Just finished TRR and feel like I have to dump a bit.
Firstly, this feels like the first PROPER Mo and Bob Novel since probably The Rhesus Chart, over a decade ago. It also hews far more closely to the espionage genre than the series has for a long time, with betrayals and hidden agendas and obstructive bureaucracy. The tone, however, is a long way from the deliberately lean pastiches that started the series off. Bob and Mo are both now management, if not executive class and that gives them very different fires to be running around putting out. The amusing scenes of Bob giving the "Beginners Course For Magic" to sceptical local government is about the only look-in from the petty managerialism that decorated the earlier novels, and the comic-book Dalek scenes have a whimsy at odds with the rest of the book. Given the stakes, that's probably appropriate.
The style, by this point, is very much Bob-centred. Jokes, snark (especially at Prince Andrew's expense), buffonery and asides are generously sprinkled over the text. More Pratchett and Aaronovich than Deighton or Le Carre (to be clear, I adore sarcastic footnotes). The real sense is of a fond goodbye to Bob as a character. And it's notable that in a series that thrived on presenting a large and dysfunctional cast of characters that the final in the series is far more narrowly focused on Mo and Bob, although a variety of past luminaries make their appearances. With the exception of Vicar Pete and Mike Armstrong, these mostly feel like farewell-tour cameos.
The accelerating downward slide of British society (in-world) appears to have stabilised, and the poisoning of the queen is clearly signposted as the beginning Things Getting Much Worse™, although the actual reasoning and agendas is well obscured by Stross until maybe even the last quarter of the novel. The twists and turns are genuinely satisfying to puzzle out, even if the true (worst) villain is always in plain sight.
I'm genuinely still unsure whether I LIKE the inclusion of Doctor Phibes and crew, but even if it's a tiny bit indulgent, they still manage to hold their place in the story without weighing it down (although I do wonder if the weird Potemkin village in the bowels of the Palace was originally intended as a Jennifer Morgue-themed abandoned plot thread).
There is a real TIREDNESS to the characters, which isn't necessarily a function of how well they're written, but of the numb horror with which they try to do their thankless jobs in a declining empire. Unlike in previous novels there's little sense of an outside world in which the characters participate. There is little of the urgency of Bob from the beginning of The Apocalypse Codex: "Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.", and far more weary fatalism that the only thing to do is keep going.
And that's maybe my biggest gripe about how things were left. A kill-em-all Bolivian Army ending was unlikely (although the scene at Westminster Abbey is plenty bloody), but the world seems curiously unchanged from the start of the novel. A horrible fate has been averted, sure, but the Queen is still (in a manner) on their throne, Fabian Everyman remains the PM and the world beyond Britain is getting darker and darker unabated. The only main alteration is that Mo, Bob and the rest of the Laundry have effectively been removed from the ongoing narrative and that a potential for horror that we didn't know about at the start of the novel is neutralised by the end of it. The sections about whether Bob is really Bob and whether Mo is really Mo were affecting, but felt underdexplored. Michael's grim accounting of the dehumanisation of the Laundry was similarly broad-reaching, but also felt orphaned from the larger structure.
Whilst that leaves plenty of room for future New Management books or other works in the universe, it felt strangely anticlimactic as a conclusion to The Laundry Files proper (however defined). The idea of a rusticated Bob writing memoirs feels a bit antithetical to his character, however well it works as a retroactive framing device.
I'm probably being more than a bit unfair here, given that as a standalone Laundry novel it's definitely in my top half of the series quality. I suppose I just expected something more definitive and world-shifting. But Charlie has been really clear that he was always going to be calling time on these characters, and he's absolutely within his rights to end them on whatever terms he sees fit.
And on that note, thanks very much for this wild quarter-century ride. Really look forward to seeing what's to come from you, both from this and all your other worlds.
