Tag Archives: Genius

An Aggravating Amount of Paperwork

The promotional materials for any novel in Mick Herron’s Slough House series must include one reference to Herron being the John LeCarre of current spy novelists. Peruse the press for Slough House, Herron’s seventh installment in that popular series, and you’ll easily find it. No, not on that page. Go back a few pages . . . stop . . . no, one more . . . there it is.

The lazy and frivolous compliment is an insult to both. LeCarre was a savant who elevated the spy novel to art. Herron is a master entertainer with a sharp eye for absurdity and an acerbic tongue. They’re only the same in terms of their intentionality. Herron is intentionally funny. LeCarre is intentionally not.

LeCarre is the master of ceremonies in the spy fiction genre, and there is justice in that. Genius will always be welcome at any literary feast. But what about the talented and amusing entertainer? Shouldn’t that writer get a prominent seat and full plate as well?

Herron’s Slough House certainly qualifies as entertaining. Even better, in terms of storytelling, it’s one of the stronger installments in the series. It’s fast and fun to read. If you’re unfamiliar with the novels, Slough House is where Britain’s MI5 puts its Slow Horses – those incompetent, unlucky, or annoying spies that the service doesn’t want to deal with anymore. Slough House is where they work under the insufferable Jackson Lamb, a hilarious HR nightmare. The hope is these agents will become so bored they decide to quit, because firing people involves an aggravating amount of paperwork.

This installment opens with MI5 celebrating another “bold new enterprise.” That’s usually bad news for the Slow Horses. And, sure enough, Slough House has been erased from MI5’s database. The Slow Horses are still getting paid but otherwise it’s like they never existed. As with everything they do, the Slow Horses can’t decide whether they care about it or not.

This is probably unrelated, but a certain Russian dictator has sanctioned a hit on a double-agent Russia swapped with Britain. MI5’s “bold new enterprise” is a revenge killing. Putin now wants tat for that tit, and someone has informed him that the Slow Horses are skilled assassins. Now two of them are dead. Others are being tracked, as if they might be next. Slow Horses are experts at nothing, but “once the label’s been applied, the facts cease to matter.” So it’s the Slow Horses up against Russian-trained assassins in cynical London where no one can be trusted, especially the people who are supposedly on your side. I wonder who will win. The reader, of course.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Thanks for Nothing

Vladimir Nabokov is the master of the paranoid, deranged, unreliable (take your pick or choose all three) narrator. If Lolita didn’t convince you, Pale Fire will. It’s a comedic feat and a delicious confection, but mostly it’s indelible.

Charles Kinbote is our narrator with the questionable judgment and perhaps unsound mind. Some describe him as insane, a remarkably disagreeable person, or a monstrous parasite of a genius. He describes himself as John Shade’s closest friend and most trusted advisor, even if they’ve only known each other for a few months and no one ever thought of them as friends. Their friendship “was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed.”

Shade is one of the great poets of his generation. He has almost finished his magnum opus when he dies. Kinbote takes possession of the unfinished poem and decides to edit it and provide helpful commentary and notes. Since the poem was Kinbote’s idea, he’s the most qualified person to finish it. Plus, it’s about Kinbote and Zembla, his home country. So who better? The English department at Shade’s university believes the poem has nothing to do with Kinbote or Zembla, a distant northern land no one has heard of. They think the poem is auto biographical and deals with the death of Shade’s daughter, the “waxwing slain.” These professors have written a letter in which they argue the poem has fallen into the “hands of a person who not only is unqualified for the job of editing it . . . but is known to have a deranged mind.” So who’s right?

Pale Fire is a delightfully strange novel. It consists of three sections: Kinbote’s foreword; the poem itself, also named Pale Fire; and Kinbote’s Commentary and Index. And let’s not forget that the story pointedly opens with a quote from James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson and ends with a murder. So who’s story is being told in Pale Fire? If there is a biographer, who is it? Is Shade a wavelet of fire compared to Kinbote’s bonfire? Or is Kinbote a pale phosphorescent hint trying to shine near Shade? What’s real here? Whether you’re able to answer those questions or not, Pale Fire is a remarkable journey with many laughs along the way.

Thanks for nothing, Gladiola. Aren’t you supposed to answer questions and not ask them? And why should I read about an unreliable guy with a shaky grasp of reality? Is this even literature? Because I only read literature. I’d better let Nabokov take over from here. “Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average reality perceived by the communal eye.” I hope that helps.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor