57 pages • 1 hour read
Mick HerronSlow Horses
Mick HerronFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Juxtaposition
Content Warning: This section of the guide makes reference to kidnapping, threat, violence, and murder.
Slow Horses uses juxtaposition throughout to create tensions in the novel and to explore the themes’ often oppositional elements, such as tradition and modernity, trust and secrecy, loyalty and betrayal, and reputation and discretion.
The most notable juxtaposition of the novel is that between Slough House and Regent’s Park. Where Slough House is grim and gloomy, Regent’s Park is flooded with light and filled with busy people. Where Slough House is run by the disgraced and disheveled Jackson Lamb, Regent’s Park is headed by the elegant and cunning Diana Taverner, at least for the duration of this novel (Head Desk Ingrid Tearney is out of the country). Slough House is likened to a dungeon early in the book, whereas the image of Regent’s Park is elevated and shining, “the light at the top of the ladder” (45). When Slough House sits “in darkness” during the evenings, at Regent’s Park, “even when nothing was happening, there’d be enough people about for a midnight football match” (167). These juxtaposed images highlight that River and the other slow horses yearn to climb their way out of the darkness of failure and into the light of success. The images of high/low and light/dark also have implicit moral connotations that the novel at first encourages, for instance by referring to the slow horses’ “sins,” and then subverts. This subversion is a transition, as the locations become associated with those who work in them. The hierarchy of the juxtaposition is shown to be reversible, especially morally, as the novel shows Regent’s Park to be villains to Slough House’s anti-heroes. In an espionage world where everything may be its opposite, the novel’s plot ultimately reverses the moral and aspirational significance of the Regent’s Park/Slough House contrast.
Wordplay
Slow Horses employs dark, sardonic, and witty humor to create its narrative tone, build a relationship between the author and reader, and deepen the portrayal of the characters, who express many of the jokes. Much of this humor relies on wordplay. Wordplay is linguistic wit or jokes that rely on the double or divergent meanings of words and phrases. This can be a matter of context or rely on punning, which uses words that sound or look the same or similar (homonyms and heteronyms, respectively). As wordplay relies on double meanings, it is highly resonant in a spy book where ambiguity, misdirection, and hiding in plain sight are essential elements. Herron’s continual wordplay is part of the British tradition to which his books self-referentially belong, and part of the developed grounding of his characters and settings in their cultural context. English abounds with homonyms and heteronyms and, as a result, words are an important part of the British sense of humor.
A key example of contextual wordplay is found in Hassan’s inner monologue when he is abducted. He tries to calm himself, thinking, “The thing to do was not lose his head” (82). At this point, the reader knows that the kidnappers have threatened to decapitate Hassan, but Hassan himself does not know this, which creates a dark comic irony from the wordplay. When Slough House is first introduced, the imagery uses puns to conjure falseness and uncertainty to create a sense of mystery and to underpin or foreshadow aspects of Slough House’s meaning. Slough House’s front door has no doorbell and a shuttered letterbox: “It’s as if the door were a dummy” (13-14). “Dummy” is a pun here, as it has several meanings, all of which are relevant. First, “dummy” means something false: Slough House, the novel warns the reader, is literally a “false front,” where rejected agents are kept off the radar. It also means a mannequin or replica of a human, resonant to the nature of false identity in espionage. “Dummy” is a British word for a pacifier, denoting that the slow horses are silenced and infantilized by Regent’s Park, as well as for a foolish person, which is how Regent’s Park views the slow horses. This early description is a clue, typical of the spy thriller genre but expressed in Herron’s own way, through layering of punning meaning: It warns the reader not to take Slough House, or the narrative, at face value.
Jargon
Herron employs jargon (words and word usage specific to a particular group) to enrich and underpin his creation of an enveloping but secretive spy world. He both draws on the typical terminology of spy thrillers, like “spook,” “asset,” and “op,” and devises his own lexicon of colorful descriptors to build the unique world of Jackson Lamb’s Slough House. This created jargon is particularly significant for portraying the slow horses as a distinct subculture, both outside the normal MI5 word and insiders among themselves. As Herron’s creation, it is revealing of authorial intentions. Most often, the jargon isn’t explicated, suggesting that Herron prefers to rely on his reader to pick up meaning from context or look up words as needed than to create stilted exposition. This also has the effect of making the reader feel like an outsider at times, part of the novel’s irreverent and subversive tone.
Many of these jargon terms have specific meanings that reveal characters’ or group’s attitudes. For instance, the novel uses the term “joe” to describe a field agent in contrast to the “suits,” who are management: “Suits and joes was an age-old opposition” (298). “Joe” is friendly, suggestive of an everyday guy, a team player, whereas “suits” adopts a corporate term for professionals and senior management, showing the corporatization of espionage, something Lamb and his agents resent. Herron creates the term “achievers” to mean assassins. The comedic cynicism of this term, embedded in a world where murder is normalized, is partnered with the irony that its tone of glorification belies the truth: Achievers are sent to clean up a scene or get rid of a problem. Often in Slow Horses, agents tasked with assassination are chosen because they are expendable: They find themselves killed, showing that they are not “achievers” at all. Herron coins the term “Dogs” for the Service’s internal security system. In the novel, they are portrayed as ruthless and amoral hunters, obedient and unquestioning. They do Taverner’s bidding. “Dog” is also an insult used to denote uncleanness, amorality, stupidity, or aggression: A “dogsbody” does undesirable tasks. The layered meanings of the novel’s inventive terminology helps to create a complete narrative world.
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