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ellestraI'm finishing Europe in Autumn. I started reading the book because it starts in Poland and the author uses proper Polish spelling (diacritics and all) and when I read an excerpt it felt so weird to see them like this in an English publication. That was the first thing that drawn me to the book - I could tell the the author (Dave Hutchinson - British) has been around Poles or spent some time in East Central Europe (he did). There were moments when I felt embarrassed how accurate some descriptions of the behaviours and attitudes are. The thing is that what we say about ourselves to each other. It just feels weird when a foreigner writes it.
The book starts slow and doesn't seem to have much of a plot for the first 3/4ths of it so it's good I had my mind too taken by enjoying the views. It's all about the setting there - the Europe where the European Union failed and it failed badly. The countries in Europe not only went back on Schengen and restored the old borders but the cancerous independent movements keep adding new ones - many of then not bigger than Vatican. Rudi - the main hero of the story is a cook who gets into a more dangerous line of work - smuggling people and things (packages) from one state to another through the borders. He becomes part of shadowy organisation known as Les Coureurs des Bois - The organisation which structure is so obscured that no one knows who runs it and who belongs to it (it's like Annonymous of package delivery). He also doesn't know why the drops are happening and what he is transporting. And we only see his failures even though we learn he gets really good at his job. Each job is a separate thing and mostly just a way to show another fractured part of Europe but it also makes notes of some of the weird happenings that led to emergence of this political structure and the unknown origins of some of the main players. It only in the last third all those little weird things come together and it gets really weird. The conspiracy that's behind what happens turns out to be more complicated that anyone ever expected. I liked slowly uncovering what it's about (and trashing of the football "fans").
When I started this book I just thought the concept was an interesting science fiction premise but I was in it mostly for the references to Poland. There was certain ring of truth to that possibility of fracturing back to nations and borders - with Scottish independence movement and the separatist groups (small but existing) in Silesia in Poland (and similar things in other part of continent). We saw Yugoslavia fall apart in violence and Czechoslovakia in peace but the unification process has also been strong and I and everyone I know enjoy the freedom Schengen gave us (my dad jokes he doesn't needing passport because he only goes sometimes to Croatia and now he can do it just with his personal ID and there used to be 4 borders to cross on the way there the first time we went). But then Ukraine crisis unfolded and firs we had Crimea vote and separation and now people are taking over government buildings and declaring them separate countries. This makes the whole thing a little unsettling. Just little to close to the truth.
The book starts slow and doesn't seem to have much of a plot for the first 3/4ths of it so it's good I had my mind too taken by enjoying the views. It's all about the setting there - the Europe where the European Union failed and it failed badly. The countries in Europe not only went back on Schengen and restored the old borders but the cancerous independent movements keep adding new ones - many of then not bigger than Vatican. Rudi - the main hero of the story is a cook who gets into a more dangerous line of work - smuggling people and things (packages) from one state to another through the borders. He becomes part of shadowy organisation known as Les Coureurs des Bois - The organisation which structure is so obscured that no one knows who runs it and who belongs to it (it's like Annonymous of package delivery). He also doesn't know why the drops are happening and what he is transporting. And we only see his failures even though we learn he gets really good at his job. Each job is a separate thing and mostly just a way to show another fractured part of Europe but it also makes notes of some of the weird happenings that led to emergence of this political structure and the unknown origins of some of the main players. It only in the last third all those little weird things come together and it gets really weird. The conspiracy that's behind what happens turns out to be more complicated that anyone ever expected. I liked slowly uncovering what it's about (and trashing of the football "fans").
When I started this book I just thought the concept was an interesting science fiction premise but I was in it mostly for the references to Poland. There was certain ring of truth to that possibility of fracturing back to nations and borders - with Scottish independence movement and the separatist groups (small but existing) in Silesia in Poland (and similar things in other part of continent). We saw Yugoslavia fall apart in violence and Czechoslovakia in peace but the unification process has also been strong and I and everyone I know enjoy the freedom Schengen gave us (my dad jokes he doesn't needing passport because he only goes sometimes to Croatia and now he can do it just with his personal ID and there used to be 4 borders to cross on the way there the first time we went). But then Ukraine crisis unfolded and firs we had Crimea vote and separation and now people are taking over government buildings and declaring them separate countries. This makes the whole thing a little unsettling. Just little to close to the truth.
