For the last few weeks I've been enjoying Slow Horses on Apple TV Plus, with Gary Oldman as the main character Jackson Lamb and Kristin Scott Thomas as his opposite number in MI5, Diana Taverner. I knew about it as a book series, of which I'd previously read the second volume, because my dad picked that up at random once. I remember enjoying Book Two, named Dead Lions, and had resolved to check out the rest of the series someday.
Someday arrived when I finished the first season of the show, which I devoured in just a little over a week. It's one of those rare adaptations that presents a perfectly realized version of the source material - think later volumes of Harry Potter, in which Hogwarts becomes this enormous, sprawling place with nooks and crannies everywhere, rather than the one or two sets used in the first two movies. Only with Slow Horses, it takes place in a London that's recognizable and true to life.
Because this post contains spoilers, I'm not going to explain the premise of the show, but I will say that it and the book do a good job of conveying London office life. My first job was in a ramshackle old building in Southend with lots of quirks and where the endless tea rounds helped to pass the day. My next job was in a slightly nicer office, but in a quirky neighborhood... and not too far from the Slow Horses' place near the Barbican. Indeed, when they convene at Blake's grave in season 1, that scene takes place in Bunhill cemetery, where I used to take my lunch on nice days.
In that way, Slow Horses is a bit of a spiritual successor to John le Carré's spy novels, especially the ones centered around George Smiley. When le Carré passed away, one of the obituaries said that much of his books' appeal lay in the fact that they were chronicles of office life, ranging from interminable meetings to petty office rivalries. Slow Horses captures that vibe well, right down to the one try-hard who's always trying to get people to go to the pub.
Another thing I liked about the show is that the first season fleshes out certain things better than the book does. The three white nationalist kidnappers are given more motivation and explanation than in the book, and you see their fate after the failure of their plan, whereas in the book Hassan Ahmed manages to escape without the help of the Slow Horses. Indeed, in the book, the bulk of the Slow Horses are passive and don't accomplish much of note after a certain point, just sitting in a cafe near Old Street, whereas in the show they bravely sally forth to save Hassan.
Though in true Slough House fashion, two of them forget to get gas and are stranded by the road on the way to Epping Forest.
I was able to contrast the first book with the first season because I finished them fairly close to one another, but I didn't do that with season 2, because I finished the second book more than two years ago and wasn't sure if I wanted to read it again. Still, I flipped through bits of it as I was watching the last episode of the season, and it's clear that they made some big changes to how the Russians' plot plays out.
I've now started on season 3, and while I haven't bought the third book yet, I think I'll be reading that pretty soon, so I'll have a better sense of where the two works diverge. In the meantime, I've been enjoying the development of the characters' relationships to each other, even as they themselves don't really grow into competent (or even, in some cases, likable) people. It helps that they got actors of the caliber of Gary Oldman to star in it - he makes one of his typical transformations into the shambling wreckage that is Jackson Lamb, and truly breathes life into him, to the point that when I read Lamb's passages in the first book I saw Gary Oldman in the role.
The other nice thing is that, regardless of how many seasons Apple TV greenlights, there are about 8 books in the series, plus a bunch of novellas and related works, so I'll have a fair amount to catch up on. I'm especially looking forward to seeing who's still around by book 8, and how many parts of London they visit that I know well.
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