Tag Archives: Secrets

Get Me the Slow Horses

If you like spy novels and you’re not reading Mick Herron’s Slough House series, what’s wrong with you? Are you consumed with self-loathing? Are you mean to children? Not obnoxious children. I have no problem with that. I’m referring to nice children. Do you enjoy treating nice children badly?

This isn’t me asking. It’s my neighbor. She loves this series, and she has excellent taste. I love the series too, but my taste is suspect.

Spook Street is the fourth installment in the series. It brings back Jackson Lamb, the delightfully acerbic and misanthropic head of the slow horses, a group of British MI5 spies who’ve fairly or unfairly been relegated to Slough House because they’re misfits, losers, or nuisances. Slough House is “where they sent you when they wanted you to go away, but didn’t want to sack you in case you got litigious about it.” When there’s an emergency and national security is at risk, no one yells “Get me the slow horses.”

Still, national emergencies happen in Britain and somehow the slow horse get tangled up in them. Much to the reader’s relief, that’s what happens once again in Spook Street. The story opens with a bomb going off in a London mall on January 1st. Forty people are killed including the suicide bomber. It should be a straightforward investigation for the real spies at MI5, but it looks like a group secretly funded by a MI5 legend, who’s now retired and has dementia, might be involved. Slough House is pulled in because the MI5 legend is the grandfather of a slow horse.

The slow horses are now on Spook Street, and “When you lived on Spook Street you wrapped up tight: watched every word, guarded every secret.” These are things the slow horses aren’t good at, and MI5 desperately wants to keep all of this a secret. But here’s the “First law of Spook Street. Secrets don’t stay secret.”

Spook Street is another fast paced installment in the Slough House series, and it’s a pleasure to read. But beware, these stories have a body count, and Mick Herron has no problem sending slow horses out to pasture with a bullet.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Do What They Say or Else: Curiouser and Curiouser

Annie Ernaux’s Do What They Say or Else is a matter-of-fact coming of age story set in Normandy, France, in the late 1960s. It’s not sweet or sentimental. It’s straightforward and refreshing. Simple and profound.

Anne is 15 and a half, bored, disgusted by her parents, and intensely curious about sex. Sounds about right. She is suffering through the summer before she starts high school. This is the summer she begins to leave her parents behind and experiment with being an adult. She has secrets, which she is happy to share with the reader, but not with her parents. Smart decision.

One secret is “if I had to die, in a war for example, I would throw myself at the first guy who came along.” So would I. She is wise and makes keen observations – such as perverts start to “come out in March like the primroses.” Or this one about her parents: “you have to keep your mouth shut all the time so you won’t hurt their feelings.” She has just read Camus’ The Stranger and is deeply affected. She would love to discuss the book with her parents, but she knows they will not find that normal.

Like all teenagers, Anne is cynical but also naive. “There must come a day when everything is clear, when everything falls into place.” If only. Anne is a wonderful narrator because she’s curious about everything and insightful. She is every 15 year old I remember being, and it is fascinating to listen to her as she navigates to adulthood. “Curiosity is normal at my age: it would be strange if that wasn’t the case, except that for girls, curiosity can lead to anything, and it’s frowned upon.” Anne ain’t wrong.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Denise Denies It All

But Denise
the ceilings have ears
and eyes are in every wall.

Argus hides in the cloud spying 
on your Uncle Sam bobble doll,
which nods nervously on the dash
looking for a place to crawl.

And if Argus spies it
then she spies you
because no one accuses 
you of being small.

Everything you hide is a peepshow 
behind a thin glass wall.
Every lewd whisper and Judas kiss
is recorded for instant recall.

But Denise -
Denise denies it all.

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief

Hallmark Cards

   Hallmark has nice sentiments,
   but they meander the gentle slopes
   of meadows laced with buttercups
   pollinated by crisp dollar bills.
   And we are too smart for the platitudes
   of enterprises that print treacle for profit.

   At least that's what William and Mary say.
   Though they annually ask us for money,
   so they would say that anyway.

   There is also no denying the obvious:
   we have been lucky - so far. 

   Though we have stumbled on rocky trails,
   slipped on slick foothills
   and blundered over blue ridges,
   we've never had to scale the Himalayas.

   So while there have been obstacles,
   we have overcome them hand in hand.

   But perhaps that is simply 
   the Hallmark card in me speaking -
   the one that blithely assumes
   our journey has been one and the same.

   Maybe your path has been different.  

   Maybe you climb Himalayan peaks everyday.

   Maybe I am being foolish and insecure.

   But that exhausted look on your face
   suggests you ran uphill for miles today
   while I walked meters on smooth linoleum.

   Then there are these scattered scraps of paper -
   fuzzy phrases that spawn insipid poems
   parading my mostly muddled thoughts on everything.
   You can find them everywhere.

   And then there's you.
   Furtively writing in a diary
   I can never find.
   And I have looked everywhere.

   Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief

   First published in Blue Lake Review