Slow Horses -- Clown Town

December 16, 2025

I've been reading Clown Town, the latest installment in Mick Herron's "Slow Horses" series. It is the fourth or fifth in that series I have read, and I have watched the AppleTV+ adaptation. I've generally enjoyed both, but I am finding the books increasingly turgid and self-indulgent. It's almost like Herron is so busy showing off the many ways he can imagine for the frustrated spies to insult and denigrate one another that he occasionally loses track of the plot. All the characters --and there are too many, and they are too similar (three major female characters, all angry, profane, given to violence, scruffy dressers with androgynous names!) -- sound the same when they launch into profane rants about the incompetence and willful stupidity of the characters around them. It's easy to lose track of who is speaking and to whom -- and what they were talking about before the rant came on. There are also a couple of timelines at work in this one, and the narration sometimes slips from one to the other and back in the same paragraph without a transition, making it a challenge to keep track. And it doesn't help that Herron alludes to incidents from the past novels in a mode that assumes you recall exactly what happened to whom and why.

The series is certainly enjoyable, partly for its cynical portrayal of the "security services" as short-sighted trench warriors out for narrow personal or agency advantage, which differs so sharply from Le Carré's careful bureaucrats slugging it out in slow motion with the Soviets on one side and the Americans on the other over the right to write history or Deighton's patriotic burnout cases. But the narration could leave aside some of the redundant characterization and perhaps tell a more exciting story.​