Bob’s Back! And so are the the spoilers for previous books. Be warned!
Our main protagonist may be back but all is not good with the world. The Laundry is in big trouble. A mainstay of the British government for decades (albiet a secretive one), The Laundry has suddenly come under scrutiny. Thanks to the events of The Nightmare Stacks, one could argue there is no use trying to hide magic from the general public, and the existence of the department is now public. Unfortunately, the exposure of The Laundry coincides with a mass casualty event. Certain members of Cabinet think The Laundry has to be held accountable for what happened at Leeds—or even better, dismantled. Better to blame this new, mysterious poorly accounted for department than themselves, right?
Enter the private sector.
As detailed in one of the earlier chapters of the book, the decision tree that the Prime Minister (who seems to be a spineless little Blair-ite) is following looks a little like this:
- (a) is a problem: Something Must Be Done,
- (b) is Something,
- (c) Therefore (b) Must Be Done.
The Something that the PM hopes to take up the government’s occult operations is the rather blandly named, but American owned, GP Services. But there’s more than meets the eye here: GP Services is a subsidiary of GP Systems, which is owned by Golden Promise Ministries—the brand of God (isopod) botherers that were bothering the Laundry back in The Apocalypse Codex. Which sets off all the alarm bells for the remaining core Laundry staff—including Bob and Mo. (Mo, it seems was not permitted to resign like she threatened two books ago.) It’s bad enough that you would outsource national security operations to a foreign entity, but Golden Promise Ministries? Who worship the Sleeper in the Pyramid?
Those alarms become klaxons once Bob gets arrested on trumped up charges—someone from the US tried tipping off the Laundry admin and it didn’t go smoothly. It appears that anyone that the Reverend Raymond Schiller had some familiarity with back in the day won’t be offered a nice redundancy package or a pension, but rather a target painted on their backs. And if you thought the modus operandi of the Golden Promise Ministries was odious previously, here they really step up the nasty.
What to do when the government turns hostile? Continuity Operations. Due to the tricky nature of the geas that the staff of The Laundry are bound by, one could argue that they don’t answer to the PM at all, but to the monarch and his or her heirs and appointees directly. The PM and cabinet are all under the thrall of hostile foreign influences, so the crew and the Senior Auditor decide to take their own initivive—the Queen herself never told them to stop, did she?* So they’re free to ignore the dissolution order issued by the Cabinet Office.
I’ve made the observation previously that it’s often the London-based office stories that have the strongest spy elements and The Delirium Brief is a really good display of that. Disguises, burner phones and safe houses are all abound. What’s left of the core Laundry team are also in need of all the help they can get. If there’s a favorite character from previous books that you have been missing, there’s good odds that they’ll pop up here. There are a lot of moving parts in The Delirium Brief and a lot of little pieces are being slotted in together. So you have to pay close attention.
This is another one of the Laundry books though that really benefits from a binge read, rather than waiting years between installments. There are details here that cast a number of characters and actions from both The Fuller Memorandum and The Annihilation Score in a very different light. One of the main revelations for me that two figures that I thought were separate individuals initially are shown to be one here, and the recent re-read made this less of a stretch than when I read the book when it first came out. Other characters I’ve had to rethink a little are a certain line manager of Bob’s and a certain thorn in Mo’s side from when she was made the director of a new department. One of these made a lot of sense; the other really frustrated me and I’m not sure I agree with them returning. And even with the re-read, I still feel there is some context missing.
Another thing that’s worth paying attention to here is what is going on in the US throughout the book; some of the choices made by members of the Continuity Operations team will leave you screaming; their decisions make more sense though if you keep an eye on what’s unfurling stateside. (Something that Stross goes into more detail in the next book, btw.)
The Laundry Files novels have gotten slowly more and more bleak as the series has progressed. While there is still quite a lot of dark humor to be found here**, I think most of the clowns have been shooed out for this book. They’re trying to make a deal with the lesser of their evils—but they’re still pretty evil! I strongly suspect that this bleakness coincides with Stross getting more and more disillusioned with world events—I do wonder whether or not this book would have had a slightly less dark cast if a certain 2016 referendum had turned out differently?
But its’s not all dire; I just want to point out that Mhari Murphy really aquits herself well here. Well done girl!
For cbr18bingo, this one is Joker. Why? This is not a reference to the drop of humor for the darker tone, actually! Rather this is for Fabian Everyman, who reads to me like a British version of Mark Hamill’s Joker.
