Tinker Tailor Soldier Sigh

“Even the best spies have their time in the cold,” an old secret agent tells his grandson. They’re sitting by the fire in an episode of Apple TV’s Slow Horses, adapted from Mick Herron’s best-selling novels. The agent is alluding to John le Carré’s novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), to reassure the younger man about his recent failure at work, but—like the audience—his grandson finds it difficult to believe his own career will ever recover. It’s 2022 in Britain: Whose career is thriving? 

Herron’s Slough House series, on which Slow Horses is based, owes a filial debt to le Carré, the moody chronicler of Britain’s secret cold war. The old man’s name is David Cartwright, derived from le Carré’s real name, David Cornwell; events and characters from le Carré’s books are reworked into the background of the plots, sometimes referenced as if they had actually happened. “The shadow he threw on the genre is matched by the light he cast,” Herron wrote somberly after le Carré died.

Many of le Carré’s books, too, were adapted for television; most famously, Alec Guinness starred as the owlish George Smiley in the BBC’s 1979 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Smiley’s task, from semi-retirement, was to identify a Russian mole in the top ranks of MI6, the overseas intelligence service. (The plot was inspired by the Cambridge Five and Kim Philby, who had publicly defected sixteen years earlier.) “We caught a wave in history which was very interesting for the audience,” le Carré later said of the show’s rapturous reception. He was talking about that year’s strike in Britain’s Independent Television network, which gave the BBC an unusually high viewership, but also about a general sense of paranoia the cold war had laid on everyone, including ordinary citizens well outside the intelligence services: “It was the time of great betrayal.”

In 2011 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was adapted again, this time into a movie starring Gary Oldman as Smiley. Where Guinness commanded a scene with few words spoken softly from deep inside his overcoat, Oldman was more vital; he strode purposefully around London, swam in the Hampstead ponds, and attended drunken office parties. Still, his character remained a perfect gent, too polite to knock his colleague Bill Haydon (Colin Firth) around for sleeping with his wife (or even mention it), his shoulders barely broader than the frames on his glasses.

In Slow Horses, Oldman returns to the fringes of the secret services as a kind of dark joke, almost unrecognizably grown out into something closer to his natural state, with his own South London accent, his real lank hair, a new potbelly. As Jackson Lamb, a cold war veteran in the tradition of Smiley (not least in his silly name, lifted from a minor character in Smiley’s People), he finds himself washed up on the banks of the Thames, with only bosses for enemies and with nothing to do except verbally abuse his employees—which Oldman does with genuine relish.

Lamb sits at the top of a department in home intelligence nicknamed Slough House, because its members are so far from the center of things—MI5’s fictional headquarters are at a villa in Regent’s Park—that they might as well be in Slough. (The show’s name is a secondary joke; its residents are so slow as to be out of the running.) He emerges from the world of le Carré, having spent years in Berlin running agents against an actual enemy. Betrayed by his superiors, who were traitors either to Britain or to its professed principles of freedom and honesty, he wages a passive war against their manners and their good taste from outside the fold.

He is, in this respect, a holdover from an earlier time. Over the course of the series, villains resurface from places that were once live theaters of cold war conflict—east Berlin, Russia, North Korea—and assume, incorrectly, that Britain still has anything worth defending. (Empire, for one: in the books Herron can barely bring himself to mention MI6’s overseas operations.) The task of Lamb’s team is mostly to notice that anyone is watching at all, while MI5 headquarters is consumed with defending the corner office.

Slow Horses may be catching a wave in history, but it’s not the churn of geopolitics. It is the cruel optimism of the underemployed, of people who feel stuck, underpaid, and underappreciated at work. Far from the stable and important government jobs they were promised, the characters can only watch as their less high-minded colleagues use MI5 as a launching pad to the private sector and secure lucrative state contracts. They descend into cynicism, no longer able to take anything seriously.

Slow Horses begins with the fall of a young cadet named River Cartwright from the promise of a career at the top of the secret service. His grandfather David was “Second Desk” of MI5 during the cold war, though in fact he was running the show—luckily, as First Desk turned out to be a Russian agent, in the manner of Tinker Tailor’s Bill Haydon. David has been informally training River since the latter’s mother abandoned him when he was seven; mostly we glimpse this education in the form of clichés (“Moscow rules, cover your back; London rules, cover your arse”) and a syllabus: “The first bedtime story he ever did read me was Kim,” River tells a colleague in Herron’s first novel. “After that, well, Conrad. Greene. Somerset Maugham.” And, of course, a box set of le Carré.

The series opens with River’s final training exercise, which is to catch a young man before he sets off a bomb in a crowded train station. Cartwright, played by the slightly dashing Jack Lowden, is given a description of the suspect: a young South Asian man in a white shirt over a blue tee. But he tackles the wrong person; the training scenario ends in disaster, and hundreds of fake people die. 

Herron was writing a series of detective novels in 2005 when jihadists killed fifty-two people in the center of London, which inspired him to change genres. But the fiction that emerged was an uneasy examination of his initial stir to patriotic action: having set us up to expect a search for the next London bomber, the first novel—and the first season of Slow Horses—is instead about the search for white nationalists who abduct and threaten to behead a young Pakistani Brit. After Cartwright’s failure the rest of the episode is spent reminding the viewer that the off-putting aspects of the scenario—the Muslim terrorist, the wrong brown man, the hundreds dead—were all just for show.

In a further absolution it turns out that the new Second Desk—Diana Taverner, played by Kristin Scott Thomas—manipulated the exercise so that Cartwright would fail and lose his place on her team. He had, unwittingly, photographed her organizing the whole white nationalist affair as a false flag operation meant to impress the abducted boy’s uncle, a heavyweight in Pakistani intelligence, with the success of the mission to rescue his nephew—though of course it quickly tumbles out of her control, and its only lasting effect beside a body here and there is River’s secondment to Lamb’s pack of rejects. 

Every season of Slow Horses is structured around the struggle within MI5 between the old guard, interested in “tradecraft” and therefore (from the audience’s perspective) narrative, and the new rationalizers, interested in efficiency and austerity. MI5 has been largely given over to the data centers condensing activity into numbers—except for Slough House, which remains stubbornly and usefully ancient in its methods. Arrayed against them are First Desk, who has been replaced twice so far but who is inevitably power-pleasing, and a villainous MP, a joke Herron could not resist: in the books he’s a bottom-feeding, towheaded Etonian with ties to the far right. (In the show they’ve curled his hair, brushed his teeth, and reminded him how to tie a tie.) The set design amplifies the difference between Slough House’s cozy world of damp, unglamorous treachery and the sleek uselessness of MI5, whose headquarters might have been filmed in Cupertino. 

The predictive powers of MI5 are understood to be nonexistent; almost every season begins with an act of public, political violence of the sort the agency is supposed to detect and prevent. Our heroes spend the rest of the episodes (and books—there are four more yet to be adapted, with another installment, about fallout from the Troubles, due in August) figuring out which higher-up has colluded with the neo-Nazis/sleeper Soviet agents/kidnappers/mall bombers and trying to hold them accountable. After the first season, there’s barely any tradecraft, which is replaced by Whitehall intrigue (and, in the third season, a dingily lit and overlong gunfight). Usually it’s other agents who are doing the actual snooping, which the Slough House has to detect.

Like almost every piece of spy fiction before it, however, Slow Horses tries to be about everything except espionage. The genre’s exploration of the clandestine world of human emotions, and especially of the range of human loneliness, is only barely contained within the frame of covert politics. The characters are isolated by failure, addiction, and bitterness; they paste smiling faces over secret selves and past lives; they fight bygone wars on behalf of nobody; even at the highest levels of government, they devote themselves to their work for little reward.

One of the frustrations of the script is that it often pushes the characters to the lip of darkness, only to draw them back with a joke. The show’s screenwriter, Will Smith, comes trained, via The Thick of It and Veep, in the Armando Iannucci school of nominally political insult comedy. The dialogue in the latest season in particular often sinks into unbearable quips, as when a newcomer to Slough House, previously almost silent, diagnoses his colleagues’ squabbling as a form of affection, or when a pretty agent asks Lamb, “Do I look like an idiot?” and he replies, “Talking about your looks could get me into all sorts of trouble.” 

But the viewer can ignore the occasional elbow digging, because in this season many of Slow Horses’ themes are yoked together in a mostly successful way. Despite Oldman’s thudding presence, River is the hero of the series, a young man with great expectations, mysterious paternity, the precarious legacy of his grandfather, and a feverish need to win his superiors’ approval—all of which would have made him, in le Carré’s time, the perfect spy: lonely, steeped in the culture of subterfuge, desperate to prove himself. 

The champion skulkers of espionage novels, across several generations and beginning with Conrad and Kipling, hover self-consciously in the background of the Slow Horses series. Herron insists on making this inheritance explicit in his books, which are full of homages to other novels, and the publicity surrounding the series makes much of their tie to le Carré’s Karla trilogy. But the le Carré book from which this season of Slow Horses most clearly descends is A Perfect Spy (1986), a semiautobiographical novel in which Magnus Pym, just like River Cartwright in these episodes, is pulled between several father figures: his biological father, his gruff English handler, and the older man who gave him his intellectual education (who is, in le Carré, also the person who turns Pym into a double agent for Czechoslovakia).

Pym’s soft point, the part that turned him into a spy first for and then against his country, is that the fatherland, which messed him up in the first place, demands absolute dedication. Like le Carré’s real father, Pym’s is a conman who has constructed a low-aristocratic lifestyle, including a poshly educated son, on a mountain of fraud and debt, simulating a fine life for his family so completely that they almost believe it’s theirs. Pym’s Czech handler assures him his betrayal is worth it, because his work will destroy “all the junk that made you what you are: the privileges, the snobbery, the hypocrisy, the churches, the schools, the fathers, the class systems, the historical lies, the little lords of the countryside, the little lords of big business, and all the greedy wars that result from them.”

Herron’s books are light; he is free from le Carré’s self-pity and occasional sententiousness,¹ and for that matter from the tedious casuistry of Graham Greene or Conrad’s philosophizing. The show, for its part, has very little of the seriousness of The Americans or the cosmopolitan reach of Le Bureau des Légendes, though it’s not so shallow that it reliably protects its characters from being killed off. And yet River, like Pym, is built by a system that has not just fallen into disrepair but is in its essence committed to the wrong things. MI5 didn’t notice, for decades, that its First Desk worked for the Soviets—and not even for political reasons, simply for money. It was corrupt enough that River was sure nepotism would secure him a job; we see it surveilling its own citizens beyond the letter of the law, entrapping them into serious crimes, detonating violence in other parts of the world, and covering up the aftermath. 

This season is particularly concerned with the consequences of the familial loyalty demanded by the service. River, we learn in a particularly operatic twist, is the biological child of an American mercenary, Frank Harkness, who seduced and impregnated David Cartwright’s daughter in order to blackmail the Second Desk. In exchange for his daughter’s safe return from the compound in France where Harkness is raising a coterie of infants to become freelance assassins, Cartwright was forced to supply him with weapons, money, and passports, with which Harkness could furnish his stable of Bonds-in-training. 

River, like Pym, finds his father disgusting and rejects his plea to join him—only to assert more strongly his filial ties to his employers and, by extension, the states to which they’ve sworn their service. But the Britain that employs River has lost what little stature it had left in Pym’s day; nobody believes anymore in an enemy that isn’t internal. Duty to the crown seems pointless, not to mention a bit distasteful; in these shrunken times, what’s left to cling to except your own precarious professional position? And so a show that might have examined the state of the nation gives us instead an examination of the state of the office.

Every unhappy worker will remember being told to imagine their workplace as a family. Nobody believes this when they hear it, and even in the rare case where we might expect a workplace to provide a sense of purpose, or honor, or security—for example, a counterterrorism agency—it will still fall short. Then again, each dysfunctional workplace is dysfunctional in its own way.

After a failed career as a poet, Herron took a dead-end job copyediting legal research. Bored and frustrated, he began writing novels at night. A decrepit building he used to pass on his way to work became Slough House in the books and in the show, which is filmed on location. (The nickname might also recollect Britain’s The Office, which is set in Slough.) The world of Slow Horses emerges from his malaise, shared by so much of his audience, who are eager to sympathize with characters who spend their days sorting through someone’s garbage or flagging books taken out from the Luton library that suggest the borrower might have an interest in money laundering. But—as when boxes of bemoaned and unsorted paperwork in Slough House become a weapon against an intruder—the show insists on an element of glamour in the work of even the most abject spy. A tiny, warped optimism moves things along.

For the workers in Slough House do in fact resemble a family—not one that builds out of several seasons of proximity, but one called into being from the start by service to the fatherland. Cast out from Diana Taverner’s bosom, the slow horses have fallen under the reluctant protection of Jackson Lamb. The relationships that develop within Slough House and MI5 are almost explicitly domestic, beginning with River’s relationship with his grandfather and culminating in the revelation of his paternity. (The show cannot countenance incest in Lamb’s nursery; even the thought of it incurs capital punishment. “If I find out you are indulging in extracurricular activities that could upset the equilibrium of this blessed sanctuary, then I will make it so that you wish you were in a Siberian gulag,” Lamb warns River and a colleague as he catches them flirting; an episode later, the woman is shot in the head. Another pair of coworkers begins an actual affair, which lasts for four episodes before one of them is killed.)

Over four seasons, it’s made clear to the audience that Lamb feels a sense of responsibility to his employees, even as he makes their workdays miserable. His abuse, the show wants us to believe, is not totally pointless; it’s a way of building character, restoring a lost sense of militancy to his largely millennial workforce. His employees are sometimes unfireable incompetents (much hay is made of anti-discrimination laws), often addicts, and sometimes people, like River, who have fallen foul of MI5 office politics. This is Herron’s nifty (though not always convincing) way of having people sitting atop billions of dollars and terabytes of surveillance data remain underdogs. Even Lamb’s own hypercompetence is only ever mobilized in the service of getting an edge on First Desk in order to save his workers, of whom he is begrudgingly but unstintingly protective.

Lamb and others who worked in the cold war—like Taverner, River’s grandfather, and an archivist who lost a leg in Berlin—may have believed at first that they were happy to leave it behind. But the victory that was supposed to expand everyone’s world has contracted theirs, leaving them with little to do but scoff at the young people in their cubicles, with their noses pressed to their screens. And yet those young people don’t have much to live for either. They can’t even romanticize the thrill of fighting an existential threat, because they’ve never known anything but work for work’s sake. The slow horses come closest to taking their mission seriously when workplace ties bleed over into their private lives—when River tells his coworker about his grandfather’s increasing dementia, or when a secretary tries to retire and a whole host of her former colleagues invade her apartment. In these moments, it becomes a little clearer why they’re showing up to work at all.