improvising: didn't matter, she delivered it like a natural."
Endings and beginnings. Mostly there's no room here for the grey and grime of Slough House. But as Batchelor observes, leaving his refuge at Regent's Park early one gleaming, snowy morning, it doesn't stay like that for long. The grey and grime soon shows through and then your feet are soaked in slush.
If I read this book right there's one person who's soon going to get a nasty introduction to that slush, and I'm looking forward to reading more about them in Herron's next book.
Recommended if you want a little gift for Christmas to get a friend or loved on hooked on this series. Or perhaps if you want a little pre Christmas gift for yourself.
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