Book Review | Europe in Winter by Dave Hutchinson

Union has come. The Community is now the largest nation in Europe; trains run there from as far afield as London and Prague. It is an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

So what is the reason for a huge terrorist outrage? Why do the Community and Europe meet in secret, exchanging hostages? And who are Les Coureurs des Bois?

Along with a motley crew of strays and mafiosi and sleeper agents, Rudi sets out to answer these questions – only to discover that the truth lies both closer to home and farther away than anyone could possibly imagine.

***

Both in Britain and abroad, so much has changed in the years since the release of Dave Hutchinson's Arthur C. Clarke Award nominated Europe in Autumn that the mind positively boggles. In 2014 I described its depiction of a Europe decimated by division "as plausible as it is novel," but I'll be damned if it isn't beginning to look visionary.

What shape the differences democracy has recently wrought will take is, as yet, anyone's guess. Everything's up for grabs, not least the ideals we hold nearest and dearest—just as they are in the world of the Fractured Europe sequence: a manic mosaic of "nations and polities and duchies and sanjaks and earldoms and principalities and communes." (p.12)

The situation was, if anything, even worse the further East you went. Beyond Rus—European Russia—and Sibir was a patchwork of republics and statelets and nations and kingdoms and khanates and 'stans which had been crushed out of existence by History, reconstituted, fragmented, reinvented, fragmented again, absorbed, reabsorbed and recreated." (p.43)

But that's not all—hell, that's not even the half of it—as readers of Europe at Midnight will recall. That "mad story about a family of wizards and a map" elaborated brilliantly on the existence of a place called the Community: an impossible plane of space modelled on idyllic little England. Next to no one knew about it till now, but having kept its distance for decades, the Community is finally making its presence felt by way of a revolutionary railway.

The Line is being laid all across the continent, connecting the Community to the real world in a real sense, and although most folks don't mind, there are, of course, those—now more than ever there are those—who want to keep the outsiders out, and are willing to do whatever it takes to make their isolationist case. To wit, Europe in Winter opens on an awful atrocity, as a train packed with passengers travelling along that mathemagical track is attacked.

You'd think the authorities would come a-running with such loss of life rife, but Europe is so splintered that no one of its gaggle of governments wants anything to do with it. Even the innumerable NGOs are steering out of fear, such that solving the problem, if it's going to be solved at all, falls, finally, to the Coureur and erstwhile cook Hutchinson introduced us to in Europe in Autumn.

Book Review | The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North

My name is Hope Arden, and you won't know who I am. But we've met before—a thousand times.

It started when I was sixteen years old.

A father forgetting to drive me to school. A mother setting the table for three, not four. A friend who looks at me and sees a stranger.

No matter what I do, the words I say, the crimes I commit, you will never remember who I am.

That makes my life difficult. It also makes me dangerous.

***

Life is complicated—not least because it's so frickin' unpredictable. But there are a few things you can be sure of. One day, you and I will die; come what may, there'll be plenty of taxes to pay along the way; and, as Isaac Newton concluded, for every action, an equal and opposite reaction will happen.

In real terms, that means that what we do dictates what is done to us. Hurt someone and you can expect to be hurt in turn. Make someone happy and perhaps they'll pay that happiness back. This behavioural balance relies on our ability to remember, however. Without that... well, what would you do if you knew the world would forget you?

You'd let loose, wouldn't you?

Hope Arden, for her part, does exactly that in Catherine Webb's third novel as Claire North, which, like Touch and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August before it, is an engrossing, globe-trotting interrogation of identity that sits comfortably between Bourne and Buffy.

For a while after I'd been forgotten, I toyed with becoming a hitman. I pictured myself in leather jump suits, taking down my targets with a sniper rifle, my dark hair billowing in the wind. No cop could catch me; no one would know my name. I was sixteen years old, and had peculiar ideas about 'cool.'

Peculiar, to be sure, but so is Hope's very particular predicament.

You'd be forgiven for forgetting someone you see on the street; even someone you speak to, briefly. But neglect to remember your best mate and that relationship's in dire straits. Fail to recognise your son or your daughter and you've got a problem with a capital P. North's poor protagonist has had to deal with that every day since she came of age, in her every interaction with everyone she's ever met. Never mind the network of people she'd need to know her if she had a hope in hell of holding down a normal job: she's a complete stranger to her parents, and her closest friends look at her like an interloper.

It's a credit to her character, then, that Hope—"having no one else to know me, having no one to catch me or lift me up, tell me if I'm right or wrong, having no one to define the limits of me"—still holds the sanctity of human life in high regard. So scratch that career as an assassin.

Book Review | Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson

Rudi is a cook in a Krakow restaurant, but when his boss asks him to help a cousin escape from the country he's trapped in, a new career—part spy, part people-smuggler—begins.

Following multiple economic crises and a devastating flu pandemic, Europe has fractured into countless tiny nations, duchies, polities and republics. Recruited by the shadowy organisation "Les Coureurs des Bois," Rudi is schooled in espionage, but when a training mission to The Line—a sovereign nation consisting of a trans-European railway line—goes wrong, he is arrested, beaten and Coureur Central must attempt a rescue.

With so many nations to work in, and identities to assume, Rudi is kept busy travelling across Europe. But when he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him. 

With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws, Rudi begins to realise that underneath his daily round of plot and counter plot, behind the conflicting territories, another entirely different reality might be pulling the strings...

***

Maps are a way of rationalising landscapes, but what kind of map can help us come to terms with a country that changes every day? With a world that defies definition?

Dave Hutchinson's vision of Europe in the near future is as plausible as it is novel. In the aftermath of catastrophic economic collapse and a flu pandemic which led to the death of many millions, the Union begins to splinter:

The Union had struggled into the twenty-first century and managed to survive in some style for a few more years of bitching and infighting and cronyism. Then it had spontaneously begun to throw off progressively smaller and crazier nation-states, like a sunburned holidaymaker shedding curls of skin. 

Nobody really understood why this had happened. (p.27)

However unclear the reasons may be, "pocket nations" (p.27) now proliferate across the continent, each with its own borders and orders. Anything goes in some, whilst in others, next to nothing does. With more and more of these micro-countries appearing every year, a gap has opened in the market: there's a dire demand for people prepared to brave Europe's impossible topography in order to transport packages—or perhaps important persons—from state to state in spite of tight guidelines.

Some call the organisation which has sprung up to meet the needs of this new niche a company of "glorified postmen." (p.124) Others don't believe in them, even. But they exist, I insist, and they call themselves Coureurs.

Book Review | Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition 

All Joe Spork wants is a quiet life. He repairs clockwork and lives above his shop in a wet, unknown bit of London. The bills don't always get paid and he's single and has no prospects of improving his lot, but at least he's not trying to compete with the reputation of his infamous criminal dad, Mathew "Tommy Gun" Spork.

Meanwhile, Edie Banister lives quietly and wishes she didn't. She's nearly ninety and remembers when she wasn't. She's a former superspy and now she's... well... old. Worse yet, the things she fought to save don't seem to exist anymore, and she's beginning to wonder if they ever did.

When Joe fixes one particularly unusual device, his life is suddenly upended. The client? Unknown. And the device? It's a 1950s doomsday machine. And having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the government and a diabolical South Asian dictator, Edie's old arch-nemesis.

With Joe's once-quiet world now populated with mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe, he realises that the only way to survive is to muster the courage to fight, help Edie complete a mission she gave up years ago, and pick up his father's old gun.

***

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly why Angelmaker is one of the year’s best books, but then, it’s hard to put your finger on much of anything in Nick Harkaway's new novel, because it’s always in flux. One moment it’s animated urban fantasy, the next nostalgic sci-fi with geriatric spies, and it’s no slouch in the between times either. Angelmaker takes in biting black comedy, heart-warming romance, some light crime monkeyshines, an incisive commentary on the state of play of people in power and power in people — in government around the world, if particularly in Britain — and so very much more that I’d have to be “mad as a shaved cat” to even attempt an account of it all.

So quantity, yes, and in every sense: in character as well as narrative, in wit and impact and ambition. But also quality. As one right-thinking English critic asserted, The Gone-Away World was “a bubbling cosmic stew of a book, written with such exuberant imagination that you are left breathless by its sheer ingenuity,” but for all its wonders, Nick Harkaway’s extraordinary debut was not without its issues in addition — foremost amongst them its madcap, almost abstract construction, which too often left one wondering what in The Gone-Away World was going on, even as it was going, going, gone.

Angelmaker, however, is a book far better put than its predecessor. A markedly more crafted artefact. Though the author’s roving eye remains intact, and those subjects its alights upon feel as delightful and insightful as ever, Harkaway has honed this incomparable trick of his to a filigree so fine that it appears nearly invisible; a filament of woven gold — impossible, yet a fact for all that — which runs through Angelmaker from the fanciful first to the beloved last.

Not unrelatedly, it’s just such a thing that sets our tentative young protagonist off at the outset: a filament of woven gold, glimpsed amidst “a Golgotha of armatures and sprockets” in an antique automaton, given to him by an crazy old crone to fix and finesse. After all, that’s what Joe Spork does for a living. He may be the only son of an infamous criminal, but Joe will be damned before he follows in his father’s hoosegow footsteps.

"He shies away from the idea that he is what a certain class of crime novel calls an habitué of the demi-monde, by which it is implied that he knows gamblers and crooks and the men and women who love them. For the moment, he is prepared to acknowledge that he still lives somewhat on the fringes of the demi-monde in exchange for not having to talk about it."

Then again, “the stricture of Joe Spork is indecision, [as] a departing girlfriend once told him. He fears she was wrong,” and though he “tries not to reflect on the nature of a life whose high point is an adversarial relationship with an entity possessing the same approximate reasoning and emotional alertness as a milk bottle” — that being the stray cat that haunts his clockwork workshop — Joe is every inch an alumnus of the House of Spork. Once-mighty... now not so much. He’s smart and canny, connected and altogether too curious — bearing in mind what killed the kitty — so when several clients express an unhealthy interest in an objet d’art that has apparently passed through his hands, he simply can’t stop himself from looking into the thing.

The thing is, this doodah... it’s not just some high-value knickknack. It’s an apprehension apparatus; a vast and terrible truth-telling engine “whose shadow will be a block on the dreams of madmen; a weapon so awful that the world cannot survive its use, so that no one would use it save in the moment of their own inevitable destruction, and no one seek or allow the destruction of the one whose hand is on the hilt, lest they find the blade cuts every throat on Earth.” Long story short, it’s a doomsday device, and Joe isn’t the only person looking for it.

Meanwhile, “Edie Banister, ninety years of age and stalwart of the established order, has pushed the button on the revolution.” She’s the crazy old crone from before, of course, who set this whole show on the road, and she’s a side-splitting character in both concept and execution. In a stroke of sheer genius, Edie is also Angelmaker’s secondary narrator. Initially, the time we spend in her rambunctious company feels — however hilarious — perhaps a little beside the point, recalling the most meaningless moments of The Gone-Away World, but this is easy to forgive when the intrigue-rich life and times Harkaway treats us to begins to tie in with the sordid history of the House of Spork, and almost entirely forgotten thereafter, when these alternating perspectives converge in an unforgettable eruption of nuns, Tupperware and homemade explosive.

Angelmaker exudes such zany exuberance from its every pore, taking frequent “flights of trenchant fantasy” which will not be to everyone’s tastes, but I beg you: don’t let the arch tone dissuade you from the text. Harkaway’s latest may not be the most self-serious genre novel ever written, but it’s elegant in its inanity, masterful in its make-believe, and though it is — make no mistake — absolutely barking mad, it’s also truly beautiful. Like the MacGuffin it revolves around, it stands to “uproot so many old and rotted trees,” and one must bear in mind that “there are men who have made their houses in them. There are men cut from their wood. All the bows and arrows in the world are made of [these trees],” and Angelmaker, appreciated from a certain standpoint, is a stout shield set against them.

As I was saying, it’s hard to put a finger on exactly why Angelmaker is one of the year’s best books. Know this, though: it is. If the apprehension engine only existed, I’m almost certain it would confirm my suspicions. Of course then we’d all overdose horribly on unfettered knowledge, so perhaps it’s for the good that we go ignorant of the odd thing.

...

This review was originally published, in a slightly altered form, on Tor.com.

***

Angelmaker
by Nick Harkaway

UK PB Publication: February 2013, Windmill
US PB Publication: October 2012, Vintage

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

The Scotsman Abroad | Up, Angelmaker, And Away!

Today, for the first time, and perhaps the last time, your Scotsman's abroad in both senses of the phrase: at this very second I'm in an airplane, jetting off to international pastures, if not arrived upon them already, and popping Reese's Pieces.

Not only, but also, tor.com have published a review I wrote a little in advance of my departure, and it just so happens to be of one of the best books I've read all year. The only other novel of 2012 to date that even comes close to rivaling my time spent with the new Nick Harkaway was The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan, which I'm afraid we'll have to wait till the other end of my long holiday to talk about at any length.

But back to Angelmaker. It's baffling. It's bold. It's brilliant:

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly why Angelmaker is one of the year’s best books, but then, it’s hard to put your finger on much of anything in Angelmaker, because it’s always in flux. One moment it’s an animated urban fantasy, the next nostalgic sci-fi with geriatric spies, and it’s no slouch in the between times either. Angelmaker takes in biting black comedy, heart-warming romance, some light crime monkeyshines, an incisive commentary on the state of play of people in power and power in people – in government around the world, if particularly in Britain – and so very much more that I’d have to be "mad as a shaved cat" to even attempt an account of it all.

So quantity, yes, and in every sense: in character as well as narrative, in wit and impact and ambition. But also quality. As one right-thinking English critic asserted, The Gone-Away World was "a bubbling cosmic stew of a book, written with such exuberant imagination that you are left breathless by its sheer ingenuity," but for all its wonders, Nick Harkaway’s extraordinary debut was not without its issues in addition – foremost amongst them its madcap, almost abstract construction, which too often left one wondering what in The Gone-Away World was going on, even as it was going, going, gone.

Angelmaker, however, is a book far better put than its predecessor. A markedly more crafted artifact. Though the author’s roving eye remains intact, and those subjects its alights upon feel as delightful and insightful as ever, Harkaway has honed this incomparable trick of his to a filigree so fine that it appears nearly invisible; a filament of woven gold – impossible, yet a fact for all that – which runs through Angelmaker from the fanciful first to the beloved last.

(continue reading)

Please do follow the link through to tor.com to read the rest of the piece.

And then, if you haven't already, buy this book! Because it's exactly that awesome.

Wish me a happy landing! :/