Slow Horses

I'm embarassed to say that I prefer the TV adaptation of Slow Horses, and don't think viewers will get anything out of reading the original novel. Typically I expect that the novel is deeper, smarter, and more complex than a TV series. Unfortunately for us readers, the adaptation is very faithful to the source material while suffering the sin of not having Gary Oldman.

The TV series provides many more scenes of Jackson Lamb tearing it up, delivering hilarious verbal abuse that is part of the charm of Slow Horses. The showrunners gave Gary Oldman more material and as a result, the novel feels like it's holding out on us. There's also a sense of effortless gravitas in an actor of his skill, and so while the novel tries to surprise you with Jackson Lamb's hidden talent, viewers instinctively know that underneath the dirty jacket is a man to be reckoned with.

On the other hand, the novel is a bit more intellectually complex. It's shorter and more focused. The adaptation also suffers from watering down its themes with Hollywood-action and requirements to give all major actors/actresses a certain amount of screen time. These are all qualities that do credit to the original source material. Sadly, the downside is to not see Gary Oldman. And that's just not worth it.

Recommended with reservations -- seriously, just go watch the TV series.

I have to admit, this one took me a bit to get into. It is written in what seems like a typically "dense" British spy novel manner, a la John le Carre, where every word can matter and plenty goes unsaid but implied. There was also plenty of set up, which is to be expected, I guess, for the first novel in a spy series (the Slough House series is currently at 7 books), so quite a bit of the beginning of the book is taken up by introducing you to the various players at Slough House, a spot where basically British spies are presumably put out to pasture after a particularly egregious screw up.

So I didn't read it very quickly which was probably a mistake. Because, like I said, everything in the end matters and sometimes I lost the thread of things. There is a lot going on, both specifically written about and obliquely hinted at and it would have behooved me to have read this a bit more quickly. In other words, I shouldn't have been a slow horse - ha!

But every time I picked the book up again (metaphorically, of course, as I am an ebook reader these days), I would find myself more and more engrossed in the story of how some higher echelon folks wanted to pin their own screwups on this lot of screwups. But the head screwup, Jackson Lamb, won't let that happen and gets the group to band together and kind of solve the problem.

So, in the end, this was a great read. The last third I couldn't stop reading, which is a good thing, because I doubt I could have untangled it again. The story is told with plenty of jumping from one place in the action to the other, but you are never sure where, exactly, in the chronology you will end up. But it ties together well at the end.

It is also told with plenty of humor, both just funny and also a British dark humor. There were a few British idioms I didn't understand (for fellow non-British types, "a small gonk" is a tchotchke, a small troll like toy, for instance), but in general, it was a fantastic read and I am anxious to see where Lamb takes this bunch of losers in the second book, Dead Lions.