Europe in Autumn begins as it means to go on — a vivid scene filled with character, threat and intrigue, an authentically realised encounter that feels both larger than life yet believable. In this guided tour of a disjointed European future, author-turned-journalist-turned-author-again Dave Hutchinson shows a daunting grasp for writing timely and insightful speculative fiction.
When an Estonian chef named Rudi defuses a confrontation with drunk Hungarian gangsters at his Polish boss’s restaurant, he both demonstrates his cool under pressure and comes to the attention of the mysterious Coureurs des Bois — a secretive, almost mythical international organisation that views borders as an inconvenience to be creatively bypassed on request, be the package in question information, goods, or breathing…
And if there’s one thing Europe has a lot of, it’s borders: decades after the collapse of the European Union, and still smarting from a devastating epidemic that killed millions, the continent is peppered with semi-national micro-states as the countries of the past fracture under the weight of their history. The exception to this is The Line, an enormous new nation thousands of kilometres long but only tens of kilometres wide, a glorious trans-Europe railway that bought its way through all the squabbling sovereign states and then declared independence from the lot of them.
Rudi has grasped the basics of life as a Coureur long before he ever sets foot on The Line, but doing so thrusts him into a world of high stakes espionage that he is far from ready for. Yet while his eyes are opened to the danger he might face from his own mysterious employers, not to mention every government upon whose toes they tread (which means all of them), he discovers not only that he likes his new career, but that he is unexpectedly good at it.
And he’ll need to be, because it isn’t just gangsters and governments who have problems with the Coureurs. There is something else out there, bigger and more powerful than any nation in European history, and killing inconvenient chefs is less than nothing on their scale of atrocities.
The first thing to be said is that Europe in Autumn is a very nicely written novel. The set-up might sound complex, but Hutchinson has a clean and readable style and the result is at times thrilling, moving, witty and grim. The characters are happy to make light of the trappings of classic spy fiction, and while you sense that to an extent the author does too it doesn’t prevent him delivering an entertaining mix of passwords and dead-drops, high tension tail-shakings and other midnight assignations. There’s slick action, too — this is spy-fi and sci-fi combined, and when the violence sparks it does so with high-tech flair — but the stand-out element is the environment.
Two past sf favourites hovered in my mental background while reading. On a superficial level, I was reminded of Michael Marshall Smith’s Only Forward as both books offer up highly fractured future societies, although the uniquely quirked “Neighbourhoods” of Only Forward are like distant, neon-lit fantasies beside the territorial future depicted here, which in many ways is little different from the Europe of the present — glossy and grotty, side by side. The stronger comparison I made, due to its closer proximity to the highs and lows of the contemporary world, was with Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, which also presents a world radically different than the one we know but which retains a more visible link to the present, and in which many of the characters we follow are resolutely ordinary people.
Far from being a super-spy, our protagonist (and the majority of his peers in international espionage) are similarly normal, dabbling in what sounds like an extraordinary hobby but which more often proves to be about as exciting as posting a letter for someone you never met. It’s only when you learn the letter exploded on opening that things get interesting… but they rarely do. One of Europe in Autumn’s chief pleasures comes in witnessing the stop-start transformation of Rudi from a passionate if unremarkable chef into a significant player in a continent-spanning conspiracy — but his journey isn’t a race to the finish line. It’s a slow, steady, and costly learning curve, and his youth is only part of the price he ultimately chooses to pay.
If there is a problem with the novel, it’s one that verges on the beneficial. Hutchinson has a tendency to abruptly change focus and yank the reader off the path they were following, dumping them somewhere new without warning as unfamiliar characters go about their own lives, all showing no connection to what went on before. It’s a problem mostly in that Rudi’s immediate world is so full of interesting detail and mysterious grey area that being pulled from it threatens to infuriate. However, if you are willing to roll on landing, these jarring leaps come good, widening our awareness of the strange and dangerous potential this splintering future society has to offer.
There is also a major conceptual twist lying in wait in the later stages, one that (on re-reading the book for this review) I found to be quietly hinted at ahead of time, but which originally struck me as a challenging choice to say the least. The nature of all novels, even in the non-speculative genres, is to invent a world reflecting the one we know in everyday reality. Europe in Autumn does this and then some but, while it is highly inventive, for the longest time it appears to give us a world solidly derived from the one we know… until it really, really doesn’t.
I found this departure from plausible speculations on the future of the continent to realms of wildly fictional science a tough border crossing. Returning to my early reference points, it felt a little as though I’d been pulled from the semi-realism of China Mountain Zhang direct into the exaggerated possibilities of Only Forward — and these are not similar books by any means. That said, I remained eager to follow Rudi’s story despite the uncertain turn it took, and come the end I felt well satisfied.
Europe in Autumn is a rich, cool read which leaves itself begging for a continuation — and that’s convenient, since the third book in the series is published next month. I’ll be reviewing the second book shortly, which means there’ll be inevitable spoilers for this one coming. My advice is, if you haven’t read Europe in Autumn already, now’s the ideal time to start.
Review by Andrew Leon Hudson – SFFWorld.com © 2016
Great review – sounds like a good read. But, what exactly, is Rudy doing for The Line? Just shuffling stuff around?
I think my summary there is a bit lite. The Coureurs are an underground organisation, in essence part-couriers-part-spies, who are contracted by individuals or organisations to side-step minor irritations like sovereign borders — and that often does mean transporting “goods” of some sort, but it could also include other things of qualified legality within a given nation, as well as perfectly legal stuff that might later be put to questionable use. So it’s not a case of what he does for The Line (or any other nu-nation) but what he might try to do in spite of them!