Somerset Maugham meets death metal

Juhan was wearing skinny black jeans, a black T-shirt, and a massive black leather jacket with jangly silver zippers, which hung from his shoulders like the wings of a pterodactyl. In appearance, it was as if Somerset Maugham had, in the final years of his life, decided to take up death metal.

— from Europe in Winter, by Dave Hutchinson.

Can you picture it? Might Somerset Maugham ever have taken up death metal? I'd like to think so.

His own little rebellion

Dinner over, he took the empty plastic tray from his hotpot back into the kitchen and dumped it in the bin. He was supposed to separate out recyclable and unrecyclable plastics, but nobody seemed to notice and he was starting to view it as his own little rebellion against the forces of authority, a mask for the real rebellion, the one which could conceivably get him killed. Look at me, I don't recycle, I'm an anarchist.

— from Europe at Midnight, by Dave Hutchinson.

People who took sleep seriously

On the morning of the second day, he opened his eyes and found himself lying in the most comfortable bed he had ever encountered. It was the kind of bed that a person would have to be bodily picked up and carried away from just in order to get up in the morning. But it paled in comparison to the pillows his head rested on, stuffed with down to such precisely-calibrated firmness that they could only have been the end-result of centuries of research. He was covered with crisply-laundered cotton sheets, topped by an old-fashioned quilt. He felt warm and safe and perfectly relaxed. Whatever else had happened to him, he had clearly fallen into the hands of people who took sleep seriously, and it was difficult to hate such people.

— from Europe in Autumn, by Dave Hutchinson.

Something secretly crafty about bar-codes

Unpacking after one of Lewis's infrequent shopping expeditions was an adventure. Lewis had a theory that there was something secretly crafty about bar-codes, that They were tracking each bar-coded item and compiling vast lists for a purpose made even more sinister and terrifying by being entirely unknown.

So trips to the supermarket inevitably ended with bags and packets piled on the kitchen table, Lewis bent over them with the scissors, cutting off bar-codes, to be burned later. When Seth first saw him doing this, he had inquired whether his flatmate needed regular medication, but it had turned out that Lewis was a relative rarity: a completely sane man whose world-view was almost entirely irrational. Sometimes, thinking about it, Seth wondered if Lewis might not actually be right.

— from Europe in Autumn, by Dave Hutchinson.

I can't recall where I heard about this book. I'm sure it was an end-of-year roundup, that may have mentioned this review at Pechorin's Journal.

I'm finding Europe in Autumn to be immensely enjoyable. A sci-fi thriller set in the not-too-distant future (about twenty years after Scotland separates), I'm still waiting for the more conventionally science-fictional aspects to kick in. But it's a well-imagined world of countless independent polities, and thus borders and bureaucracies and the rebel heroes that run counter to them.

I occasionally get lost in the action, but I'm appreciating Hutchinson's ease and wit.

But of course Lewis is right.