Tor, 2018, 384 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 978-1250196095
Over a sufficiently long period of time, every spy series has an episode in which the agent goes rogue. (Well, except for the Mission: Impossible series, where it happens in nearly every film.) With The Delirium Brief, Charles Stross takes The Laundry Files series one step further, by having the British government shut down the occult intelligence agency its protagonists are working for. Without warning, without delay — removing the sole agency responsible for keeping trans-dimensional horrors at bay. Mayhem ensues.
Of course, there’s a reason for all this, and those play outside the narrative as well. After a trilogy of sometimes-disconnected entries in the series expanding its scope and cast of characters, The Laundry Files was in sore need of a disciplined escalation. As significant as the destruction of Leeds in the previous episode was instrumental in the series’ progression toward a Lovecraftian singularity, there was a feeling that previous episodes introduced various new characters and advanced the plot, but left plenty of material on the floor, just ready to be used more significantly.
The Delirium Brief is the payoff. Not the entire payoff, but an opportunity for Stross to riffle through the mantelpieces of the seven previous volumes of the series and grab any artillery left around in order to push the series to the next level. With the notable exception of the second book’s Hades Blue (which was always been an odd fit in the rest of the series), nearly the entire surviving gang is back in action this time around, and that goes from the heroes to the villains.
The barely-resolved climax of the previous book takes a much better place as this newest entry begins, with initial series protagonist “Bob Howard” (not his real name, not even a real human at this point in the series) being thrust in front of cameras to explain The Laundry’s lacklustre response to a trans-dimensional invasion with a five-figure body count. Bob is not a PR person. Bob would rather fiddle around with computers. But Bob is what the Laundry has left — as the government turns its unsympathetic attention toward the Laundry, two things soon become clear: It wants some heads to roll, and there’s a vastly eviler force behind it whispering that The Laundry should be eliminated. After an opening that squarely renews with the series’ roots in espionage thrillers, the action gets crackling as The Laundry is shut down. This isn’t your average fire-everyone pique: this means that essential services keeping horrors away from the Kingdom are suddenly interrupted, that most of the senior management of the organization is targeted for arrest and the various spells binding its employees are no longer effective.
As someone with quite a bit of experience in Canada’s surprisingly benevolent public service, I had a bit of a problem with that section of the book on purely practical grounds — While the series’ depiction of the British civil service is often very similar to the Canadian experience, this specific bit rang incredibly false. But as Stross has explained at length, much of the novel was rewritten in the heat of the Brexit shock, perhaps as exemplary a breakdown of public stewardship as has been witnessed in the Westminster system. There are also the demands of fiction to consider: I can argue until tomorrow that this kind of wholesale firing would never pass muster with Canadian public service unions, the point here is to get all Laundry characters on the run, and actively plotting against their own government in order to save the realm.
In that respect — whew, does The Delirium Brief work as intended. Even after a curiously dispassionate previous book in which a major British city is destroyed, this entry feels as if all the stops have been removed. The trans-dimensional horrors are taking over the British government, and our heroes are (as usual) fighting a desperate rear-guard action to save at least something of normalcy. The price to pay is considerable — not necessarily in terms of a body count, considering that even I was surprised at the number of main characters surviving to the end, but in terms of the compromises made to even eke out a smaller defeat. The situation is so desperate that the protagonists have to make terrifying compromises and league with a lesser evil… that’s still remarkably evil.
As I’ve mentioned, for long-time series readers, this is the payoff. As Stross has often promised, this is the mid-point of the Lovecraftian singularity designated by CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Some retrofitting is necessary to make all of the narrative pieces fit together (notably in bringing back cultists and avatars of the Black Pharaoh), but it works well. The antagonist, represented by preacher Raymond Schiller (back from being left for dead in anther dimension at the end of the fourth book), is a repellent piece of work, with methods that bring moments of stomach-churning erotic horror. By this point of the series, as with other Stross series, The Laundry Files is getting grimmer by the volume, with the breezy narration barely offsetting a universe of chill-inducing horrors. Even having smart-aleck Bob back as the main narrator isn’t enough to make us forget that Bob is no longer Bob, that the series has moved far past paperclip jokes and that the narrative is describing the mid-phase of a Lovecraftian singularity putting everyone in existential danger.
Even then, the book is a breeze to read — I managed it in less than a day, so invested was I in finding out what was going on. From the point when Bob survives an attempt to abduct and eliminate him on the streets of London, it’s a wild ride to the end. The characters that are assembled have already been developed to the point where the fun is in having them all interact. (Compared to the book that introduced her, I was surprisingly fond of bubbly elven sorceress Cassie this time around, for instance — it does help that we don’t spend too much time in her head. There’s a paradoxical effect here in that, by showing mid-to-high-level Laundry employees leaguing together, the agency does lose quite a bit of its mystique: there’s a feeling that there’s not a lot left to discover about the organization or its universe at this point, which makes sense considering that the action is moving at a faster pace that takes advantage of everything we know about The Laundry Files at this point.
The effectiveness of the results is undeniable: The Delirium Brief is the best book of the series in a long while, because it gets back to the roots of the series and goes forward with the entire cast of characters. Compulsively readable, cleverly imagined and largely true to the series’ evolution (at the expense of the humour, alas), it’s a big irrevocable step forward and a reward for faithful series readers so far.
