Europe in Autumn

Better than I expected - a really interesting alternative world European crime novel. Alan Furst meets Zelzany.

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This book breaks one of my cardinal rules for reading satisfaction, namely, it is not a self-contained novel. It is, instead, the first part of a longer story. This book doesn't wrap up plot points or provide a satisfactory conclusion to the mysteries it only starts to develop at the end of the book. In fact, it is only at the end that the story a major development occurs that points the direction in which the trilogy is heading. This book is actually just the set up for the next two books.

However, I am still giving this book five stars because I enjoyed the set-up, the inventiveness of author Dave Hutchinson's ideas, and the humor and wit Hutchinson brings to his prose. With the warning about the fact that if you invest your time and money into this book, you are getting a cliffhanger and stay tuned experience, you are on your own.

To turn to the substance of this book, Rudi is an Estonian chef working in Krakow, Poland in the near future. The setting may be our timeline or it may be some alternate history. The major difference is that the world - or Europe, at least - is in a craze of devolution. Regions are declaring independence willy-nilly. For example, the formerly Polish region of Silesia has declared independence and become the polity of Hindenberg. The devolution craze has gotten to the point where buildings and national parks have declared independence, which is apparently made possible by the willingness of the UN to send in peacekeepers and the unwillingness of European nations to spill blood publicly. Peak devolution seems to involve industries declaring independence:

“The Line finally reached the Chukotka Peninsula in the middle of a blizzard of Biblical proportions. The more wry commentators suggested that the next obvious step was to start digging a tunnel towards Alaska.

Instead, the Company ran a single forty-car TransEurope Express, an inaugural trip, from Portugal to Siberia and back again, for the benefit of the Press and leaders of the nations and polities the Line passed through and various inconspicuous men whose origin was never explained to anyone. Then it declared itself to be sovereign territory and granted all its workers citizenship.

Which may have been the point of the exercise all along.”

The proliferation of borders has created a demand for a service that will smuggle people and things through these microstates. That service is a mysterious entity known as Courier des Bois. This entity is also involved in what looks like espionage work, frequently being opposed by national intelligence services. Rudi is brought into the Couriers and we follow his life for a few years through a series of eventful and frequently failed missions. This part of the book is interesting but does not seem to be going anywhere in particular, although we do get a lot of background on this European reality.

Then suddenly things start happening as Rudi goes back to Estonia and is “rescued” by British Intelligence and caused to cool his heels in London for a few months when he is obviously set up to continue his adventure with money and information. Rudi escapes and hooks up with Courier asset Seth, who appears, but does not seem to play a significant role in this book.Seth shows Rudi a way out of England into independent Scotland via two ladies with a mysterious route that takes them over the border.

And that is one penny dropping.

Then, Rudi helps a gang leader to escape his micro-polity and he gets information that leads him to some documents. The documents seem to be a fanciful history of an eccentric family obsessed with a map of England that contains references to locations, towns, and places that do not exist in England and never have.

That is another penny dropping.

If you've read this far, you might be surprised to find that the cover is ripped off the fictional world Rudi lives in - our world? - in the last twenty pages....and now it is time to purchase the next installment, “Europe at Midnight.”

So, I did.

My word, that certainly didn't go where I expected it to go. I thought I was reading near-future Le Carre, but it turned into...well, something else. Definitely looking forward to the inevitable sequel.

Europe In Autumn is set in a near future Europe, where in the aftermath of pandemic and economic collapse nations are splitting and fracturing into smaller states and entities. Devolution is the order of the day, from a bunch of organised football hooligans who have commandeered an ageing tower block estate, to an entire transcontinental railway line that runs from Portugal to Siberia. As countries spin off ever more republics, duchies and polities, like glaciers calving icebergs, border crossings and controls have become very tightly enforced, which in turn leads to a black market in couriers who can transport data, documents and even people across lines the local authorities would prefer them not to. The lead players in this market are Les Coureurs Du Bois, a cloak and dagger organisation dedicated to an idealistic vision of a world without borders and complete freedom to move - the Schengen dream revived.

We are introduced to Les Coureurs through Rudi, an peripatetic Estonian chef working in a Krakow restaurant. An encounter with some drunken rowdy Hungarians ends with him being inducted into their ranks, and embarking on a series of training missions where we see him build his operational knowledge, from a bumbling beginner to someone who can assess a situation and work out all the angles in a matter of minutes. Ultimately things go catastrophically wrong, pitching him into an unknown world of shifting loyalties and double crosses straight out of the finest espionage fiction, as he travels across a fractured continent trying to discover exactly who wants him dead. The novel reads more like Le Carré than it does SF, along with a heavy dose of Kafka's Eastern European paranoia, before it opens out in the final few chapters.

This is a tremendous novel. Hutchison's writing is deft enough to keep the pages turning no matter how complex the plot gets (and boy, does it get complex), the espionage tradecraft is fascinating, and the evocation of a broken Europe seething with thousands of different cultural grudges is outstanding. I've just finished reading it for a second time, and it's still of the most invigorating, unputdownable books I've read in recent years.

An interesting start promised much but then fails to deliver and eventually becomes a complete disappointment. The structure of the book also adds to a piecemeal feeling.

I don't know what to say about this book. I almost put it down about 100 pages in because I think it was mis-titled. A better title would have been “Stuff That Happens to Rudi, Most of It Bad, All of It Confusing”. The only reason I hung in there was that another reviewer PROMISED that it would all make sense in the end. So, I carried on. The chapters read like little episodes that seem unconnected and Hutchinson does have a knack for putting the reader into the storytelling trance, otherwise no one could survive this much exposition every single chapter. Some of it was really interesting (I'm a history major), some of it just seemed...fruitless.
Still, I plugged on and the payoff at the end is worth it. I'm pretty sure.

I'm trying so hard not to just list all of the things that drove me crazy. Like the technology. Sometimes it's so advanced and sometimes it's completely backward. What in the hell was in the suitcase? I'll stop.

Here's what rocked: Hutchinson's writing, Rudi (the character), Seth, The system itself (I LOVE the idea that situations are parceled out to so many people doing tiny bits of it), and the lovely, kickass unnamed (really) female character. I do not like where the story seems to be going in the end, nor do I feel any need to read a sequel.

I've heard very good things about this book but, although it was ok, I don't think it's worthy. The end half was good but it definately didn't make up for the slow start. Interesting final twist though.