As mentioned a few days ago, I've been busy reading
The Fuller Memorandum, the third novel in Charlie Stross' Laundry series. The book has a darker tone than its predecessors and begins with an explicit warning from the narrator that although he survives he does not do so unscathed.
The book begins with a routine exorcism that goes horribly wrong, leaving Bob Howard, our intrepid narrator, on leave pending the outcome of a fatal accident enquiry. His mentor, Angleton, is unsympathetic. Instead he assigns a reading list and devolves his BLOODY BARON committee responsibilities on to Bob's shoulders.
With his wife Mo out of town, Bob kicks around for a few days, buying an iPhone, getting drunk with friends, loading highly classified occult software on to his new phone, worring about Mo's reaction to his profligacy, that sort of thing. But when his wife does return, she's clearly very upset, on the edge of sanity, but unable to talk to her husband because he lacks the proper clearances. Bob demands the proper counter spells and his masters agree, but before the paperwork arrives, the not-so-happy couple are attacked by a possessed Russian who bares an uncanny resemblance to Fester Addams.
At this point, the plot starts to accelerate. There are signs that the apocalypse might be about to arrive sooner than anyone expected and that there might be a mole deep in the Laundry. There are letters from Arthur Ransome concerning a dark spiritual force discovered by Roman Ungern von Sternberg during his sojourn in Mongolia, and there are cryptic hints about a weapon called Teapot from a Russian whose nom de guerre just happens to be Nikolai Panin.
I loved
The Fuller Memorandum and thought it an excellent follow-up to
Atrocity Archives and
Jennifer Morgue. As with its predecessors, which owed debts to Len Deighton and Ian Fleming respectively,
Fuller was clearly written an homage to Anthony Price but with hints of John Le Carre about the plot — both
Fuller and
Tinker Tailor feature mole hunts, unorthodox recoveries of files from a secure archive and a principal character who has to work on the problem from outside the existing system.
One of the book's great strengths is the way that it allowed Stross to take characters he'd established in the earlier books — Bob, Mo, Angleton — and show them working together in a way that brought out previously unknown aspects of their personalities.
I thought that that the relationship between Bob and Mo was particularly well done, making them feel like a genuine couple in a way that hadn't really had a chance to happen in the previous books. There was a standout moment when they argue over Bob's impulsive purchase of an iPhone that is both very authentic and very funny — Mo starts out being angry only to become completely won over, at which point Bob realises that the only way that he is going to be able to recover the situation is by buying Mo her own iPhone for her birthday.
But despite my enthusiasm, I have to admit that the pacing of the book is not quite perfect. Although it opens with a bang, in the form of the failed exorcism, this is followed by a couple of chapters that are heavy on exposition, probably in an attempt to get new readers up to speed with the world of the Laundry. I'm not sure that this entirely works — far better to read the books in order — but there were a things I'd forgotten since last time, so I wasn't ungrateful. But others might be.
Still, it's a minor quibble about a really enjoyable book. If nothing else, it was good to be reminded to go back and take another tilt at Anthony Price's Audley novels.
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