After hundreds of years of secrecy, the Community, an adjacent alternative world, and Europe, fractured into a dizzying network of tiny states and principalities, open their borders to each other. A new era of peace and prosperity beckons, but that doesn't stop somone committing an awful terrorist atrocity, but nobody knows who did it or why. An increasingly exasperated Rudi, who just wants to cook, sets out to make sense of it all with his gaggle of strays, waifs, exiles and fugitives. There are more shadowy players maneuvering and intriguing aganst each other than you can shake a stick at, and the ability to cross invisible borders to hidden dimensions adds whole layers of difficulty to finding out who they are and what they want. Hutchinson's prose and oblique storytellng and lovable characters make an insanely complex plot a thoroughgoing pleasure to unravel.

(Not gonna lie, second chapter had me going for a bit.)

It's hard to oversell the sheer readability of these books, so far, what a wonderful, fascinating, chilly, dangerous, but somehow at the heart of it all romantic world it is to visit, romantic in the way of old-school spy stories, with danger in every shadow, uncertainty in every encounter and ambiguity about the morality of sides and actions, but with added science fiction that creates an entirely relatable alternative Europe and an even odder reactionary throwback alternative to that Europe, and the shadowy back and forth between the two. Excellent, leisurely, twisty, but always absorbing. 

 Excellent novel about a young man drafted into a courier network that relies on old-school spy tradecraft to cross the borders of a balkanised future Europe. His induction, training and early missions all seem to go catastrophically wrong, but he survives and even thrives in the strange, often boring, occasionally dangerous twilight world. I liked how as the book goes on, new sections begin eliptically with new settings and characters which intersect with Rudy's, as if he is becoming better at concealment until ready to reveal himself, and crossing the borders of other people's stories. After an almost meandering, episodic, but always interesting first half, things start to come together and then take a serious swerve towards something even weirder in the final quarter, leaving me looking forward to reading the rest of the series quite a lot. 

Not so much conquered as squashed flat, the survivors of a human-occupied planet include a team of scientists who are selected for transportation to the home world of the conquerors. I am so bad with names. As they learn about their nature of their captivity and their options for survival, they are all unknowingly concealing a spy from a powerful enemy of the conquerors in their midst. 

With each blow struck against the Judges their chances of preventing the Day Of Chaos gets more and more remote, even as they case down the infected agents entering the city, deal with fear and paranioa and misinformation, and prepare for a death toll that, if they're lucky, will only be in the low millions. By the time Chaos Day actually arrives, will there be anything left of the city to cave? 

In an act of vengeance for the Apocalypse War, Sov agents set in motion a long-in-coming plan to destroy Meg One. The Judges chase the clues and the trails and track the suspects, but can they shut it down in time? Wagner expertly orchestrates the mounting tension and dread through complex plots and plot-lines, including the escape of one PJ Maybe. 

Look, I'm just a lad from an irish country village sometimes I have to admit that the subtleties of the British class system and its cultural affect are a bit beyond me. You have the upper class chaps from the private schools, and then you have the unnamed agent, who is not upper class and did not go to a private school, yet he's the biggest snob you'll encunter on these pages, with his elegant good taste in clothes, coffee and food. Unnamed agent, of course, is a young person in swinging London, so maybe he's just at the heart of the zeitgeist while the stodgier old British institutions endure in mouldering but unshifting implacability. Unnamed agent keeps bothering people about expenses and back-pay, maybe that's the real difference. 

Anyway, British boffins are leaking and defecting in weird numbers, and being kidnapped and put up for sale, Unnamed Agent is transferred to a slightly different department to help look into it, and things get very complicated from there. Pay attention, now, and it'll all make sense. 

A bishop dies, a new bishop is appointed, along with his wife and his curate and things in Barchester go absolutely hog wild, or as hog wild as it gets for Barchester. The new bishop's unpopular, the wife is domineering, the curate is scheming. This leaves our beloved gang from The Warden in doubt and confusion, the issue of the hospital warden returns, as does a family from Italy with ideas of their own, and lots of people become interested in or unjustly angry at the good widow Bold. It's like Hobbiton, if Hobbiton was real, and Anglican. 

This is rather good, in fact a lot better, more thoughtful and interesting than I expected, which is aside from the real qualities of the story and the characters. It engages with the legends and myths of Arthur in a fascinating way, elegaic, celebratory, but wry and humane amidst all the oddness and the wonders. The rag-tag found family survivors of Camelot after the death of Arthur, with the addition of a callow young would-be knight in stolen armour from a far-off island, try to work out what to do next. Will Arthur come back? Is there another king out there waiting to be found? Will God come back after deserting them at the end of the clamitous Grail Quest? Will the fairy lands invade, lead by Morgan Le Fay? Where is Lancelot? Where is Guinevere? Where is Merlin? Through a series of adventures that manage to be fruitless, shambolic and inconclusive, when they're not downright tragic, various answers are revealed. There are stories of fairies, stories of the wonders of God, stories that mix up both, stories of magic. It's all such a muddle, reflecting the muddle of Arthurian lore, yet Grossman cuts a clear narrative path through it all, to a surprisingly triumphant - yet at the same time cconsistently thematically inconclusive - conclusion, until a final moving moment of grace. An unexpectedly affecting love-letter to the once and future king. 

It's utterly charming to be carried away by the small drama of a gentle churchman adminitsering a rather cosy hospital established by a bequest in a will suddenly besieged by stern reformers who accuse him of living large off the proceeds. There's a lot of sly humour and some outright satire, but it's a gentle story of tradition and politics and conscience and it's not hard to see why these books have endured.