★★★★★ The Laundry makes a James Bond movie

The Jennifer Morgue

Charles Stross

Charles Stross's Laundry Files is my all-time favorite science fiction series, and The Jennifer Morgue is one of the best novels in the series, so it follows that I like it a lot. The four most important characters in The Jennifer Morgue are Bob Howard and Mo (Doctor Dominique O'Brien), whom we met in The Atrocity Archives, Bob's boss James Angleton, and a new character, Black Chamber agent Ramona Random. (The Black Chamber is the US occult secret agency.) As usual, Bob is the first-person narrator, so we end up spending most of our time with him and Ramona, who becomes his mission partner. However, Angleton and Mo are the main plot drivers -- the puppeteers pulling the plot strings.

The Atrocity Archives was more of an investment in the future of the series than it was a story. That is to say, it told a story, but that was not the most important thing it did. Rather, it explained the unique magic technology ("Magic is a branch of applied mathematics.") of the Laundry Files, introduced the secret government organization that Angleton, Bob, and eventually Mo work for, and of course introduced Bob, Mo, and Angleton.

The Jennifer Morgue is different. It is mostly about telling a story. And it's a good story, clever and intricate and exciting, with a clever plot twist. Of course, I'm not going to tell you what the twist is outside a spoiler tag, but I have read The Jennifer Morgue half a dozen times, and even though I know the twist is coming, I still enjoy it every time.

We begin with a prolog in which we see Angleton observing the Cold War (1975) machinations of US intelligence agencies attempting to retrieve a sunken Soviet missile submarine from the sea floor. We then leap forward to the 21st century and Bob, who becomes entangled with Ramona and is sent to the Caribbean on a mission to frustrate the designs of an evil American billionaire intent on retrieving an artifact from the sea floor and achieving world domination.

If that all sounds very James Bond: British secret agent accompanied by sexy babe Ramona thwarting a billionaire supervillain, well, it's no coincidence. Billington, the supervillain in question, has set up a geas (magical compulsion -- hard G, rhymes with "mesh") to compel all involved to conform to the James Bond mythos. No spoiler here: we learn all this in the first few chapters, and Stross mentions the "Bond Canon" in the acknowledgements with which he begins the novel.

Here's the plot twist: Angleton and Mo subvert the geas by substituting actors: Mo becomes James Bond, and Bob becomes the Bond Babe. Mo is super badass -- this is tremendous fun.

The audiobook is narrated by English/South African actor Gideon Emery, who does an excellent job. Emery navigates English and American accents, with a smattering of German and Italian and whatever Mo is -- she's supposed to be Scottish (Aberdeen) but sounds Irish to me. Some English narrators feel that as long as all the Americans sound like assholes, they have achieved authenticity (looking at you, Kobna!), but Emery's US accents sound realistic to me.

Angleton, Ramona, and Mo continue to develop in future novels. Mo remains a major player throughout the series. Ramona is a minor character until novel 6, The Annihilation Score. At the end of The Jennifer Morgue it is still not clear what Angleton is -- we learn more about that in book 3, The Fuller Memorandum.

PIMPF

The novel The Jennifer Morgue is the first 90% of the book The Jennifer Morgue. It is followed by a short story PIMPF and an Afterword about Ian Fleming and James Bond, "The Golden Age of Spying". PIMPF is a tasty bit of Laundry Files candy, in which Bob has to rescue an intern after occult infiltration of an online game.

The Jennifer Morgue is a fun Bond-esque secret agent science fiction/fantasy story with lots of twists.

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