Slow Horses
a fast-paced beauty of a thriller
Jonathan Lamb is abominable. He has a bath twice a month, brushes his teeth when he remembers to, and has obnoxious eating habits. He farts prodigiously, with no compunction in doing it in public, and sleeps in office, his feet on the desk, toes poking out of the holes in his socks.
Unsurprisingly, he treats his colleagues like dirt, squelching dignity and thrashing ego into pulp. People who work with him are in any case in a bad place, as Slough House, the place which Jonathan Lamb heads, is filled with, what is derisively called, slow horses, MI5 agents who have goofed up big time, and are possibly on the brink of being thrown out forever.
But intrinsically, these no-gooders are people who have a point to prove because they are, well, MI5. Finally, and however badly they might have muffed up an operation, discord invariably sniffs them out, segueing into delightfully troublesome adventures. Sometimes out of their own foolishness, sometimes because they are being used for their foolishness, and sometimes because there is a real problem which they lurch into.
And as the protagonists stumble around generally making things worse, the series itself upturns the entire spy genre into something absolutely outrageous and fresh. There is adventure, action, irreverent humor, skullduggery, double games, double crossings, et al. but wrapped around characters as unique as a friendly shark, as irrepressible as a child holding in laughter.
It's a tribute to the writers, Morwenna Banks and Mark Denton, that they infuse life into a genre which has James Bond on one side of the spectrum and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on the other. What Slow Horses does beautifully is to do genre-bridging by adopting the best of each sub-genre of the spy thriller and meshing it into something completely outrageous and pulse-pounding.
The series is moody, atmospheric, gritty, realistic, and is shot with panache and a terrific sense of verisimilitude. And progressively as the slow horses get their mojo going, it transits into something frenetic, pulse-pounding.
The three seasons of the series pick up from each other but are independent in their own way and create a world which is in conflict internally (politics in spy-dom!) and in consonance with contemporary times (terrorists, et al). The story embraces love (which, alas, emerges stillborn), betrayals which bind, and secrets which light up the dark.
The actors all hit it out of the park. Gary Oldman plays Jonathan Lamb with so much grime that it is impossible to think of anybody else as dirty, ill-clothed, ill-mannered as him. The other actors play out their frustrations like a woman into her second year wearing a chastity belt. And even if they are involved in grave errors of judgment, they plunge into their foolhardiness with aplomb.
Slow Horses is completely arresting in its world creation and writing, etching compellingly sketched characters. Season 4 has started dropping in episodes. And voila, the excitement continues!
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