The novel “The Labyrinth Index” by Charles Stross was published for the first time in 2018. It’s part of the Laundry series and follows “The Delirium Brief“.
The New Management in the UK has brought about a number of changes, including in the agencies that manage occult activities. Mhari Murphy has been elevated to the rank of Baroness but the price for her is high, as one of the new duties the Prime Minister has entrusted to her is that of executioner after the death penalty has been reinstated.
For Mhari Murphy, the situation gets worse when she’s assigned to lead a team of operatives linked to the Laundry on a mission in the USA. Her task is difficult since it’s the extraction of the President, whose existence was suddenly forgotten by the American population.
The ninth novel in the Laundry series is set after Nyarlathotep took power in the UK. Mhari Murphy, a recurring character in previous novels, is the protagonist and, as usual, she tells in the first person the part of the story she lives directly. With the New Management, she became Baroness Karnstein, a reference to “Carmilla”, one of the earliest vampire works. Bob Howard, the protagonist of most of the laundry stories, appears only briefly while other characters who appeared in previous novels have a greater involvement.
The Laundry series is also based on elements of explicit Lovecraftian inspiration but for a long time, the Great Old Ones remained a remote threat. In the post-Brexit UK, on the other hand, Nyarlathotep came to power and the situation seems to get worse for the USA too with the attempt to awaken Cthulhu.
Paradoxically, having Nyarlathotep as Prime Minister is good because he doesn’t want Cthulhu to return. Humanity is likened to a hive Nyarlathotep wants to keep because he likes honey while the forces behind the attempt to awaken Cthulhu aim at the extinction of humanity.
When the Americans forget the existence of their President, it’s clear that very powerful forces are at work. Mhari Murphy is the first to be surprised when the Prime Minister charges her with leading a team of agents on a mission to extract the American president. She still struggles to accept that she’s a vampire but in her mission, she exploits the skills she acquired through her transformation. This makes her approach very different from Bob Howard’s.
Having Mhari Murphy as the protagonist is just one of the differences from previous novels. “The Labyrinth Index” is the result of a series of events that brought about major changes throughout the series. The existence of magic as a branch of mathematics remained a secret for a long time, so Bob Howard’s adventures could have been set in our world. Instead, in the last few novels, there has been a series of public revelations that make that fictional universe distinctly different from our world.
“The Labyrinth Index” gave me mixed feelings for the presence of various positive elements, usually among the ones that marked the Laundry series, but also of some elements that seemed to me to add chaos to the story. In particular, the non-linear storytelling is sometimes needed in order not to reveal key details of Mhari’s mission too early but in some cases, it becomes a distraction in a rather complex story.
In recent years, Charles Stross introduced several variations to the original formula of the Laundry Stories. This offers a certain freshness in a series now composed of several works including novels and short fiction but the new elements are not always positive. Personally, I find the New Management intriguing and will read the spinoff novels the author has started publishing but I definitely prefer Bob Howard as the protagonist. Overall, “The Labyrinth Index” still seems enjoyable, and if you are appreciating the latest innovations introduced in the series you might like it.
