Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Autumn (2014)

Young Rudi is a citizen of a future Europe that has been balkanized into a tessellation of new mini-states, of all sizes and sorts, including a trans-European high speed railway line from Portugal to Siberia that declared itself an independent nation-state as soon as construction was concluded. As the novel starts Rudi is working as a chef. After some argy-bargy in his employer’s Polish restaurant involving a drunken party of Hungarian Mafiosi, he is recruited into the shadowy organisation of ‘Coureurs’, an apolitical group that specialises in moving information, parcels and people covertly across the spider-web proliferation of new borders. We follow Rudi’s training, and then his adventures in a labyrinthine nested set of plots, counter-plots and counter-counter-plots that take him from Poland to Estonia, Germany, former ski resorts that are now nations, to London and elsewhere; from Spy Who Came In From The Cold waiting around in seedy cafes, to more Bondy shootings and explosions and severed heads in lockers.

There are times when being a writer as well as a reviewer can get in the way, rather, of the simple business of Doing The Reviewing. A writer reads slightly differently to the way a reader reads, since she always has a portion of her eye on the technical skill or otherwise with which the job has been done, like a plasterer at a dinner party, slyly checking out their host's walls. In this case, what kept getting in the way of full absorption in the story was sheer admiration at Hutchinson’s chops.

This is my main take-away from the novel actually: that Hutchinson is an exceptionally skilful writer. Europe in Autumn is rendered with impressive fluency, precision and vividness. Hutchinson knows how to write dialogue, how to plot, how to pace, and best of all he writes characters—both main characters, and walk-on figures—that just lift off the page, alive, distinct, believable. He gets inside the variety of European settings in ways that absolutely compel belief. He is good with mood and atmosphere, and he is bold in withholding many of the satisfactions readers come to thrillers for—explanations, loose-end-tyings-up and so on. The whole book, actually, is a masterclass in how to do this sort of thing—this sort of thing being the post-Le-Carré, state-of-the-(European)-union thriller-y, adventure-y, ideas-y novel with a pinch of travelogue. I enjoyed the whole thing immensely. Quite apart from anything, it’s very funny.

Europe in Autumn is also a timely novel, not only because (I’m writing this before the results of the Scottish Independence Referendum are known) national independence and succession movements have become such a prominent feature of contemporary European life, but because it is a book about Europe—and it’s surprising how few such novels are written. I say surprising, because it seems to me that ‘Europe’ is so patently a major subject. We need more art about ‘Europe’, rather than just about individual European nations. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Europe in Autumn is its geographical capaciousness. For a long time the view from Britain has been that ‘Europe’ (to which we regard ourselves as, at best, semi-detached) is basically three things: Germany, France and ‘the South’ (Italy, Spain, maybe Greece). One of the nice things about Norman Davies insanely ambitious attempt to comprise an entire history of Europe in one volume was the attention he paid to Eastern Europe—although his Polish expertise perhaps over-played that one Eastern nation.

Hutchinson doesn’t include scenes in every single European nation in his narrative (it would look forced if he did); but he gives a much wider and more convincing sweep of the whole than most writers or historians. Formally the novel is a sequence of more-or-less closely linked novella-ish chapters, each one approaching the condition of standalone. I liked this, as appropriate to the logic of balkanization the novel explores on the level of content. And the main character is a lovely piece of writing: potentially unlikeable—he is, after all, a loner, a breaker of laws—but actually engaging and fun, without ever losing the capacity to surprise the reader.

If I had to carp (carping? oh -- Muß es sein?), I might say that the book doesn’t generate any great sense of dread. Hutchinson’s instincts as a writer are comic rather than specifically Hitchcockian or Kafkaesque. Even when Rudi’s plans go wrong, and he is captured and tortured, the book still reads as pleasant and funny rather than alarming or horrifying. This is not necessary a bad thing, in one sense. We might say that the geniality of mood Hutchinson creates in this novel is its own reward. But it melds awkwardly, in places, with the conventions of thriller adventure, and the result can feel leisurely and pleasant when it needs to be tighter or sparer. And the ending—no spoilers, now; you’ll have to read for yourself to see what I mean—left me thinking: ‘hmm, does that quite work, now?’ But you know what? Probably it does.