#Review - Cold Water by Dave Hutchinson

Cold Water

Dave Hutchinson

Solaris, 10 November 2022
Available as: PB 417pp, audio, e   
Source: Purchased

ISBN(PB):  9781786187222

Cold Water is a return to the world of Hutchinson's Fractured Europe, some time after the events of Europe in Autumn, Europe At Midnight, Europe at Dawn and Europe in Winter.  It doesn't assume any familiarity with those, although if you are you'll be rewarded by posting some referencing and of course you will have a head start in understanding the background. This is a world devastated by a viral plague; a world where the states of Europe have fragmented into statelets, free towns and pocket republics; and a world interpenetrated by alternate, pocket universes.

Against that background, we're given a twisty, tense and involving thriller mixing espionage, crime and derring-do. Carey Tews, a woman from the Republic of Taxes, has retired from the shadowy network Les Coureurs. She reckons she's getting too old for the work, and besides, her cover blown by what happened in Hungary (don't talk to her about Hungary!) But like Smiley of old, she's invited back to carry out One Last Job when her recruiter, mentor, and sometime lover, Maksim, gets himself killed in a little Polish town that's winding up to declare independence.

The story also follows Krista, a young Estonian police woman, whose investigation into a gangster's operations in Tallinn is rudely interrupted by scandal from the past, by way of Russian agents, a drunken journalist, and a crew of juvenile hackers and forgers who get you any credentials you might need. As always with Hutchinson's books the detail and plotting is meticulous, creating set-ups and pay-offs that are just so good, they could hang as works of art in any museum. There are mysteries here - so I am being vague about what actually happens - and they're fiendishly nested mysteries, so that while I spotted one or two points coming, the how and the why of their fit with the wider story absolutely took me by surprise.

There are some superb characters here too. Carey is just magnificent, a richly portrayed, complex woman who - whatever she believes - is at the top of her game. I love reading stories in which competent, experienced people meet difficult challenges head on: books where you have a sense that there is just so much happening - real danger combined with plausible, calculated courses of action... which don't always come off.

Depicting all that background doesn't make the story slow, not at all - there is plenty going on here from the start, which opens with a clandestine meet that wouldn't be out of place in the (old style, TV) Mission: Impossible, to the conclusion - a tense, high stakes confrontation at a deserted border post. The pace never lets up, with the parts dealing with Carey's history actually adding tension because - as we empathise more and more with her - we see just how impossible is the task she's undertaken (and why she didn't want it).

(In passing, I was particularly impressed by the way that is able to leverage the experience of covid to locate his story even more sharply in the imagined future (middle of the 21st century?) His "Xian 'flu" isn't covid, it is even more devastating - and it was mentioned in the earlier books. Still, the experience of lockdown, of helplessness as friends and loved ones succumb and the reality that things have changed, is deep in the DNA of this book making very real speculative fiction).

Vastly enjoyable, fun, and sharply observed. Read it.

For more information about Cold Water, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Europe at Dawn by Dave Hutchinson

Europe at Dawn (Fractured Europe, 4)
Dave Hutchinson
Solaris, 1 November 2018
PB, e 320pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Europe at Dawn.

This fourth, and final, book in Hutchinson's Fractured Europe sequence is well up to the standard of the previous parts. Again, we're in a near future world where the population has been ravaged by the Xian Flu, Europe is divided (and dividing) into increasingly many fragments and life is complicated by the existence of the Community, an extra dimensional pocket universe where it always 1950s England. ("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... it was an awful place, and that was why so many of the English wanted to move there.")

We are also in the world of Les Coureurs des Bois, an international networks of smugglers who refuse to accept the fragmentation, and work to ensure that "packages" can still be delivered across borders. That gives the book, especially the first half, an agreeable atmosphere of "tradecraft" as Situations, drop-offs, dust-offs, "jumps" and so on run past, at first seemingly unconnected but gradually joining up. We meet Alice, a young Scottish diplomat in Tallinn whose life ("Her crappy job, her dickhead employers, her bully of a husband") is about to be destroyed ("She had been constructed out of chaos by people who did not care about her"), Ben, a refugee trapped on a nameless island in the Mediterranean, and Meg, an English Colonel commanding Heathrow Airport (which, in the last book, was somehow moved into the heart of the Community). Hutchinson is very good at showing the reality of these lives in quite brief portraits - Alice's abusive husband and her daily frustrations ("she could feel her life with him slowly crushing her to death"),  Ben's desire, simply, to go North away from the chaos, Meg's confrontations with an American flight marshall who thinks he should be running things and an emissary from the Community who has old-fashioned ideas ("They didn't like hearing women swear. Well, fuck that.")

Indeed, he's so good at it that this book contains at least half a dozen separate stories, each of would easily furnish enough material for a full story. I could read a whole book about Alice or Meg. But we only see glimpses of Alice's life, and only a couple of episodes in Meg's: I'd love to have been able to read more about them, but the focus stays - as the separate strands come together - on the grand story Hutchinson's been weaving ever since Europe in Autumn. This book is fully part of that, ducking and weaving around the timeline and events already established (it must have been murder to keep all the events and characters in the rights places) and adding new depth and different perspectives to what we already know. That does mean you'll get more out of it if you have a fairly fresh recollection of the previous books, although there are enough hints that it also makes sense on its own.

Kind of... By the end of the book, Rudi himself - I did mention that Rudi's back, didn't I? No? Well, RUDI'S BACK! YAY! - is pretty bewildered by some of the revelations, and aghast at what the future may hold. But that's the nature of Fractured Europe, I think - there is no neat resolution, we don't get all the answers, and there is an unsettling sense that no-one is really in control. (Of course no-one is in control, ever, anywhere, but that's such a worrying idea that we spin conspiracy theories and postulate sinister masterminds: it's easier to believe a genius is running the show, even an evil one,  than accept the directionless, emergent chaos that is the alternative. Hutchinson refuses to comfort us by affirming that conspiracy rules OK, while not denying that there are conspiracies afoot).

Did I sound excited to meet Rudi again? of course I am. I just love Rudi. He's so capable, so resigned, so... upright. Surveying what's been done to Alice, "Rudi felt his heart break". Unlike others here, all he really wants to do is to run his little restaurant, not be swindled by the meat suppliers, and to keep the "cohorts of individual creeps, ghouls, crooks and gentleman adventurers" at bay. That sounds a tall order, in a continent where, seemingly, everyone wants to be a spy: I think that - despite the focus on spyycraft, the jargon - one of the targets of this book is the general obsession with espionage, with the glamour of it (at one point Alice meets a man she describes to herself as a "Poundshop Harry Lime" and reflects that she herself is therefore a "Poundshop James Bond").

Another focus is, clearly, the Little Englander mentality thats sees the preserved never-was of the Community as some kind of salvation, rather than a horrendous parody (make your own connection to current politics) and - in a wider sense - the current world trend towards extremes. Rudi is the perfect foil to this, a dignified, modest man with steel inside him, an inhabitant and product of deep Mitteleuropa. He is the counterpoint to the chaos and even, to a degree, the conspiracies. We can believe in Rudi and I salute Hutchinson for giving us that. More, his books take Europe seriously, as a place, not just colour: Hutchinson displays a familiarity with the places, the journeys, the ways of living. There's a cosmopolitanism here, a rooted cosmopolitanism, a sense we have to transcend the irritable scratchiness of nationality and resit the demagogues. It's a delight in countries and places and differences which is its own riposte to the narrowness of the Community and those who think like it.

This is, in short, a delightful book and also a serious book. I'm so glad that we have it to round off the Fractured Europe sequence. The whole thing is a considerable achievement, and while everything has to come to an end, I am also sad that this is the last book in Fractured Europe.

Europe in Winter

Image from http://www.rebellionstore.com/

Europe in Winter (Fractured Europe 3)
Dave Hutchinson
Solaris, 3 November 2016
PB, 320pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book.

It was hard to be certain who was running the world any more, although obviously it wasn't the people who thought they were.

This is the third book in Hutchinson's Fractured Europe sequence (I hope that it being a sequence not a trilogy means there is more on the way - I want to read more, and by the end of this book a great deal is left intriguingly unresolved).

It is the mid to late 21st century. Europe has devolved into its default condition for much of history - a collection of pocket states, principalities, duchies, free cities and territories, the EU a vestige of its former state (but with money!) the UK divided. (I'd love to borrow Mr Hutchinson's crystal ball, especially with reference to next week's Lottery numbers...)

The main transnational, unifying feature in this Europe was thought to be the Line, a railway running from Portugal to Siberia, which is itself sovereign. Europe at Midnight revealed another: a second Europe, hidden in old maps and accessible only where the topology is right. The Community was invented - laid out, surveyed - by an English family, beginning in the 19th century, and it has a certain tweediness: they can't make good wine there because such a thing wasn't contemplated by the Founders. But you can - if you know how - cross into the Community, travel through it, and come out somewhere else - making the Line somewhat moot.

The Community and Europe are now in an awkward state of detente, pre full Union - but it is a fragile state, beset by espionage, suspicion and sabotage.

Against this background, Europe in Winter is less a single narrative, a chunk of plot, but more but a series of vignettes, set in this time and place, slowly adding up to an impression of a story which Hutchinson avoids telling as a story. Instead, you have to infer it (although there is a bit of a recap at the end for anyone who's been a bit slow).

A reckless act of terrorism aboard a train. A cat and mouse game in the Warsaw Underground. Conspiracy theorists crossing with real agents in Luxembourg. Murder on an island off Estonia. A trail of money.

At the centre of it, as always, is the urbane Rudi, chef, member of les Courreurs des Bois and former infiltrator of the Community. He's a man equally at home amidst the clamour of a busy kitchen, and trading identities is the backstreets of London. We meet him at the start of this book on familiar territory, in Max's restaurant... but something isn't quite right here and when we know what it is, there's the first clue to what is going on.

Again and again he pops up, sometimes observing, sometimes acting - often in danger, usually in control. And each time, Hutchinson drops him into another little vignette, like a cooler version of George Smiley. There are so many situations (and Situations) here that it would be silly to try and list them all (as well as spoilery) and it would miss the point: it's the cumulative effect that counts. Not only the atmosphere that Hutchinson engenders - the subtle spycraft, dodging a tail in the snowy Luxembourg streets or arranging a meet in a deserted English parish church - but also the characters: he's endlessly inventive at making real not only the major players but all the little people - the tired nurse getting ready to go to work, the tunnelling contractor in his office, the woman doing a favour for a friend and in deeper than she realises.

And the language: the book is written in a cool, knowing tone ("It could have been any day, any year. Only the drunks changed..." "Not my circus; not my monkeys") that's well suited to the subject and well suited to, especially, Rudi's viewpoint - collected, and in charge, even when baffled by events.

Frankly I could read this forever. I don't care whether or not it ever converges to a definite plot, I just want to go on, seeing the layers peel away, shuffling the jigsaw pieces around, reading backwards and forwards to check details. Hutchinson's writing is almost interactive in the way it gives you and evolving problem to engage with

And it is a problem in every sense of the word. In a world already complicated enough, we see additional layers, whole aspects of reality that were previously unsuspected. It's an achievement to pull the rug from under your readers as thoroughly as Hutchinson does here, more so for the third book in a sequence when normally you might be expecting things to start resolving.

All in all, a gem of a book, easily as good as, possibly better than, its predecessors and promising so much more in this fractured world.