sphynx
7/10/2022
Didn't finish (I've read about 1/3 of the book). I don't understand why this book holds three nominations in three prestigious science fiction awards: Clarke, BSFA and Campbell. Maybe because it was published around Brexit time and hit the right notes of EU fragility/disintegration at the right time?
The book is the story of a spy/courier in the near future, who travels in fragmented Europe with hundreds of micro-states and tons of borders. Bureauacracy and humiliation of border checks doesn't sound too scary or worth a story to me, given that I had to live through that many times coming to Schengen countries or the US.
The writing is rather mediocre, it has sentences like "This was very very bad, and was getting worse".
Perhaps in self-irony, the book keeps referring disparagingly to spy novel terms like "the package" and "situation" as "cloak-and-dagger terms coming straight from John le Carré novels", but still insists on using them all the time, which is annoying.
The main character basically does nothing in his first two operations, but somehow he is still fine and is progressing through that career, I can't really understand his motivation or care about him.
Also, the book is full of those geographical cliches, like Poles do this and that. I don't think the author really means it, probably it just goes well with the book being very "geographical" in general: i.e. there are many countries, we travel around them with the main characater, etc., so we need to describe the people somehow as well, so let's add (maybe fictional) stereotypes.
I liked the opening scene with Hungarians debauch in the restaurant though, it was entertaining and a quick start :)