Review of Mick Herron's Slow Horses (original) (raw)
Related papers
Railways and Railwaymen in "Mugby Junction"
2019
This paper examines the impact of the Victorian railways on railwaymen in relation to labour and social economy, the industrialisation of travel, and urban modernity in three short stories: "The Engine-driver" by Andrew Halliday, "The Engineer" by Amelia Edwards and "The Travelling Post-office" by Hesba Stretton in Mugby Junction, edited by Charles Dickens in 1866. Regarding the history of the railway, emphasis has shifted from the cultural and social aspects to psychological interpretations of the influences of science and technology on individuals. These stories provide an insight as to how the machine ensemble played a critical role in altering railway workers' physical, emotional and psychological states, and transformed them into haunted "modern" subjects. The representations of mystery, death, crimes and spectral images in these stories not only address deep anxieties and a changing mode of life, but also acknowledge the reader about how the Victorians reacted to the rapid expansion of the railway network within and beyond the British Isles.
The Writing on the Wall: The Concealed Communities of the East Yorkshire Horselads
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2007
This paper examines the graffiti found within late nineteenth and earlytwentieth century farm buildings in the Wolds of East Yorkshire. It suggests that the graffiti were created by a group of young men at the bottom of the social hierarchy -the horseladsand was one of the ways in which they constructed a distinctive sense of communal identity, at a particular stage in their lives. Whilst it tells us much about changing agricultural regimes and social structures, it also informs us about experiences and attitudes often hidden from official histories and biographies. In this way, the graffiti are argued to inform our understanding, not only of a concealed community, but also about their hidden history.
Joyce Carol Oates's "Slow": Sudden Detective Fiction?
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2022
Joyce Carol Oates's fictional project, which considers literature to be both a realm for the exploration of unconscious impulses and a crucial element of lived experience, has led her to focus on stories that deal with the aftereffects of violent crime. However, Oates has specifically stated that she does not write detective fiction: she is a writer of what she calls "psychological mystery and suspense" fiction. Rather than the resolution of enigma, it is the act of detectingthe quest itself-which is the most important element of her stories. Oates's stories therefore often expose, but offer no answers to, the mysteries of life. They use textual strategies full of gaps to recreate unconscious processes, and they introduce crime plots that are not fully resolved. Indeed, this is the aspect-the inherently active questioning state of being in suspense-emphasized by the subtitles to so many of her recent story collections which are variations on "Tales of Suspense." In other contexts, Oates has referred to herself as a "psychological realist" and to her work as "psychological realism." This article will use a close reading of Oates's micro-fiction story "Slow" to illustrate Oates's particular form of psychological realism and show how she integrates elements of detective fiction into her writing to great effect. Joyce Carol Oates écrit souvent des oeuvres de fiction qui racontent les effets de crimes violentes sur les vies de ses personnages. Cependant, elle a déclaré qu'elle n'écrit pas de la fiction policière. Elle préfère dire qu'elle écrit des récits de suspens comprenant des énigmes psychologiques. Dans les histoires de Oates, la quête prend l'importance sur la résolution de l'énigme. De ce fait, ses histoires identifient les mystères de la vie sans souvent proposer de solutions. Elle a recours à des techniques elliptiques afin d'évoquer l'état de l'inconscient. Elle introduit des mystères qu'elle ne résout souvent pas complètement. En effet, c'est cet état de questionnement permanent qui est le propre du suspens qu'évoquent beaucoup des sous-titres de ses recueils récents où l'on trouve des variations sur la formulation « histoires de suspens ». A d'autres moments, Oates se définit comme étant un « psychological realist » qui écrit des oeuvres de « psychological realism ». Cet article examine de près la mini nouvelle « Slow » afin de montrer comment Oates incorpore des éléments de la fiction policière et du réalisme psychologique dans ses écrits.
2016
through a crack in present-day America back to 'a freshly whitewashed / scullery in Cullenramer' and into the 'new-laid eggs' of the past 'from any one of which', he writes, 'I might yet poke / my little beak'. The 'country toward which I've been rowing / for fifty years', in 'It Is What It Is', is also that landscape of the past, 'the fifty years I've spent trying to put it together'. It's now twenty years since Muldoon left 'The Old Country' (as one of the poems in this collection has it) for pastures new, and even more than that since an hallucinogenic stroll with Ciaran Carson through the green fields of home transformed his head into the 'head of a horse' with a 'dirty-fair mane'. It was probably only a matter of time before horses, in one form or another, earned a place in a book title, given their ubiquity in Muldoon's oeuvre-from Moy's horse fairs to the Wild West-and unsurprisingly, the horse trail in this book has all the elusiveness we've come to expect from the poet. The 'horse latitudes', the blurb helpfully tells us, 'designate an area north and south of the equator in which ships tend to be becalmed, in which stasis if not stagnation is the order of the day, and where sailors traditionally threw horses overboard to conserve food and water'. That's one handy fact through which to 'interpret' this book, of which more anon. Another strategy might be to pick up various horsy links in a chain, to jog along an intertextual and self-referential 'inside track': there are 'clay horses', cobs, war horses, stallions, pack mules and asses. There's a pair of 'rain-bleached horses' (compare 'Gathering Mushrooms') who stand 'head to tail' (compare 'Why Brownlee Left'). There are moments of Frostian rhythmical canters: 'whereof … whereof…whereof'; 'whereat … whereat … whereat'. And horses become, inevitably, hobbyhorses-one of Muldoon's being the urge to squeeze signification dry: so there's a 'half-assed attempt to untangle / the ghastly from the price of gasoline'; his former lover is put 'through her paces', although she kicks 'against the traces'. Even more obliquely, the seemingly all-American poem, 'Soccer Moms', a double villanelle and paean to 1960s America, with 'Gene Chandler … winning
: In the late 1950s, the emergence of the anti-establishment reflected a new approach of those young men in society who had undertaken national service and been better educated than previous generations. However, they were still excluded by an older generation who had experience in the war and were able to control both working practices and access to power. Although Fleming’s James Bond was gaining a mass readership during this period, he was also in this older establishment mould. The publication and popularity of working class literature, beginning with Look Back in Anger (1956), Room at the Top (1957) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) introduced a different kind of young male protagonist who was keen to get on, get past some of those who were clinging to the past and thus be characterised as anti-establishment. Despite the popularity of James Bond, the establishment was also being challenged in the security services. The defection of Burgess and Mclean, together with suspicions about other Russian spies inside the government machine suggested that ‘knowing someone’s people’ would not always be a secure way to vet the nation’s security service personnel. In the early fiction of Len Deighton and John Le Carre these two cultures started to collide, and served as an antidote to Fleming, particularly in the Ipcress File (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). Here Harry Palmer and Alec Leamas, both northern working class finance administrators within MI6, become the means through which the internal workings of the machine are revealed. As representatives of the anti-establishment, it is their outsider status that informs their insights of organizations which have become bureaucratic and self-f-serving. Yet it is also their expendability, as working class agents, which can also serve to reinforce the organizational status quo. This paper examines these two central characters and the role that they play in establishing new models of internal, but anti-establishment outsider heroes.