My latest: on Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels, in Hedgehog Review

I’m in the latest issue of The Hedgehog Review with an essay called “Beating Slow Horses.” It’s about Mick Herron’s spy novels, which have been adapted for TV on AppleTV+. Here’s how the essay opens:

The conceit at the heart of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels is simple. There is a house in London for misfit spies. When MI5 is unable, for one reason or another, to fire failed employees, it opts to send them there. The exile is permanent, though the losers who suffer it do their best to pretend it isn’t. It’s a win-win for the service, in any case. No one gets sued. HR is pacified. And banishment proves either so unbearably dull and humiliating that the misfit spies voluntarily quit, or they remain there forever, whiling away the hours without hope of redemption. It is said of the souls in Dante’s purgatorio that the unhappiest are happier than the happiest on earth. Conversely, the happiest in Herron’s inferno are unhappier than the unhappiest outside its walls.

After all, there is no garden atop this mount and certainly no Virgil or Beatrice. Only a hulking demon, pitchfork in hand, keeping the drudges circling beneath him. The paradiso of Regent’s Park is lost forever. Only after some time does it dawn on the damned that their perpetual expulsion means they’re in hell.

Hell’s name is Slough House.

Unfortunately, the essay is paywalled at present. I imagine it’ll unlock here in the next few weeks. All the more reason to subscribe to a wonderful magazine!

Slow Horses

In adapting the novels, here’s what the show gets right:

1. Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Not only a perfect match between actor and character, a so-obvious-it’s-inspired choice given Oldman’s previous role as Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

2. The rest of the casting in season 1. Jack Lowden’s River is a would-be cross between Bond and Bourne, except he’s a bit of a doofus, self-regarding, a screw-up, and still in the service owing mainly to nepotism. The rest fit their roles perfectly, whether Kristin Scott Thomas, Christopher Chung, Saskia Reeves, Freddie Fox, or Dustin Demri-Burns. Give the casting director a raise.

3. The general atmosphere and vibe: the former within the world of the story, the latter put off by the same. Slough House is dark, dank, and cranky; Lamb is genuinely embittered and misanthropic; redeeming qualities are few and far between; you really believe this is an island for MI5’s misfit toys. The vibe thus produced is simultaneously cool (spies!) and bitterly funny (losers!), placing the audience always on the ironic edge between cheering on the slow horses and laughing at their incompetence. And it’s hard to believe when actual danger and daring-do come along and rope these has-beens and second-rates into the game.

Here’s what the show gets wrong:

1. The final episode of season 1. In the book, not only do we get to live inside Ahmed’s head as a character in his own right. For all the slow horses do to find him, much less to save him, Ahmed rescues himself. All the Lamb/River action is at Regent’s Park. The others try to track Ahmed from a deli or coffee shop. But the kidnapping and attempted execution are botched due to a combination of foolishness (Lady Di), in-fighting (the two remaining kidnappers), and shrewdness (Ahmed). The slow horses are nowhere to be seen! That is, in the book. In the show, Lamb and River and Min and Louisa speed down the highway to find Ahmed and, eventually, save him—more or less on camera! Give me a break. It’s absurd TV high jinx that lights the subtext of the show on fire. All of a sudden we’ve got real spies doing real Bond–Bourne–Jack Ryan stuff, rather than the back-ups to the back-ups accidentally stumbling upon observing some spy stuff … on their laptop screen.

2. The second season is a mess from start to finish. Marcus and Shirley are both duds—whether as written or as acted, it’s unclear. The plot of the book is so complicated that the writers attempted both to simplify it and to make it more closely connected to Lamb and the slow horses, but the result is a story impossible to follow by anyone unfamiliar with the novel and finally nonsensical on its face. I still can’t believe that the finale opts to leave both the “evil pilot mom” and the “cicadas” plot threads utterly dangling, unaddressed. Including the bald man in the action, making Roddy an action hero with his laptop, putting Lamb and Popov in the same room, flying River to the OB’s house to save the day … once again, the finale is absurd, on its own terms, while also being a denial of the whole point, ethos, and thematic heart of the show.

3. I’m also unsure about the wisdom of beginning to reveal, as soon as the season 1 finale, secrets about Lamb, the OB, Partner, and their interlocked past that might be best reserved for later. That is, the shock of some of their secrets needs time to become shocking. If we learn them more or less up front, then they’re just part of who the characters are, rather than revelations that complicate what we thought we know.

4. The second season also ups the “feel good” schmaltz a couple notches compared to the first season. It feels the need, in other words, to give the good guys a heart, rather than to keep them the losers they are. Lamb in particular basically just becomes a grand master spy, running his joes, rather than a cynical drunk who can’t spare a single second’s thought for another person’s feelings—especially if that person is someone he cares about. I hope, in the next season, they have the wisdom to drop the warmth and return to the cold the way it should be.

2022: reading

On its own terms, it was a solid year for reading. In terms of my goals, however, not so much. What with health, travel, and professional matters hoovering up all my attention from July to December, my reading plummeted in the second half of 2022. Last year I wrote about how, for years, I’d been stuck in the 90-110 zone for books read annually. Last year I climbed to 120. This year I hoped to reach 150. Alas, by the time Sunday rolls around I’ll have read 122 this year. At least I didn’t regress.

The environmental goals I made, I kept: namely, to cut down TV even more; to stick to audiobooks over podcasts; and to leaven scholarly theology with novels, nonfiction, poetry, and audiobooks. I make these goals, not because I value quantity over quality, nor because I want to read faster or just read a bunch of smaller books. It’s because setting these goals pushes me to set aside much less worthy uses of my time in order to focus on what is better for me and what I genuinely prefer. Both the direct effects (more reading) and the knock-on effects (less TV, less phone and laptop, less wasted time on mindless or mind-sucking activities) are what I’m after. And, as I’ve written before, I didn’t grow up reading novels. Which means I’m always playing catch-up.

My aspirational monthly goal is 2-3 novels, 2-3 volumes of poetry, 2-3 audiobooks, 3-4 nonfiction works, 4-8 works of academic theology. That alone should push me to the 140-160 range. I was on pace heading into August this year, then cratered. As 2023 approaches, I won’t make 150 my “realistic” goal; I’ll set it at 135. But one of my brothers as well as another friend both hit 200 this past year, which puts me to shame. So perhaps a little friendly competition will do the job.

In any case, what follows is a list of my favorite books I read this year. Two new books I was disappointed in: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and The Ink Black Heart, the sixth entry in J. K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series. I won’t write about the latter, but I might find time for the former. I also read J. G. Ballard’s Crash for the first time, a hateful experience. I “get” it. But getting it doesn’t make the reading pleasant, or even justify the quality of the book. I do plan to write about that one.

Here are the ones I did like, with intermittent commentary.

*

Rereads

5. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time.

4. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man. Hadn’t picked this one up in 22 years. Magnificent.

3. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. I’m willing to call this a perfect book. I should probably read it every year for the rest of my life. Lewis really is a moral anatomist nonpareil.

2. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451. Hadn’t read this one since middle school. Had completely forgotten about the technologies Bradbury conjured up as substitutes for reading—the very technologies (influencers live-streaming the manipulated melodrama of their own lives into ordinary people’s homes via wall-to-wall screens) we have used to the same end.

1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I could not remember when or whether I’d read this years and years ago, but I listened to Forest Whitaker’s rendition on Spotify and it was excellent. Highly recommended. (The audio recording; I know Douglass himself doesn’t need my stamp of approval.)

Poetry

I won’t pretend to have read as much poetry as I have in previous years. I finishing rereading R. S. Thomas’s poems; I got to a couple more collections by Denise Levertov; and I read Malcolm Guite’s The Singing Bowl, my first of his volumes. I’m hoping to get back into more poetry in the new year.

Fiction

10. William Goldman, The Princess Bride. Never knew Goldman wrote it as a book before it became a screenplay and a film. A delight.

9. John Le Carré, Silverview. A fitting send-off to the master.

8. Ian Fleming, Casino Royale. Brutality with flair. I wasn’t prepared for how good the prose, the plotting, the thematic subtext would all be. I wonder what would happen if, in the next film adaptation, they actually committed to adapting the character rather than a sanitized version of him. I’m not recommending that: Bond is wicked, and the Connery films valorized his wickedness. But the books commit to the bit, and it makes them a startling read some 70 years later.

7. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan. The second entry in the Earthsea saga. I expect to read the rest this year.

6. Walter Mosley, Trouble is What I Do. My second Mosley. Someone adapt this, please! Before picking it up, I had just finished a brand new novel celebrated by the literary establishment, a novel that contains not one interesting idea, much less an interesting sentence. Whereas Mosley is incapable of writing uninteresting sentences. He’s got more style in his pinky finger than most writers have in their whole bodies.

5. Mick Herron, Slow Horses & Dead Lions. I got hooked, before watching the series. Casting Oldman as Jackson Lamb, he who also played Smiley on film, is inspired. I expect to finish the whole series by summer. Herron isn’t as good as Le Carré—who is?—but his ability to write twisty plots in punchy prose that intersects politics without getting preachy: that’s a winning ticket.

4. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House. My first Jackson. As good as advertised. Read it with some guys in a book club, and one friend had a theory that another friend who’d read the novel a dozen times had never considered. I’m still thinking about it.

3. Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz. Wrote about it here.

2. Brian Moore, The Statement. I’ve never read anything like this novel. It floored me. James and Le Carré are my two genre masters, each of whose corpus I will complete sometime in my life. Moore may now be on the list, not least owing to his genre flexibility. I’ve read Catholics. I just grabbed Black Robe. Thanks to John Wilson for the recommendation.

1. P. D. James, The Children of Men. I’m an evangelist for this one. Don’t get me started. Just marvel, with me, that a lifelong mystery writer—who didn’t publish her first novel till age 40—found it within herself, in her 70s, to write a hyper-prescient work of dystopian fiction on a par with Huxley, Orwell, Ballard, Bradbury, and Chesterton. I would also add Atwood, since this novel is so clearly a Christian response to The Handmaid’s Tale. As ever, all hail the Queen.

Nonfiction

10. A bunch of books about liberalism, neoliberalism, and the right: Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society; Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism; Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal; Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents; Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture; Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order; Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind; Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences; Matthew Continetti, The Right.

9. John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform. Outstanding. Hat tip to Matthew Lee Anderson for the recommendation.

8. Christopher Hitchens, A Hitch in Time. A pleasure to dip back in to some of Hitch’s best work. But also a reminder, with time and distance, of some of his less pleasant vices.

7. James Mumford, Vexed & Yuval Levin, A Time to Build. Imagining life beyond tribalism, neither pessimistic nor optimistic. Just hopeful.

6. Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks & Phil Christman, How to Be Normal. I wrote about Burkeman here. Christman is a mensch. Read both, ideally together.

5. Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story & Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War.

4. Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel.

3. Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

2. Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush. He’s still got it. There are a couple essays here that rank among Berry’s best.

1. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope. The best book of any kind I read in 2022. One of the best books I’ve ever read. A one of one. On a par with After Virtue, A Secular Age, and other magisterial table-setters. Except this one is half the size and happens to focus on Plenty Coups, the Crow, and the moral and philosophical grounds for continuing to live in the face of reasonable despair. Take and read.

Christian (popular)

8. John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life. Hand on heart, I’d never read a Piper book in my life. I wanted something short and punchy on audio, and this fit the bill. Turns out the man can preach.

7. John Mark Comer, Love-ology & The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry & Live No Lies. Hopped on the JMC train this year, since all of my students and many of my friends love his books. He’s doing good work. Pair him with Sayers, Crouch, Wilson, and Dane Ortlund, plus the younger gents at the intersection of Mere O, Davenent, and Theopolis—Meador, Loftus, Anderson, Roberts, Littlejohn, et al—and if you squint a bit, you can see the emerging writers, leaders, and intellectuals of a sane American evangelicalism, should that strange and unruly beast have a future. And if it doesn’t, they’re the ones who will be there on the other side.

6. Ronald Rolheiser, Domestic Monastery. Simply lovely.

5. Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church. Shrewd, lucid diagnosis. Not so sure about the prescription.

4. Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For. Click on the “Andy Crouch” tag on this blog and you’ll see tens of thousands of words spilled over this book as well as Andy’s larger project. A wonderful man, a great writer, a gift to Christian attempts to think and live wisely today.

3. Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. I listened to this one on audio. I wept.

2. Andrew Wilson, Spirit and Sacrament. Just what the doctor ordered for my students.

1. Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender. The unrivaled summer beach read of 2022. No joke, I was at the beach in July and looked to my right and then to my left and saw more than one person reading it. You heard it here first.

Theology (newer)

15. Some books on Christian ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed (by Victor Lee Austin), A Brief History (by Michael Banner), A Very Short Introduction (by D. Stephen Long).

14. Myles Werntz, A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence & From Isolation to Community. Two accessible entries from a friend on Christian pacifism and Christian community. Nab copies of both today!

13. Charlie Trimm, The Destruction of the Canaanites. See my review in Christianity Today.

12. David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse & You Are Gods.

11. Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human. Victor makes a case that friendship is not just the heart of being human, but the heart of the gospel; or rather, the latter because the former; or vice versa.

10. Fred Sanders, Fountain of Salvation. See my forthcoming review in Pro Ecclesia.

9. Edwin Chr. van Driel, Rethinking Paul. See my review in Modern Theology.

8. Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, The Love That is God. This one will be on a syllabus very soon.

7. R. B. Jamieson and Tyler Wittman, Biblical Reasoning. See my forthcoming review in International Journal of Systematic Theology.

6. William G. Witt, Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination. So far as I can see, immediately the standard work on the question. I’d love to see some good-faith engagements from the other side, both Protestant and Catholic.

5. John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift & Paul and the Power of Grace.

4. Christopher Bryan, The Resurrection of the Messiah. Historical, textual, linguistic, literary, and theological scholarship at its finest.

3. Mark Kinzer, Searching Her Own Mystery. I learned a lot from this book. I try to read everything Kinzer writes on the topic of Israel, church, and messianic Judaism. Even better something focused on a particular text, in this case Nostra Aetate.

2. Adam Neder, Theology as a Way of Life. Pellucid and compelling. A beautiful vision that captures heart and mind both. Here’s a taste.

1. Jonathan Bernier, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament. What can I say? I have a thing for contrarian dating of the NT. I’m not at all persuaded by the consensus dating of most first-century Christian writings. Bernier updates John A. T. Robinson’s classic Redating the New Testament, with a clearly enunciated methodology deployed in calm, measured arguments that avoid even a hint of polemic. For that very reason, an invigorating read.

Theology (older)

6. A Reformation Debate: The Letters of Bishop Sadoleto and John Calvin. (Whispers: Calvin doesn’t win this round.)

5. Papal social encyclicals: Veritatis Splendor, Evangelium Vitae, Humanae Vitae, & Lumen Gentium. Always worth a re-read.

4. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God & Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Beautiful, devotional, exemplary models of spiritual theology.

3. St. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Church: Select Treatises & On the Church: Select Letters.

2. St. Basil the Great, On Social Justice. Blows your hair back then lights it on fire.

1. Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church. Is Ramsey the most underrated Anglophone theologian of the twentieth century? The man had exquisite theological sense; he wrote with style and passion; he cared about the unity of the church; he was a bona fide scholar; he wrote about everything; he became Archbishop of Canterbury; what’s not to love? Both this work and his little volume on the resurrection are classics.

Late le Carré

The truth is that politics began to intrude itself into le Carré’s work more flagrantly. It certainly preoccupied him. The Brexit vote outraged him, and at the end of his life he petitioned for Irish citizenship, so that he might remain a European. “I think my own ties to England were hugely loosened over the last few years,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “And it’s a kind of liberation, if a sad kind.” This growing disenchantment could not help but leave its mark on his work. In his classic novels, politics is the background against which his figures act; in the later ones, politics itself is the subject matter, and his figures become the surrogates who act it out.

One of the reasons that the later books tend to blur together is in the sameness of their plots: an essentially decent but rather dim fellow is complicit in some sort of international conspiracy about which he is ignorant until he is enlightened through his encounter with a clear-eyed idealist, after which he tries to redeem himself with a selfless but typically futile act of heroism. Le Carré’s idealists were sadly generic: all-purpose human-rights lawyers or international doctors—types rather than individuals. This is the tragic irony of his career: having made his mark by introducing moral complexity and ambiguity into the spy novel, he ended by making cardboard cut-outs against whom James Bond seems like Hamlet.

—Michael J. Lewis, “The Cooling of John le Carré,” The New Criterion (June 2021). That seems a harsh assessment, but what comes before and after the essay is measured, fair, and deeply appreciative of le Carré’s art. I wrote about his second-to-last novel, A Legacy of Spies, when it came out in fall 2017. I enjoyed it, though my reaction was similar to Lewis’s, and only confirmed by what turned out to be le Carré’s last novel, Agent Running in the Field, which Lewis calls his “Brexit novel.” Le Carré was one of a kind, and his prose was always top notch, but his career was bifurcated by two 30-year periods: 1961–1989, and 1990–2019. A Perfect Spy (1986) is his masterpiece, or rather his crowning masterpiece, alongside The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and the subsequent Smiley/Karla Trilogy. But there are other jewels in the crown, both before and after the end of the Cold War, because the man did not know how to write boring sentences or boring stories. I think of him the way I do P. D. James: a master of his craft whose second-tier work runs circles around would-be competitors. And as with her prolific output, I look forward to finishing every single book that came from his pen in my lifetime.

On John le Carré's new novel, A Legacy of Spies

The first thing to say about the latest novel from 85-year old spymaster John le Carré is that it is slight. Trumpeted as a return to the world of characters that made him an international household name—to George Smiley, his allies and his enemies—it is indeed a quite literal trip down memory lane. The book is ostensibly the written account of Peter Guillam, now an elderly man nearly as old as le Carré, reflecting on his role in an affair from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The book uses the threat of a lawsuit against the British secret intelligence service as a plot device for revisiting the events leading up to and including the story told in 1963's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It thus doubles as a sort of retrospective prequel, filling in gaps, painting George and his activities in even bolder shades of gray, and adding even more tragedy and pathos to the events of that book, as well as a sort of meta-commentary from David Cornwall, the man behind the pseudonym, on the ethics of spycraft, the humanity (or what's left of it) of his great hero Smiley, and how both Great Britain and Europe as a whole have fared since the Cold War.



The book asks: Can it be simultaneously true that it was right for spies—like Cornwall, like Smiley, like Guillam—to forsake so much of their humanity against so great a foe as the Soviet Union and that their eventual triumph proved empty, a victory for nothing so much as naked global capitalism? In losing the battle for their souls for the sake of winning a war, did they fail to see that a far greater war was at stake, one they lost anyway, thus giving away their souls for nothing? Or if they managed to keep their souls, to what end and at what cost?

These, like so much of le Carré's post-1990 output, are the questions animating A Legacy of Spies. Neither the narrative nor the retrospect is substantial enough to carry the profundity of their weight, but the questions land by sheer force of authorial will, and by the unquenchable loveliness of the prose, and of the lived-in quality of the world. (It's lived in, all right: Smiley's been a character in nine novels across 56 years. His apparent immortality not implausibly matches his creator's.) For example, the way in which the drama of the story comes from the (again, literal) children of those caught in the crossfire of Control, Smiley, and Guillam's work nearly six decades earlier is at once on the nose and fitting: those sacrificed on the altar of war—however cold—are not ciphers or symbols or merely joes but human beings with loves and lives outside of and beyond the fragile networks of information to which they temporarily belong.

One wishes Smiley's role in the book were not so similar to other recent exercises in nostalgia: the lost great man sought by his junior, discovered only at the end (see: Tron 2.0; Blade Runner 2049; Star Wars: The Force Awakens). The book does make me want to see Tomas Alfredson get on with adapting Smiley's People with Gary Oldman, then perhaps—perhaps?—doing some sort of double adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold paired with A Legacy of Spies, using prosthetics to age the principals in the latter. In fact, we now have three rough-and-ready Smiley trilogies: #1: Call for the Dead, A Murder with of Quality, and The Looking Glass War; #2: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People; and #3: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Secret Pilgrim, and A Legacy of Spies. The first trilogy is middling, the second is the masterpiece, but the third stretches from 1963 to 1990 to 2017, maps onto the whole drama, denouement, and aftermath of the Cold War, and is book-ended by pained but non-cynical moral reflection on the tragedy of spycraft, using a concrete case study in the sacrifice of others "for the greater good."

What greater good? Le Carré isn't sure anymore, if he ever was. Regardless of the precise quality of his latest novel, it's a question worth pondering.