The Difficult Third Novel

[mtvessel]

Mar 2017
The Fuller Memorandum - Charles Stross - Hachette Digital, 2010
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The difficult second album is a well-known cliche, but with series where each book is a self-contained story, it is more often the third that goes awry. Typically the first has a new setting and characters to get to know, and it is generally easy to extend both in a sequel. But in the third, the plot really has to start interrogating its own background or readers will begin to suspect a lack of depth; hinted-at romantic attraction must become overt, an institution's dark secrets must start to come to light, and so on. As a result, the freshness and surprise of the first two books can be lost. To some extent, this has happened in The Fuller Memorandum.

The plot starts with a routine exorcism at an airforce base that goes horribly wrong, leaving our hero, Bob Howard, on gardening leave. He is soon dragged back in, however, when his boss, the mysterious Angleton, disappears. Bob has to investigate while dealing with his wife Mo, who has been traumatised by another botched operation, and then an attack at home by a Russian zombie - and the fact that all these incidents happened so close together suggests that not everyone at the Laundry is working for the good guys.

An internal investigation into an organisation of secret agents may sound very Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and I think that the intention was to do for John Le Carre what The Jennifer Morgue did for James Bond. But Stross plays it far too straight, writing a fairly serious thriller with a lot of faffing around that only becomes compelling towards the end. There are several good things - we learn more about Angleton's back story, which is unusual to put it mildly, and I was pleased to see Mail Rail and the Necropolis Railway feature in the plot. However, the characters are not great. Mo is the only woman of note and she has effectively been turned into a superhero, making her less relatable as a character, and other than Angleton I am struggling to remember anyone else at all, including the bad guys. Also the ending, while dramatic, is deeply unoriginal. Still I think this is a blip - hopefully, now that its backstory has been explained, the Laundry can go back to being the source of bureaucratic annoyance for our hero that it has always been and Stross will be able to focus on expanding his interesting setting instead.