What follows is a low key, quietly cutting assessment of a fracturing Europe, and a devastating critique of a what a purely English space without any European influence might be. For some reason, the existence of a nation that can access Hutchinson’s fractured Europe at any point makes certain people in the corridors of power a little nervous, and when extra-dimensional traveler Rupert comes along, they send Jim to find out what he knows. Chasing down the misdeeds of the murderous Old Board, he stumbles onto a path that literally takes him out of his world and into ours, one where no one has ever heard of The Campus and he’s lost and alone.Įxcept in our world there’s an intelligence operative named, quaintly enough, Jim, whose investigation of a random act of commuter violence quickly leads him to something deeper and stranger – the existence of a parallel country called Ernshire created, or perhaps accessed, by an eccentric English family called the Whitton-Whytes. The reader’s doorway into this world is Richard, or as he calls himself in a nod to the Prisoner of Zenda, Rupert of Hertzau, who functions as the head of Intelligence for the reeling, starving Campus. The book’s opener takes a bold risk, putting the reader in a setting that seemingly has nothing to do with any of the events of the previous volume – a post-revolt university called The Campus where the surviving faculty and students are struggling both politically and for simple survival. Which is, of course, a roundabout way of saying that Europe At Midnight is very good indeed, both as a mannered novel of espionage and as an incisive critique of the forces at play behind the spies and secret agents. And like le Carre, Hutchinson punctuates his narratives with moments of unexpected violence that are all the more shocking because they feel so unlikely. Like le Carre, Hutchinson excels at telling stories of espionage through quiet, human moments, only later revealing how those seemingly innocuous passages affected the larger whole. Now the sequel, Europe At Midnight has arrived and the comparison is even more apt.

The reference that gets used most often to describe Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Autumn is John le Carre.

Europe in autumn by dave hutchinson