This Is What Happened is a psychological thriller from Mick Herron, a short novel that doesn’t waste a single scene or moment. The premise is that Maggie Barnes is recruited by an MI5 agent to perform a risky mission of espionage in the office building where she works. There are so many twists and turns in this novel, even from the beginning, that I hesitate to say more. This is my first Herron novel, though I know he is well-known for his spy novels, but this is quite a different offering in many ways.
The number of characters is deliberately kept small, giving the novel the feeling of a play. Every plot twist is heavily foreshadowed, and some are deliberately guessable, but the art of storytelling shown here is utterly genius. Heron is manifestly capable of writing about very creepy forms of evil, about loneliness in the city, about broken families, and about the sense of brokenness that pervades modern-day Britain. There are a few misses, such as the over-attribution to Brexit of some of the nastiness that the novel talks about; and I, for one, would have preferred a less abrupt ending, though I can see the virtue of stopping as soon as the story comes to an end. It leaves a bit more to the reader’s imagination.
But the absolute genius of the novel is in its mastery of tension. The reader is allowed to know a lot more than the characters in the book, and thus we know what they are headed towards long before they do. This ramps up the suspense to eleven, and the book becomes impossible to put down. The ending isn’t the strongest, but I think the journey there is what really counts. It is an ingenious work, one I could imagine being adapted for the stage, and one that will leave you biting your nails in suspense, and cringing at some of the horror of what is being portrayed. The heroism of humanity, the depravity of humanity, the vulnerability of humanity are all on full show here. This Is What Happened pulls no punches. You are in for one hell of a ride.
Wet Broken Things 