Book Review: Europe in Autumn (2014) by Dave Hutchinson

Dave Hutchinson needs to network more. I've read any number of mediocre and crap SF novels that are covered in enthusiastic blurbs from other authors, bloggers, and online fanzines. Europe in Autumn has one measly blurb from someone named Eric Brown, who may well be Dave's downstairs neighbour for all I know. This novel deserves a raft of accolades, so for his next novel (which will surely be a sequel to this one) Dave needs to start hitting the fan conventions and standing rounds for his fellow SF writers down at the pub.

One of the chief pleasures of this novel is its unpredictable ambition. The setting is Europe in the near future and the region has spawned dozens and dozens of new states, some as small as a few city blocks. All these polities, as they are called in the book, have thrown up new borders and travel restrictions to go with them. There are always people who want to move themselves or contraband across borders unnoticed, and a shadowy organization called Les Coureurs des Bois has sprung up to serve their needs. Rudi, a young Estonian working as a cook in Krakow, joins the Coureurs and begins a career that becomes more dangerous and mysterious with each mission he takes on. The novel ends with Rudi discovering that there is, quite literally, more to Europe than meets the eye.

Europe in Autumn is shelved in the SF section of the bookstore, but it mostly reads like a great espionage novel, perhaps a forgotten title by Len Deighton. All the tropes and flavour of the spy novels of the 1960s are here: tense encounters with border guards; middle of the night frontier crossings under the glare of searchlights; double and triple crosses; dead drops; passwords and false identities; and sudden, shocking violence. One sequence in particular, set on a snowy night in the state of Potsdam, stands out as a brilliant blend of SF and old school John Le Carre-style tension as Rudi tries to smuggle a man across the border. The first half of the novel is picaresque in structure as we follow Rudi around Europe in his job as a Coureur. His various adventures are entertaining in their own right, but Hutchinson's portrait of a divided and sub-divided Europe is rich and endlessly inventive. He smartly pays attention to the small details of life, which gives his imagined Europe greater verisimilitude than is usual in these kinds of alternate reality stories.

Rudi is an excellent guide to this new Europe. He's witty, cynical, clever, but motivated by a quiet idealism to see Europe once again become borderless. Rudi more or less stumbles into his job with the Coureurs, and in this regard he's very much like one of the heroes of Eric Ambler's spy novels, many of whom are men with ordinary lives and jobs who suddenly find themselves having to cope with terrors and realities that are far outside their experience.

Although Europe in Autumn starts out as an alternate reality spy novel, by the end it's begun a seamless transition to something far stranger and more in keeping with its SF designation. There's clever future tech on display throughout, but it's always kept in the background. What's most remarkable about this novel is that Hutchinson's prose is fully the equal of his imagination. All those SF writers with big, bombastic ideas (and blurbs) rarely have the writing skills to back up their glitzy concepts. Hutchinson's writing is so good it he'd be worth reading no matter what genre he tackled. And if he doesn't use some part of this review as a blurb then he's just being difficult.

Book Review: The Crooked Man (1997) by Philip Davison

In one of his blog posts, spy novelist/critic Jeremy Duns neatly divided espionage novels into two camps: desk work and field work. A desk-work spy novel is all about spymasters trying to sniff out moles, turn enemy agents into defectors, and divine what the other guy is up to and then frustrate his plans. It's a cerebral genre, and John Le Carre would be the poster boy for it. A field-work novel follows agents at the pointy end of the espionage stick: surveillance, assassinations, dead drops, car chases, shootouts, and having sex with implausibly-named women if your name is James Bond.

The Crooked Man is very much a field-work spy novel. The crooked man of the title is Harry Fairfield, a lowly odd-jobs man for a sub-section of MI5. Harry doesn't even rate an official position, he's simply paid on a per job basis by Hamilton, his ruthless MI5 boss. Hamilton is one of those oh-so-English spies with an Eton tie who can use the word "quite" as a weapon and who refers to his hitmen as "chaps." Fairfield is what Len Deighton's Harry Palmer character (he was only given this name in the films made from Deighton's novels) might have become if he'd succumbed to booze, gambling and the moral brutality of his job. Fairfield is a bit a wreck, hating himself and what he does despite being rather good at it. He's used by Hamilton as an occasional minder for senior politicians, a burglar, and sometimes as an enforcer.

This is a slim novel, but Davison packs a lot of plot into it. The action shifts from London to Dublin to Bosnia, and Harry finds himself at the centre of several murders, including one committed by a cabinet minister that needs to be covered up by MI5. The plotting is excellent, but what makes Davison stand out from the herd is the quality of his writing. Here's a snippet from a scene where Harry KOs a man sent by Hamilton to search his flat:

     He groaned and let out a nauseous whine. His eyes focused on me momentarily, then on the picture cord that bound him.
     "What have you done?" he asked painfully.
     "I've waited patiently," I replied
     "You hit me...you..."
     "Oh, I did," I confirmed.
     "What did you hit me with?" he demanded with the same pain evident in his voice.
     "With conviction," I said assuredly. "What's your name?" I asked.
     He wasn't going to tell me.
     "A first name will do."
     He had a tic in one eye that made want to slap his face.
     "Winston. I'll call you Winston."
     No response.
     "Winston," I said, "these days there's a lack of social cohesion that makes it increasingly difficult for us all to decide what we mean to each other...wouldn't you agree?"
     He sneered. I slapped his face hard. He agreed there was a lack of social cohesion.

Davison's dry, acidic prose is wonderful, and there was one particular line that stuck in my mind (but I can't find now) that describes a character as bringing their problems with them like "a kite on a short string." Fairfield isn't only a hardboiled quipster. The backbone of the novel is his moral struggle with his crimes of omission and commission. Fairfield has intense feelings of guilt, and even tries to atone for his sins, which is pretty much unheard of in spy fiction. In this regard Davison is a thematic cousin to Graham Greene, but for my money Davison is the better writer. There are three more Fielding novels after this one, but they seem to be out of print. So here's me off to the used book stores.

Film Review: Billion Dollar Brain (1967)

In the 1960s it was all about the spies: spies on TV, spies at the movies, and spy novels by the bushel. Harry Saltzman, not content with co-producing the James Bond films, bought the rights to Len Deighton's spy novels and made three of them featuring Michael Caine as British agent Harry Palmer. The Palmer character was intended to be the anti-Bond: a spy who was more civil servant than superhero, and whose adventures reflected Cold War realities. The first two films, The Ipcress File and Funeral In Berlin, followed this formula faithfully. The third film, Billion Dollar Brain, went in an altogether different direction. For one thing Ken Russell was hired as the director. Russell had a formidable reputation based on his work at the BBC, but Brain was his first feature. It's clear he wanted to make a big impression.

Billion Dollar Brain sits halfway between being a James Bond spectacular and a gritty, realistic spy story. That's probably the main reason it did poorly at the box office and with the critics. What everyone seems to have missed is that it's a brilliant piece of filmmaking. The fact that it didn't fulfill contemporary genre expectations is beside the point. Brain is simply a celebration of filmmaking magic. The visual exuberance and flair in this film is off the charts. Russell's shot compositon, camera movements, and use of locations is superb. The story is set in Finland in the depths of winter and I can't think of another film that's made winter look so glamorous, so cold and so beautiful. The visuals are matched by the score, which is courtesy of Richard Rodney Bennett. The music manages to suggest icy cold, romance and tension, and it does it in a lush, romantic style that includes the prominent use of a theremin; probably the first time a theremin was used outside of a horror or sci-fi film. All in all, this is one of the best film scores ever.

The plot conerns a deranged Texas billionaire, the wonderfully named General Midwinter, who's bankrolling an anti-Soviet uprising in Latvia. At the heart of his plan is a giant computer designed to co-ordiante the uprising. Karl Malden is Midwinter's point man in Finland, but he's actually skimming every dime Midwinter thinks is going to Latvia. Harry Palmer has to ensure that Midwinter's schemes don't lead to World War III. The story is not meant to be taken seriously. This is first and foremost a satirical look at Cold War fear and paranoia, particularly the kind that was coming out of the US. General Midwinter is a mad character who would be equally at home in Dr. Strangelove. His ranch is the scene of anti-communist rallies that have a certain pre-war German flavour, and his monogram, emblazoned on the side of his oil tankers, is also ominously familiar. Ed Begley gives a great, outsized performance as Midwinter, and the script gives him a score of juicy lines, my favourite being, "My arm is long and my vengeance is total!" The faint whiff of anti-Americanism may well have hurt Brain with US critics. What might have hurt it even more was it's sympathetic portrayal of the Soviets, led by Oscar Homolka as Colonel Stok. In one key scene Stok leaves a performance of The Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich to meet Palmer. The symphony, which is a tribute to the defenders of Leningrad, has left Stok in tears, and he explains its meaning to a sympathetic Palmer. That's not the kind of conversation Bond ever had with anyone from Smersh.

This is one of those films that has a score of memorable set pieces and scenes, too many to mention, really, but some of the highlights include Palmer being chased through a snowy woods by mounted troops; a primitive wooden ferris wheel turning by the side of a frozen lake; blackmarketeers ambushing a truck; and, most memorably, the demise of Midwinter, which is a direct and clever homage to Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky. If nothing else, Billion Dollar Brain is the best-looking spy film I can think of, and its sly humour is probably more appreciated today than in 1967. The clip below has the film's opening credits (by the great Maurice Binder) with Bennett's amazing score.