Solaris, 2018, 358 p.

The third of this year’s BSFA Award nominees for best novel that I have read.

This is a pleasing enough conclusion to Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe sequence. We meet once again old friends Rudi and Rupert. Some loose ends are tied up. As usual Hutchinon’s prose goes down smoothly even if it contains the occasional barb such as, “Friends. Always there when they need you.” We make new acquaintances like Alice, a minor diplomat in the Scottish Embassy in Tallinn, to whom is brought the supposed head of St Magnus martyr, Kirkwall, which embroils her in various machinations involving Les Coureurs des Bois and its adversaries, and Ben, a refugee from Africa, stuck for a time on an Aegean island whose fellow refugee occupants are sustained by a rotating system of aid from southern European countries as a barrier to onward travel. The text explicitly references Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, an acknowledgement of Hutchinson’s debt to the cold war thriller. We also have the return of Professor Mundt, plus the Whitton-Whytes (responsible for all this byways into other-world stuff) and finally encounter the book of instructions as to how to map new landscapes over old. The story features not only Europe and the Community but also the Realm and there is the possible involvement in all these shenanigans of Americans who were maybe responsible for the Realm. (Boo; hiss.)

Europe in Autumn has been described as the first great Brexit novel (despite having been published before the 2016 referendum) but in among the delight of reading Hutchinson’s prose there’s a sense of despair that this Europe is more or less where we may be heading, though probably without a shadowy parallel world as an extra menace. Apropos of which we also have this observation, “For a certain type of English person, the Community was a wet-dream of Return, a place where tricky concepts like ethnic diversity and political correctness and sexual equality had never taken root, and gay rights were a misty fantasy. By any number of modern standards, it was an awful place, and that was probably why so many of the English wanted to move there.” Now there’s a nail hit firmly on its head.

However, a house described as, “deniable neutral ground, a place where the real business of the world could take place, far from the public eye,” maybe panders too much to the conspiracy adherents amongst us. But it does sit well within what is still essentially a spy novel.

Hutchinson is good. Reading this was a delight even if overall the book seemed more like a collection of loosely connected short stories than a novel per se. His is a world (two worlds?) so wonderfully imagined and described that it is something of a wrench not to be able to go back to it again to explore it more fully.

Pedant’s Corner:- “The sponsor themselves never showed up … .they’d” (himself … he’d… would be more grammatical,) homeopathy (homoeopathy, please – or even homœopathy,) “the actual food drop usually didn’t place until the day after” (usually didn’t take place until,) “She pronounced it” (Holyrood) “like ‘Hollywood’.” (Holyrood is pronounced like Hollywood,) “on face value” (it’s usually ‘at’ face value.) “‘Pour decourageur les autres’” (decourager,) “‘The Pozna thing?’” (Poznan, would that be?) Magnus’ (Magnus’s,) “came and went for time to time” (from time to time,) “an unsuccessful run for the Assembly” (Scotland doesn’t – and won’t – have an Assembly, but a Parliament.) “The Directorate had weighed up them up” (one too many ‘up’s,) “a rather battered old books of timetables” (book,) “there were a number of things” (there was a number.) “‘This is never going to be over, is it.’ said Rupert” (technically contains a question and so requires a question mark,) “the gallery were the only people” (couples a singular noun with a plural verb,) “off of” (just ‘off’, no ‘of’ required.)

Solaris, 2016, 498 p. Reviewed for Interzone 267, Nov-Dec 2016.

This third in Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe sequence of novels (previous knowledge of which is not necessary for reading this instalment) starts with a bang. Under the Urals a young couple blow up both themselves and a train in the tunnel belonging to the Trans-European Republic (aka the Line.) The significance of this, its ramifications, just who was responsible, do not become clear till much later.

Then, what at first seems merely a re-run of the “Hungarians trash the restaurant in Kraków” scene from Europe in Autumn leads to an encounter wherein chef Rudi meets an older version of himself. He is told, “You, and your entire world, are very, very sophisticated computer programs.” Not much later Rudi steps out from the restaurant and the wall behind him fades. The tone of this is of a piece with other scenes in Hutchinson’s trilogy. It is present here to introduce the idea that simulations of various futures are being run in the very secretive polity of Dresden-Neustadt in an attempt to realise a prediction engine. But that concept renders the scene problematic. Indications of unreliable narration are usually welcome, but this revelation verges on the dangerous for an author. How do we then have any faith in the depictions of all that follows?

Trust; and enjoy the roller-coaster. Rudi (what we must assume is the “real” Rudi,) an agent for the smuggling organisation known as Les Coureurs des Bois – a more or less essential organisation for those wishing to get things across Europe’s now innumerable borders – but here seemingly more free-lance, has a large part to play in the remainder of the book. His observation that, “Working in Intelligence is just a case of continually winging it,” neatly describes his approach but is probably more widely apposite. We are also reacquainted, from Europe at Midnight, with The Community, the parallel world created by the English Whitton-Whyte family who, “seem subsequently to have lost the knowledge of how to do it. Either it was lost, or stolen, or destroyed, no one knows, not here or in the Community. There are stories of a book of instructions, floating about somewhere, which tells how to map a new landscape over an old one.” Powerful, and dangerous, the Community had precipitated Europe’s ultra-Balkanisation by unleashing the Xian Flu before official contact was made with it. “There was no way to defend against an enemy who could walk across invisible borders anywhere on your territory whenever they wanted, while you were quite unable to retaliate.”

Hutchinson’s unravelling of the interactions between the (by now essentially former) EU – “The Schengen era was just an historical blip, an affectation” – the Community and an entity known as The Realm (up to something in Luxembourg) is never straightforward but always intriguing. He also finds time to comment on the proceedings. “It had been an eventful day; if he had ever been unsure of what the word infodump meant, he wasn’t now.” Despite the appearance of SF grace notes – stealth suits reduce you to a transparent patch of barely-roiling air, there are time dilation effects between the Community and Europe with even longer ones in a certain cottage by the sea, someone steals part of the Community, it in turn steals Heathrow – the overall treatment is less redolent of the genre. “A solid reliable fellow” is not common SF phraseology. And not many SF novels mention a spectacularly catastrophic bowel movement, or AJP Taylor or, indeed, deliver an amusing aside on the interrogation methods of TV detective Columbo. Other allusive touches include the punning chapter title “The Justified Ancients Of Muhu” and a character named László Viktor. Another character opines, “England is a constant pain in the arse; always whining, European only when it suits them.”

Rudi’s attempts to comprehend the convoluted relationships between the Realm, the Community, his father’s involvement in a billion-dollar trust fund, the murder of a Professor Mundt, the significance of a photograph of attendees at the Versailles Peace Conference and the importance of a group of mathematicians, topologists and cartographers known as the Sarkisian Collective are never oppressive. His discovery of just what his role in Les Coureurs des Bois actually is adds an ironic twist.

Europe in Winter’s essence is really that of a Cold War spy thriller – it even name checks Mutually Assured Destruction – but in SF terms it does not add much to the two previous novels. It’s a good, excellently written Cold War spy thriller; but one nonetheless. That, though, is a strength. When a novel deals with an organisation which is capable of rewriting worlds, that looking-glass, nothing is quite what it seems ambience may be the only suitable medium. Hutchinson executes it superbly.

The following did not appear in the published review:-

Pedant’s corner. (Some of these may have been amended since the proofs):- mediaeval (Hurrah!) but…. none were (none was,) “at one point” occurred in one sentence which was followed only two lines later by a sentence which started with, “At one point,” avis (the context suggests axis rather than a bird,) three-d is an odd contraction, it’s usually 3-d or 3d, would at very least (at the very least,) the crew were prepping (the crew was,) metropoli (metropolis is Greek in origin; so the plural is metropoles,) Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries (if you capitalise Seventeenth and Eighteenth so also should you Centuries,) Polish Border Security were famously savvy (Polish Border Security was,) broke branches off nearby trees to conceal it with (doesn’t need the with,) “with a passport in either hand” (in each hand,) again a chapter number appeared at the very bottom of a page. “Facing them were the Community delegation” (was,) cats-cradle (cat’s-cradle,) in an dialect (in a dialect,) a missing full stop, cammo dudes (two lines later is camo dudes,) off of (no of required,) miasm (miasma,) Forsythe (Forsyth,) on either side (on each side,) “she watched a wild boar sow and half a dozen piglets” (wild boar, sow and…) Tipped his/her head to one side (a Hutchinson tic.)