Europe at Dawn

The Fractured Europe Sequence #4

by Dave Hutchinson

Alice works at the Scottish Embassy in Tallinn in Estonia as a member of the Cultural Section. When two men bring her the jewelled skull of a Scottish saint her world gets turned on its head, and she becomes the latest recruit to Les Coureurs des Bois.

On a Greek island Benno is just one of hundreds of refuges dreaming of a new life in Continental Europe. After hatching an audacious escape plan, he may just get his dream, but at the price of serving some powerful mysterious new masters.

Rudi and Rupert, the seasoned Coureur and the scientist in exile from a pocket universe, discover that someone they thought long dead is very much still alive. Not only that, but the now defunct Line – the railway that once bisected the European continent – may be being used for nefarious means.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Audiobook, Near Future, Dystopia

368 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2018

About the author

UK writer who published four volumes of stories by the age of twenty-one – Thumbprints, which is mostly fantasy, Fools' Gold, Torn Air and The Paradise Equation, all as David Hutchinson – and then moved into journalism. The deftness and quiet humaneness of his work was better than precocious, though the deracinatedness of the worlds depicted in the later stories may have derived in part from the author's apparent isolation from normal publishing channels.

After a decade of nonfiction, Hutchinson returned to the field as Dave Hutchinson, assembling later work in As the Crow Flies; tales like "The Pavement Artist" use sf devices to represent, far more fully than in his early work, a sense of the world as inherently and tragically not a platform for Transcendence. His first novel, The Villages, is Fantasy; The Push, an sf tale set in the Human Space sector of the home galaxy, describes the inception of Faster Than Light travel and some consequent complications when expanding humanity settles on a planet full of Alien life. Europe in Autumn (2014), an sf thriller involving espionage, takes place in a highly fragmented and still fragmenting Near-Future Europe, one of whose sovereign mini-nations is a transcontinental railway line; over the course of the central plot – which seems to reflect some aspects of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 – the protagonist becomes involved in the Paranoia-inducing Les Coureurs des Bois, a mysterious postal service which also delivers humans across innumerable borders.

- See more at: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hutc...

Works
* The Villages (Holicong, Pennsylvania: Cosmos Books, 2001)
* Europe in Autumn (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Rebellion/Solaris, 2014)

Collections and Stories
* Thumbprints (London: Abelard, 1978)
* Fools' Gold (London: Abelard, 1978)
* Torn Air (London: Abelard, 1980)
* The Paradise Equation (London: Abelard, 1981)
* As the Crow Flies (Wigan, Lancashire: BeWrite Books, 2004)
* The Push (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2009)

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Real Rating: 4.5* of five

Old friends make reappearances...old problems need solutions again, the only ones at hand are the ones that didn't work before...new faces wear old clothes and frighten us out of our sleep because the monsters under the bed never left.

An island in the Aegean Sea, the Scottish Embassy in Tallinn, a folk duo of no discernible talent but a huge reputation, and a pair of refugee teenagers tear through the pages trailing clouds of story as Author Hutchinson makes his last scheduled stop in hideously Fractured Europe.

So let me start with this. You're not going to make this your first stop on the route of the Coureurs des Bois. It would be a serious error of judgment to jump in any old how. It is necessary to read EUROPE IN AUTUMN first because so many things that happen in each book suddenly make sense in light of remembering events from the ones before; and starting from the first story helps make the experience of reading the fourth richly textured and satisfying.

The multiverse that Author Hutchinson posits, with its pocket universes and its bizarre cartographic secrets and its stunningly amoral and conscienceless elite, doesn't suddenly make sense in this book's denouement. It doesn't really ever make sense. It all—all the books, all the maps you hear about, all the baggy, wrinkled bits of story-cloth left on bushes here and there drying at their own pace—makes perfect sense as soon as you realize that. I'm not trying to be sibylline or obfuscatory. I'm giving you the effect of reading Author Hutchinson's deeply sculpted, complex story. What vistas open to you are important, but not decisive and defining. They're fractal artifacts of a universe possessed of no higher law than randomness. Remembering the things in your subjective past isn't always helpful, though it's always a good idea to rattle the dice in the brain-cup and see if boxcars or snakeyes come up. Either roll can be the winner because, like the real universe, shit just happens, what the hell. (Yes yes, it's a Terry Pratchett line, but believe me when I tell you that Author Hutchinson has a similarly depraved sense of humor to Sir Terry's.)

What you need to know about this book in particular is that Rudi coming back into focus, Rudi from the Krakow restaurant who really never wanted too much of what happened on his watch to happen...Rudi snaps the pieces of this shattered place's soul into focus as only he could. He still wants to feed people and be a cog in a machine that lacks malevolence for its constituent parts. And he is the reader in that sense, he is the character who does what he must but wants some of his work to matter in a simple way without Overtones.

He wants to live a boring life in boring times. The opposite of the "ancient Chinese curse" we've grown up hearing about. Europe's fracture due to the hideous plague of dubious origins is irreparable. The world cannot be put back together again. I think the Western Romans, especially the Britannians, of 500CE must have felt this way. It look the same. The sky's the same. The birds didn't change. But nothing will ever work again so what shall we do now?

Then there are those alternate places that aren't a thing like Fractured Europe...do they fit together better, are they functional societies, and what are we all going to use as glue to hold all the truly jagged pieces in place? There are no answers. There are no better-framed questions. There are a lot of smug bastards pretending they're on top of stuff. They're not. And you know what? Since no one is, since there's no top to be on, the world will sail on. Over the falls. Off the edge. Into safe harbor. Simultaneously.

This, my friends, is why I read Author Dave Hutchinson's books. Do not kid yourself. He sees reality, he tells you what's happening in eleventeen voices, he weaves disparate strands of story together and snips others without warning. This is what life actually is without the comforting lie of linear time to soothe our monkeybrains with story. Author Hutchinson tells us the story but unwraps it so we can get down in the gearbox that only quantum mechanics know how to grok.

I want you to read these novels. Don't start here. This is your reward for making a turbulent and beautiful journey. This is the final cataract on the river. You're prepared for it. And it's a great sense of understanding and accomplishment as you finish this book. For this is what it means to be awake and alive and fully present in a unique place. Control? None. Power? Illusion. A good dinner, some wine, and companions to enjoy. Do what it takes to keep that safe for the greatest number of people.

Happen I agree.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This fourth book in the Fractured Europe Sequence defintely needs the prior three to follow it with any kind of authority, but I can honestly say that if you're a fan of modern spycraft, SFnal post-bioweapon-devastation, high-tech, and old-world stories, then these books are right up your alley.

Yes, Rudi is back and it's a treat, his world-weariness, food smarts, and ex-courier status showing up one last time, but this book is not all about him.

It's about the milieu, modern Europe, and the deeply wearying sensation that no one is in control of anything. Despite all the spycraft and the plots or the elites or the runners, there is no real sense of order. Indeed, there never could be.

That doesn't stop all kinds of people from trying, however.

This book feels like a series of many short stories with all kinds of different characters. Some of them return from previous books. There's wry and dry humor, a shocking amount of odd grifts, and a few riots to contend with.

But more than anything, the biggest joy we'll glean from these is within the world. Observations are everything.

Quite enjoyable.

[imyril is not really here any more · Rating 4 out of 5]

But but but but but but but we can’t leave it there, surely?

Although someone should give Rudi a hug and a decent cup of tea.

Full review to follow

Maybe once I reread the whole series back to back.

I received a free copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

[David Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ian Mond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe sequence the best science fiction series of the last decade? I wouldn’t know, I generally avoid multi-book series (well, unless they’re written by Rachel Cusk or Ali Smith). But fuck it, I’m gonna call it. Fractured Europe is the most intelligent, entertaining, politically relevant sequence of books in the last ten or twenty years.*

I’m not going to bother too much with plot details, suffice it to say that Europe At Dawn sees the return of Rudi, involves the skull of St Magnus Martyr of Kirkwall and, to one degree or another, ties up the plot threads of the previous three novels. Like its predecessors, there’s nothing straightforward or linear about the storytelling. New characters are introduced, even as late as the last 100 or so pages, whose role in the story isn’t immediately apparent, Rudi only appears halfway through the book, and even then he drifts in and out of the narrative, and as the novel reaches its climax you can’t help but wonder how Hutchinson is going to bring all these disparate characters, with their contradictory motivations together. The miracle is that he does... even if he leaves a couple of threads deliberately dangling.**

With a No Deal Brexit increasingly becoming a reality and the rise of an anti-immigrant right across the continent, these four novels, and their depiction of a Europe broken apart into hundreds of nation-states and polities, looks more and more prophetic. The thing is, any old sod can come up with a “fractured” Europe, it takes Hutchinson’s talent and his eye for story to make it feel like a lived in, real place, peopled by a vast range of ordinary, eccentric, sneaky and fascinating characters.

As Hutchinson says in his thank you note - Rudi abides.

* On reflection, I’m sure I’ve made the same claim elsewhere about N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series.

** Though Hutchinson confirmed on Twitter that Europe at Dawn is the end of the sequence.

[K.V. Johansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent conclusion to the series. I loved the whole sequence but this and Midnight are my favourites. The way everything is gathered up and threads from earlier that you thought were over reappeared, altered in unanticipated ways, is really impressive. Masterful storytelling, masterful writing.

[Alex Sarll]

Yes, of course reading the end of Fractured Europe this week is an act of bibliomancy. "Obviously, the world and everything in it had been stupid since the dawn of time. It was just that, every now and again, there seemed to be a surge in stupid and there was nothing anyone could do about it except try to hang on and hope things would get better soon."

As when the second book in the series began without apparent reference to the first, so here we meet a new cast of characters – an English grandfather with a fondness for narrow boating, a worker at independent Scotland's Estonian embassy, a second generation refugee stranded on a Mediterranean rock after the current crisis has been downgraded to an ongoing situation (without in any way being resolved). But this time we know the game, know everything will tie together somehow with the Coureurs and the Community and the Line and the secrets that lie in the cracks of the increasingly complicated map of Hutchinson's near future Europe. The set-up was already far too timely, and has now drawn in other matters of the moment, from the aforementioned refugees to the appalling, aggrieved entitlement of the embassy worker's dreadful husband. Even though it's a fairly common device these days, I was surprised by the book's readiness to skip decades between chapters; the timelines aren't where you first think, and in a sense yes it's cheating that the world only seems to change on one axis as the years roll on (there are passing references to global warming, but if anything fewer than in last year's news). But Hell, science fiction has always worked like that; even John Brunner had to do the political prognostications and the environmental ones in separate books, albeit books now often considered to comprise a loose group. And considered not as prognostication but as a mirror on the present, Hutchinson has done a great job in this series of capturing that centrifugal, parochial moment which we can but hope has now reached its high tide.

[Armamix · Rating 5 out of 5]

He thinks it’s done. It’s not done.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...

I've been a faithful reader of this "sequence" and my feelings are ambivalent. The "Fractured Europe Sequence" is not really a series. It actually is a single book published in parts over the course of years. The nature of the reading experience made following the storyline difficult. In addition, this story is basically a spy story where everything is nuanced and shadowy.

Before I get into review proper, let me advise anyone who hasn't read the previous books - Do not start with this book. This book is the last part of a larger novel. It will make no sense to you by itself.

Now, here there be spoilers.

The world is unusual and yet surprisingly familiar in this the Year of Our Lord 2020. In the recent past, Europe was ravaged by the Xian Flu, which triggered an epidemic of devolution, as parts of countries separate and secede from each other.

Rudi made his appearance on the first book as he became acquainted with the mysterious organization known as Les Coureurs des Bois, whose mission is to get things through these new borders. In the first book, we watch Rude learn tradecraft through a variety of missions that do not cohere into a single narrative. At the end of the first book, Rudi discovers that there is a pocket universe called the "Community" which is accessed at odd spots in our world abut spans Europe in a starnage topological overlay.

Book two introduced us to Rupert took us to a pocket universe - the Campus - where society is a college campus. Rupert is the security chief of one faction of this society, which is in the midst of a revolution. There is some interconnection with our world and the Community. It seems that this unversity world is where the Xian Flu came from. At the end, Rupert defects to our world as the Campus is destroyed in a nuclear attack.

In the third book, Rudi returns and pursues his own mysterious history in the Couriers. He becomes involved in some subtle missions concerning a mathematician who seems to have the key to creating pocket universes. At the end of the book we get a hint that there may be an ever more secret group involved in the struggle between the Community and Europe.

Throughout these books, the most interesting creation has been "the Line," which is a Europe-spanning railroad that is its own nation. The Line seems to play an important role in these stories but is very mysterious.

The final book opens with a new character, Ben, who is a Somali refugee on an island in the Mediterranean. He is recruited and, then, disappears from the story until he gets a walk-on at the end. The rest of the first 70% of this book is like that. Things happen but it isn't clear what is happening, whether we should care, and what is important. There is a long extended section involving Alice, who is a Scottish embassy official, who gets played in a gambit involving a jeweled skull. Is she imporant? What about the person she meets, who is affiliated with some organization, but which we don't know? And then there are the references to the "William Dancy Reading Group," which has become a charity involved in providing medical equipment. What's that all about?

Honestly, at 60% of the way, I was ready to quit on the grounds that this story was going nowhere.

I was impressed with the topological nature of the books. For example, it seems that a large part of the Alice section happens before the events of other books. I wondered if there was a clue in that feature.

However, I persevered and, as in the other books, there was a big pay-off in the end. We learn who the other player in the struggle was. The Whitcomb-Whites - the mysterious creators of the pocket universe - make a reappearance. We learn what role the Line plays. We see the games within games of the Community and the European intelligence agencies. Rupert is a key player and gets revenge for the destruction of his world.

However, there were some notes that left me dissatisfied. I don't know if I missed them or if they were there all along. For example, I don't think the jeweled skull showed up in earlier books. I missed the role played by Araminta Delahunty and Andrew Molson. I don't know if I was dense or the clues were too subtle for me to pick up on.

In any event, the ending redeemed the book and the series for me. I have always liked the imaginative construction of this world and I've considered the characters to be well-drawn. I also like nuanced spy stories that cause me to reconsider what I thought was true and false.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writing a fiction series undoubtedly is far more problematic than reading a series; however, there are also some problems lurking for the reader. First off, I loved the first three novels in Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe Sequence (all three briefly reviewed here on Goodreads). When I read that Europe at Dawn was to conclude the series I was momentarily disappointed but I sympathize that a writer can have many reasons to wrap things up and move on to other projects. I noted in my review of Europe in Winter that I thought the first three books stood well enough on their own that if Hutchinson never wrote another word about Fractured Europe, the reader would be satisfied. Yet, after finishing Europe at Dawn I was disappointed. Part of this is my problem, and is perhaps the problem of the series reader, since by the time the new book came out November 1st, 2018 it had been two years since I read Europe in Winter and I had by that time lost track of who some characters were as well as various plot details. i tried to fill this gap by reading all the publisher’s blurbs and some reviews here on GR but that only worked randomly.

My other problem stems from the fact that I enjoyed this series so that when I finished it I was sad that the many, many dangling threads will never be resolved save in my imagination. BUT if you have never read this series by reading it now you can read it straight through — all four books in sequence. Many good reviews here on GR.

[Runalong · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great way to conclude one of the most incisive SF series this decade with a Lot to day about the U.K. and the rest of Europe. I still want more though

Full review - https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/ch...

[Ellison · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the first book of this quartet, Europe in Autumn, Hutchinson creates a fascinating and plausible near future Europe which contains interesting characters and some intriguingly fantastic elements. In the second book, Europe at Midnight, he moves these along and expands the possibilities. But in the last two he stalls out, wandering around in a world he has already fleshed out. The meandering path he creates is interesting but it does not seem to be going anywhere.
That being said, he writes in a style I find enjoyable so even this last book left me eager for him to write another.

[Antonio Ceté]

Vaya viaje, ninio.

[Usagi]

Adoro esta saga a un nivel difícil de explicar a pesar de que entre el idioma y su complejidad intrínseca solo me entero de parte. Es una pena que hasta este último volumen no haya corregido su flagrante falta de personajes femeninos.

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

How, I asked myself, can old Dave wrap up this four-book series in a satisfying way, when he's built this universe up from 'what if a train line was a country?' to 'What if a parallel England existed in the same space as ours?' and he is rapidly running out of pages? Well, it works. You get the feeling it could have carried on for another half dozen volumes, but for now things are uneasily stable and the people we care about are each in a reasonably happy, or at least safe, place.

[Lowthor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really satisfying conclusion. I'm going to miss Rudi.

[Gerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

God I love this book and this series of books. I'm sad it's over. This is perhaps the funniest of the series. Hutchinson has a great line in humour.

[Andrew Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike most clever dick SF ‘comedy’, this book is actually funny, because the author understands all too well that humour comes from humanity (clue in the name there) as well as wit. Thus, the painful travails of Alice as she negotiates life in the newly independent Scotland’s Estonian embassy while trying to find a decent lunch have way more impact than some of the wacky space stuff I’ve read. The novel as a whole grips like this, and it’s a mark of the writer’s skill that it does since there are references to elements from previous books, including the climax, which you won’t get if you haven't read them. There are also lacerating political insights, particularly around the plight of refugees stranded for generations on an island in the Mediterranean, washing up against the walls of a xenophobic Europe more concerned with its own petty nationalisms than a long-term solution to climate-driven mass-migration. This element of the novel is the most powerful, and features in just one sequence because the rest of the arcs need to be wrapped up. They kind of are, in an ambiguous, quietly despairing way that reflects the fact that the protagonists and the Great Game they play have become one and the same, for a purpose that is never quite clear.

[Alan McKay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why did I only give this three stars? The whole series is very compelling and based on two very clever combined ideas - the breakup of Europe and the existence of parallel universes. Maybe it's just me but I find the author's style rather frustrating - stories are begun and developed and you anticipate the resolution of the mystery, then the scene changes completely, with new characters. A great deal is left unexplained, and when there are explanations there are often either very oblique or in the form of throwaway remarks by characters, or both. An awful lot of loose ends seem to be left which I would like to have seen tied up. On the other hand, maybe the answers are there, hidden too subtly for me.

Maybe this is quite deliberate, meant to reflect the chaotic, nobody-in-charge state of Europe later this century. Having said this I did enjoy it very much, and I hope he produces more.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3183836.html

Hugely enjoyable and ties up the threads of the previous three books in the Fractured Europe series. Doesn't really stand on its own to the extent that its predecessors did, but I found it very a satisfying conclusion.

[Pete Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book which it is worth thinking about for a while before making a final judgement. The fact that I finished it just as Britain's politicians descended into an orgy of peronal posturing while failing to address the fundamental issue of how to manage Britain's departure from the EU helped enormously with my appreciation of it.

It is difficult to describe the plot, which consists of a series of short, tenuously connected episodes which take place across Hutchinson's fractured Europe. It is all massively confusing, with the confusion added to by the fact that Hutchinson dives straight in to a continuation of the previous books with little or no explanation of the people or events which have gone before.A diplomat from an independent Scotland gets involved in the smuggling of ancient artifacts in Estonia. A North African Refugee struggles to escape from a Mediterranean island dumping ground. A couple give up their stationary life to live on a narrowboat. They pay their way through a mix of pleasure cruises and the occasional mysterious lone traveller. In the background is Rudi, the constant characters all of the books, still trying to run his restaurant, still drawn into the activities of the shady Coureurs du Bois. Sitting menacingly above it all is the Community, an England living in a pastoral, reactionary parallel, but connected, universe.

The first book in the sequence was published in 2014, and read as a cautionary tale of the rise of micro nationalism in Europe. As time has gone on the tone has shifted towards "Oh my lord, its actually happening" with this shift in tone, the books have become more political. Here there is real anger about the fate of refugees and the lack of care in the wealthier parts of Europe.

This is why the utter confusion of the final (?) book of the sequence is so right. In these books, Hutchison has created the perfect narrative for and of the current political situation, When Britain has thrown up a politician so utterly preposterous, whose attitudes are rooted in a mythical past, it is almost impossible to avoid equating the Community with Jacob Rees-Mogg. Ridiculous but very dangerous.

The title of the book gives something of a misleading idea of hope. I'm a long way from feeling that there is anything positive about this new dawn, not least because of references to the rise of an American version of the community, no need to point out the meaning of that metaphor. If there is a note of hope it comes from individuals. Hutchison has a real knack for writing credibly endearing characters, with the omnipresent Rudi at the centre of that.

The Fractured Europe books are genre novels, if not science fiction, certainly speculative fiction. They show however that intelligent, relevant literature, which says something about our world, isn't just the province of "literary" fiction. If this doesn't quite reach the level if Orwell, it certainly rivals Huxley.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Kriegslok · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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 route, 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."

Dave Hutchinson's four book epic appeared during the years of the Brexit fiasco. Reading and reflecting on it you could conclude that the debate of that time played its part in influencing the books and their course. The doomed concept of a united Europe which in that typically European way unravels into fiercely independent principalities divided by walls (in this case often quite literally) lies at the heart of the books. The whole border concept becomes increasingly bizarre towards the end of the first book and provides the impetus for what follows. Through it all, Estonian chef Rudi, battles heroically but rarely has a grip on everything that is happening. I felt an affinity with Rudi trying to keep up with the fast pace of events and the regular border crossings normal and esoteric. There are still chunks which I'm not sure why they were there and nice little glitches that I thought were only there to see if I was still awake.

"There was no provision in his instructions for backup, although that didn't mean anything particularly. If he'd learned anything over the past several years travelling hither and yon at the behest of Courier Central, it was that everyone was continually winging it and half the time no one knew what anyone else was up to. It made, he supposed, for a suitably confusing environment for opposing forces, although it was hardly an optimal atmosphere in which to operate."

By the end of this last book Hutchinson has given us an excellent bit of innovative science fiction, which as all good sci fi should be, is a biting critique and reflection of humanity in all its stupidity, pretentiousness and apocalyptic anticipation. This series demands reading carefully and certainly more than once. A definite work of genius to be remembered.  

"He found himself gravitating, by default, towards the barbecues, and shortly after that he was cooking burgers and sausages and chicken drumsticks and handing them out on paper plates to whoever went past. Which was obviously what one did when one had tracked down a supervillain to their secret headquarters and exposed their evil plan for world domination."

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the final instalment, apparently, of the 'Fractured Europe' series. As we are currently steeply mired in all sorts of Brexit related chaos, the ideas within the book have a certain degree of currency. It works as a stand alone book, but those unfamiliar with the previous volumes might have trouble following it. I find it hard to conceive of what I would make of the book if I hadn't read the first three volumes.

The book is well written, much along the lines of a clever whodunnit, but I did find that there were rather too many characters for me. The backstory to some of the characters can be found in previous volumes, as can be found the situational references. We have one or two new characters, but I found myself wondering if I hadn't encountered them before, only I wasn't paying sufficient attention. I didn't like that aspect of the book.

However, desite the minus points, I really do like the basic idea of the book - a Europe of increasingly fragmented sovereign entities. All sorts of practical issues start to arise, such as which currency to use, how taxes are levied, how trade is regulated, and so on. The narrative touches upon these issues and it is these fleeting glances that appeal to me. I found myself thinking about matters such as payment systems, lines of credit, how wealth is stored, etc. This is quite interesting because the implicit economy is one based upon trade - i.e. there is little descent to barter - but the institutions and mechanisms by which trade happens are not at all visible. Of course, this begs the question as to why these institutions didn't declare themselves as sovereign nations?

This is possibly why I rate the series so highly. There is a lot here to recommend to the futurist. Much of the template can be used in different settings. For example, what if it were the USA that fragmented instead of Europe? Would the experience be different or similar? These are interesting questions. For this reason, I plan to return to the sequence, to study it as a futures programme, and to take away dsome insights from this dissection.

As for this solitary book? It dosn't work on it's own. It will appeal to those who have already embraced the world of a fragmented Europe, but it will have little apeal to those who only read the solitary volume.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The final (?) novel in Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe series is another cracking mix of thriller and espionage set in an alternative future Europe.

The novel opens with a short little chapter about a couple who buy a narrowboat, do it up and occasionally transport people to certain locations. It's another short character study, the kind that Hutchinson favoured to excess in Europe in Winter. The rest of the first half of the book is devoted to two people - the migrant Benno, trapped on a barren island in the Med along with thousands of other illegal immigrants; and Alice, who works for the Scottish Embassy in Tallin, Estonia. Both their lives become intertwined and change dramatically when they get mixed up with the Coureurs de Bois, the semi-mythic covert operations that recruited Rudi in Europe in Autumn.

As the story proceeds it's clear that Hutchinson has taken us back in time to the years before the disappearance of the Line, the sovereign nation that was also a trans-European railway, at the end of Europe in Winter. So we work our way towards that significant event and the revelation of the Community, the pocket universe country that exists topologically in the same space as Europe. By the end of this first half of the story, both Benno and Alice's lives are unrecognisable. It's brilliantly conceived and written and would be a novel in it's own right in others hands.

The second half of the novel is where we again encounter Rudi, and Rupert from Europe at Midnight, as Hutchinson attempts to tie up all the loose ends and explain exactly what has been going on. Rudi is tasked by both The Community and The Line to find out who the shadowy "third player" is in this world of pocket universes and topological manipulation. There are revelations aplenty, as it's revealed that people are not quite who you thought they were. The denouement, by narrowboat from Wolverhampton (of all places!), is quite unexpected and pleasing. But he also teases a possible continuation because it seems America might also be a player in this game.

It's another excellent thriller from Hutchinson. The entire series should, I think, be read as one long novel. It has many layers and levels and can be a bit confusing at times, but I think it would repay a reread. It's certainly one of the great feats of imaginative, speculative fiction this century.

Rudi abides.

[Pat Patterson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a condensed version of my review of this book at Papa Pat Rambles.

I began reading “Europe at Dawn” with delight. GREAT characters, GREAT telling of the story (as far as it went), and I was ENGAGED, and delighted to be reading something that wasn't utterly repulsive. The stories for each character caught my attention, and kept it, until the scene changed, and the story took up again with a different character.

What's the relationship between these characters? I'd better take some notes. So I did. And I gradually got a sinking feeling, because:

Nothing was happening. Nothing was being tied together. There was NO resolution, or even direction, in sight. And I looked at the page count, and found I was TWICE as far as I'm accustomed to give a book before realizing there is a defect. I think that's because it was written so WELL.

So, I did something I don't think I've done before: I looked to see what others said. I checked out the reviews on Goodreads, and bless their hearts, some of my fellow reviewers were kind enough to have anticipated my issue. As a part of their rave, 5-star reviews, they (more than ONE reviewer, too!) are careful to point out that this installment won't make any sense unless you read volumes 1-3.

And that's the end of THAT.

According to those who are fans of the entire series (quotes from the Goodreads reviews):

It would be a serious error of judgment to jump in any old how.
...definitely needs the prior three to follow it with any kind of authority
...the focus stays on the grand story Hutchinson's been weaving ever since Europe in Autumn.
Hutchinson dives straight in to a continuation of the previous books with little or no explanation of the people or events which have gone before.

I could go on and on with these quotes; they almost all say something like that.

I'm giving this book three stars, because the 62 pages that I read were very, very nice; I wanted more of those characters. It looks like that isn't possible, without reading Books 1-3. And I simply don't have the time.

[Paddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a considerable dislike of multi-volume series, but I really enjoyed "Europe at Midnight". So by way of compromise, I skipped to the end of the series and read this volume.

Hutchinson is so obviously a lover of Europe with all its variety of cultures and locations, that I take his "fractured Europe" universe as a warning, rather than a prediction. The need for European unity is more obvious now than a few years ago when the books were written.

I found the writing style to be gripping. The book was hard to put down. But perhaps that's because I've lived in several European countries and have travelled the continent extensively, so I am familiar with many of the locations. The plot is full of loose ends, and characters that are developed very incompletely, but these are things that can easily be overlooked.

I'm not a great fan of the "pocket universe" as a concept. Perhaps that's just my prejudice, as I suppose it's no more implausible than any of many other devices and concepts that are widely used in sci-fi and fantasy. The particular pocket universe in these books, the "Community" - basically 1950s Britain with no foreigners or spicy food, but at the same time an absolutely amoral power that has no compunction about using nuclear and biological weapons - this seems to be a metaphor for the idiocy that Brextards are nostalgic for.

Although this seems to be the last book in the "fractured Europe" series, the ending leaves open the possibility of sequels. If there is a pocket universe in Europe, there could of course also be pocket universes hidden within the other six continents. Perhaps the threats lurking there will provide the impetus to un-fracture Europe?

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obviously, the world and everything in it had been stupid since the dawn of time. It was just that, every now and again, there seemed to be a surge in stupid and there was nothing anyone could do about it except hang on and hope things would get better soon. [loc. 7179]

I really should have reread the first three volumes ( Europe in Autumn , Europe at Midnight and Europe in Winter ): but I found that somehow the first two had vanished from my Kindle and my content, and I foolishly decided to forge ahead.

There are two major new characters in this, the fourth and final volume ( or is it ) of Hutchinson's near-future European intrigue. Alice is a junior cultural attache at the Scottish Embassy in Tallin, Estonia. Her husband is horrifically controlling, and she lives in a state of permanent confusion vis-a-vis the activities of her colleagues. Benno, by contrast, is a refugee from a country he can't remember (perhaps somewhere in North Africa?) who lives in a shipping-container town on a small Greek island. Alice is offered a stolen, bejewelled skull: Benno finds a corpse with a gun and a cellphone. These are the points at which their lives are irrevocably changed.

Alice and Benno's respective turning-points seem to happen early in the overall chronology of the series: the Community has not yet revealed itself, and Rudi is still young and relatively unscarred. But Europe at Dawn skips around in time: that jewelled skull shows up again (or is it before?), the Community becomes international news, and characters come and go, sometimes not subject to the same chronology as their peers.

There are a number of splendidly effective female characters: I'd have liked to see more of Meg, the officer in command at Heathrow Airport -- which, with a section of Bath Road, was transposed into the Community in the previous volume. (Oh how wonderful it would have been if Bath Road had been transposed whilst replete with SF fans at an Eastercon, or geeks at Nine Worlds!) And Victoria surely deserves a book to herself. But Alice is great, and I am with Rudi in feeling that what happens to her is tragic.

Benno's story, which doesn't have the same sense of beginning-middle-end to it, allows Hutchinson to rage at the plight of refugees. All he wants to do is go north ... but in this fragmented Europe, where every town or village (or island) can and may declare independence, 'north' is a moveable feast.

One day I will reread the whole series, and perhaps be less confused by Europe at Dawn -- which does seem to interlock with the previous books, rather than following on from them. But there's room for more story, given the surprising revelations at the climax of this volume. And my lack of context did not prevent my being highly amused, intrigued and moved by the book.

I hope Mr Hutchinson will not be upset if I get a t-shirt with 'Spirit of Schengen' on it.

[Paul Trembling · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do like a story that finishes neatly with all the loose ends tied up - as long as it's also done in a manner consistent with the rest of the narrative. With Europe at Dawn, that's a big ask. It's the final volume of a four-book sequence that has strewn loose ends around with some enthusiasm. Characters have appeared, disappeared and sometimes reappeared, probably with a different name and occasionally after they've been dead for twenty years. Plot lines have been created, followed, then apparently abandoned. Scenes from the stories past have been dropped into the narrative, the links with story-present not always explained. And so on.

If this sounds confusing, it can be. If it sounds difficult to read - it's not. It's a terrific read, start to finish. Every character is intriguing, every scene fascinating, every plot line absorbing.

And yes, somehow, a surprising number of these plots are resolved and a lot of loose ends tied up. Not all, by any means. I don't know if Hutchinson has contemplated a fifth novel, but there's plenty of material there for him to work with if he wanted to - and I'd certainly want to read it. But enough is perhaps enough, and for the main characters at least there is a conclusion of sorts.

As it is, the entire 'Fractured Europe' sequence must rank amongst the best science fiction out there, also the most original spy fiction, and it's certainly up there in my top reads for 2018.

[Peter Hollo · Rating 5 out of 5]

As near to perfect as it could hope to be.
Hutchinson's writing is just a joy at every turn. The little short stories that pop up here and there in the novel(s) show some event or other, and then never appear again... The infodumps that rarely feel like infodumps. The engaging, sympathetic characterisation of minor characters.
This book fixes some of the, er, diversity issues of the previous ones, which had a few too many 'orrible wives in the background of a few protagonists' lives. Not that there weren't various competent female characters, but this one foregrounds them and their concerns considerably more, striking a better balance on the whole. And it fleshes out storylines across all three of the previous novels, filling in many gaps and tying up a lot of loose ends.
Not that most of the protagonists have much closure, beloved Rudi included. It's a fairly miserable, downbeat ending, and the story is very much not concluded (broadening its horizons right near the end outside of Europe and its parallel entities). But one gets the feeling that's Hutchinson's point - real life isn't neat and tidy. People's motives aren't straightforward or internally coherent. Things fall apart.
But it's beautifully told, and sympathetic to its very human cast, and I found every word of all four books absolutely engrossing. Anytime he wants to return to this milieu, I'll be waiting.