57 pages • 1 hour read
Mick HerronSlow Horses
Fiction | 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.
Symbols & Motifs
Games
Content Warning: This section of the guide makes reference to racist and sexist language and attitudes, kidnapping, threat, violence, and murder.
Game-based metaphors are an established trope of spy thrillers, drawing on ideas of tactics and strategy; power and pawn; and play, pretense, and bluffing. Herron often uses the motif of games as a way to frame the nature of espionage and the uncertainty that the characters must navigate in their interactions with others. Slow Horses uses metaphors or wordplay to conjure the game motif throughout: “game”/“games” 22 times, “play”/“playing”/“played” 58 times.
Herron uses “pieces on the board” (48) to express Taverner’s strategy, punning on “Board” in the next sentence to highlight her corporate-style ambition. Taverner treats her subordinates like pawns. Not only does she use the agents of Slough House with impunity, she also enlists the service of her own agents and even civilians without their express knowledge. River begins to see the larger picture: “it was all part of somebody else’s game, whose pieces seemed to have fallen into place for Lamb” (216). Later, as he searches Moody’s corpse, he feels that “Moody, like River, had been a counter in a board game played by other people. Only for Moody, the game was over” (289). The stakes in this “game” are mortally high, and the novel’s game symbol highlights its cynical tone, reflecting the moral ambiguity of a way of life that plays with lives.
“Sly Whores”
A further twist on the nearness of the pronunciations of “Slough House” and “slow horse,” “sly whores” is also a motif that expresses the constant risk of betrayal in the world of espionage. It is associated with Lamb’s character and worldview, especially his jaded cynicism and vulgar diction. The phrase is the title of Part 2 and, as such, shapes the tone of this section and the reader’s expectations. Its ethos dominates the second half of the novel and, in an echo that bookends Part 2, it occurs in the final pages. “Lamb knows it to be true: all joes go to the well in the end, slyly whoring themselves for the coin of their choice” (333). The idea of exchanging personal allegiance or morality for money (“whoring”) is a metaphor here for betrayal and self-interest, and this motif recurs as both a metaphorical and a literal concept. Lamb reflects how his own slow horses—Struan Loy and Kay White—gave themselves up to curry favor with Regent’s Park. Taverner has “sold out” because of her own ambition.
The motif uses the very real threat posed by bribery as a weapon in the espionage world and expresses Lamb’s disdain for those who act for financial inducement instead of out of principle. Lamb’s studied slovenliness and nonconformity is an identity that overtly rejects the outward trappings of wealth and power. His musings suggest, however, that he knows even he may “go to the well in the end” (333). Lamb remembers that other agents have given over for literal financial greed. Charles Partner, for example, “sold himself for money” (333). The motif occurs earlier when Sid and River discuss their motivations for joining the Service: The idea that people would join for the money was “quite funny.” Here, it demonstrates a contrast between “good” and “bad” motivations, and also suggests the idealism of youth as a comparison to Lamb’s experienced world-weariness.
Skin
Slow Horses employs the symbol of skin to represent the novel’s exploration of appearance, identity, and persona, especially the idea of inner/outer or false/real identity. This symbol is used in relation to deliberate disguise, essential to its espionage topic, and also in relation to perceptions and assumptions regarding race and cultural identity.
Lamb muses on the multiplicity and potential of identity: “But previous lives never really disappear. The skins we slough, we hang in wardrobes: emergency wear, just in case” (76) Herron explicitly refers to his “Slough House” pun in using “slough” here, suggesting Lamb wants to cast off both his identity and the irritation of Slough House, and making a deeper suggestion that the whole negative Slough House persona is a red herring in the novel in relation to all the slow horses and their potentials as agents. Through the skin symbol, the novel suggests that Lamb is able to choose identity at will. He is implicitly therefore a talented agent: His “skin” of dirtiness, rudeness, and indifference may be an act. Indeed, as the novel progresses, this will be revealed as a carefully curated exterior. Herron uses a sloughed-skin image again when Louisa and Min hear the intruder: The “different set of experiences” of their drinking and kissing suddenly belong to different versions of themselves—“those skins had been sloughed when they’d heard the intruder” (200)—and they snap into action. The symbol is used to express the various potentials of their characters and prompts the reader to consider that these “slow horses” are not the disappointing mediocrities that they are first portrayed as.
The skin symbol is also used in relation to the perception of race and cultural identity. The novel repeatedly uses the phrase that Hassan has been taken because of his skin color. His kidnappers, it seems, don’t know anything about him and have abducted him on sight because his “skin” or appearance suggests him to be of a non-white background, specifically Pakistani Muslim. The novel’s humor and tenderness in portraying Hassan’s inner voice deliberately juxtaposes the richness and individuality of his true inner personality with the prejudiced, reductive assumptions of the racist kidnappers. For his captors, Hassan literally “is” his skin, and their intended racist message is served because of his appearance and the cipher identity that they place on him; who he really is is irrelevant to them. Moreover, his murder in this way would reduce him, in society’s view, to a symbol of his racial and cultural identity: an erasure of his real and complex individual identity. Thus, the novel both uses and exposes the concept of skin as a symbol to reveal the nature of prejudice and assumptions that derive from defining an individual by their physical appearance only.
