I read two of Mick Herron’s wonderful Slough House series of spy novels after hearing them recommended on a podcast. The series imagines a kind of castaways section of MI5 stationed near the Barbican tube station in what is called “Slough House.” It’s for failures, screwups, and idiots. It has two main characters: Jackson Lamb, the old, rumpled, and offensive veteran who runs this unit, and River Cartwright, the young son of an older retired spy who had an epic mess up. It exists to house agents whose firings could lead to other problems, and it is meant to give them demoralizing work until they quit, or until such time they can be used as a scapegoat to save the M15 leadership in Regent Park.

Apple TV has made a series out of it, named after the first book, Slow Horses, with Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, and Jack Lowden as River Cartwright. The latest season features a story based on the 2018 novel London Rules and features terror blowback from Libyans, radicalized by the botched war on their country by the West.

I’ve really warmed up to the books and the show. The plots are a bit melodramatic, and the continued survival of Slough House requires some suspension of disbelief. But Slow Horses is ultimately a scabrous critique of modern bureaucracy and meritocracy. Its portrait of MI5 could be a portrait of any government or corporate bureaucracy. It is filled with careerist meritocrats who have high IQs but no real knowledge of the world or themselves. They are back-biters, careerists, completely reliant on technological solutions, and the vast financial resources of their departments. And they continually fail. Meanwhile, the Slow Horses occasionally thrive, despite their incompetence and lack of resources, because Jackson Lamb has real-world experience and is worldly-wise, or because the Slow Horses are loyal to one another, or have the moral or physical courage to be daring in the field.