The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross

With The Jennifer Morgue Charles Stross threw his network administrator-cum-secret agent Bob Howard into James Bond mode for a fun romp that left me trying to pick out references to scenes from those films. (Yeah, I've never read any Bond novels.) With The Fuller Memorandum Stross moves Howard away from parody and into a heart of darkness. It's like The Empire Strikes Back of the series, if you will.

It is a few years on from the events of The Jennifer Morgue and the book opens with a rather disturbing prologue:

This is the story of how I lost my atheism, and why I wish I could regain it. This is the story of the people who lost their lives in an alien desert bathed by the hideous radiance of a dead sun, and the love that was lost and the terror that wakes me up in a cold sweat about once a week, clawing at the sheets with cramping fingers and drool on my chin. It’s why Mo and I aren’t living together right now, why my right arm doesn’t work properly, and I’m toiling late into the night, trying to bury the smoking wreckage of my life beneath a heap of work.

Yes, Bob married Mo, which I suppose makes him slightly less of a poindexter. But more importantly, this sets the dark tone of the book.

Bob is sent to the Royal Air Force Museum on what he assumes will be an easy task of removing malevolent forces from an old plane. Things, however, don't go exactly as planned and an innocent bystander is obliterated. This really throws Bob for a loop as he'd never killed anyone who wasn't a demonically-possessed cultist or otherwise evil person bent on bringing mankind towards a hideous fate. Curiously enough, Bob has something he has never encounter before at The Laundry – a boss who is sympathetic and stands up for her underlings. Compounding the sepulchral ambience, Mo returns from an assignment in Amsterdam that likewise was a big Charlie-Foxtrot. However, it involved cultists ritually murdering children, including one whose head was severed. Believe it or not, the book actually lightens up a bit after the charnel house that is the first few chapters with such happy things as the imminent end of the world.

After Bob is attacked by a Russian zombie, The Thirteenth Directorate is brought into the picture. TTD is Russian counterpart of The Laundry and one of its field directors, Panin, is loose in London. Panin "invites" Bob for a drink and inquires about the status of the "Teapot", about which Bob has no clue. Oh and Angleton, Bob's boss, disappears along with the titular file. But he leaves behind a list of documents for our hero to investigate. These give the story of Baron Ungern Von Sternberg, a vicious Russian warlord of the early 20th century. One of the documents is a letter from the Baron's hand which describes the weird changes one of his men, Evgenie Burdokovskii, underwent after reading some eldritch tomes. But how do all these things fit together?

As with the previous books in the series, Bob and, in this case, Mo are essentially tasked with saving the world. But The Fuller Memorandum is much bleaker than previous efforts. If it wasn't enough for them to have missions go wrong and send them into despondency, Stross throws in some hideous extras. For starters, we learn about the origin of Mo's osseous violin which involves victims screaming for mercy as they are sacrificed by an accursed luthier. Later on in the book Bob is kidnapped by – who else? – cultists who make him the center of a heinous cannibalistic liturgy. This is a bleak tale indeed.

Personally, I enjoyed the doom'n'gloom of The Fuller Memorandum. While I'm not sure that it's fair to say that Bob and Mo hit the depths of perdition, it did feel like they came awfully close. This was a welcome change from the super agents defeating evil and living happily ever after. I liked how Stross chose to give background and deepen the mystery via various memoranda and descriptions of photographs from Laundry files. It should also be said that the prime mysteries here – the nature of "Teapot" and the identity of the cult leader – are pretty obvious. You won't get to the last chapter still pondering these things.

My major complaint is how Stross deals with Mo. Unlike previous stories, she is a lead character here and gets plenty of pages devoted to her. This is a good thing as she makes a nice complement to Bob. Plus she's a badass with a violin made of human bones that, when played, does away with all sorts of grotesque beasties and nasties. The problem is that Stross makes her out to be a bit too much like Bob, especially the dialogue. She lays down too many nerdy bon mots that are indistinguishable from Bob's. Now, when she goes to have her violin looked at, Mo was take-no-crap, don't-fuck-with-me serious and this is a delightful contrast to her husband's more awkward demeanor.

Every Laundry Files novel has Bob going off on tangents. Up to this point they've generally been some exegesis about Linux or a complaint about The Laundry's bureaucracy. Here Bob digresses into what I'll hesitantly label more existential territory with philosophies for living which include Venn diagrams and a reminder of how pitiful we humans are in contrast to, say, the Elder Gods. I'm ambivalent about these passages. In one sense, they're understandable in that The Fuller Memorandum is a much darker novel than its predecessors and Bob suffers some awful traumas so getting all serious and questioning life is normal. However, they do tend to drag on and they are written like all of Bob's tangents, i.e. – with lots of sarcasm and Douglas Adams-like asides. Perhaps if Stross had just written them a bit differently so that they weren't near total mirrors of his IT tirades I'd have been able to appreciate them more.

It remains to be seen if Stross will write any further adventures of Bob Howard. If he does, then great. If not, so be it. He's had a good run. As a swan song, The Fuller Memorandum, while having its flaws, hit the right notes in porting the despair and insanity of H.P. Lovecraft into the realm of urban fantasy.