Night and fog: Alan Furst and the literature of espionage.

AuthorWalker, Martin
PositionBook Review

Alan Furst, ed., The Book of Spies: Anthology of Literary Espionage (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 374 pp., $14.95.

Alan Furst, Dark Voyage (New York: Random House, 2004), 256 pp., $24.95.

Blood of Victory (2003), 272 pp., $12.95.

Kingdom of Shadows (2001), 272 pp., $11.95.

Red Gold (2002), 288 pp., $11.95.

The World At Night (2002), 288 pp., $11.95.

The Polish Officer (2001), 304 pp., $12.95.

Dark Star (2002), 464 pp., $13.95.

Night Soldiers (2002), 480pp., $13.95.

A NEW NOVEL by Alan Furst has become an event. He has revitalized and perhaps even reinvented the genre of espionage fiction that had seemed to fade into irrelevance since the fall of the Soviet Union. At the same time, he has devised a compelling new form for the historical novel, set in Europe's 20th-century Dark Ages, from 1933-45. Over the past 15 years or so, he has built up a body of work that has slowly but steadily moved from cult favorite to worshipfully reviewed and now to bestseller. Rather like the Napoleonic naval tales of Patrick O'Brian, Furst's novels have become an interesting cultural phenomenon, not least because his plots are less than riveting and his characters (particularly the women) often wooden or sketchily drawn. But Furst, it is widely agreed, is a writer of genius when it comes to atmosphere, that elusive but magical mix of mood and time and place.

"Third Arrondissement--the old Jewish quarter", begins one characteristic passage about Paris.

Cobbled lanes and alleys, silence, deep shadow, Hebrew slogans chalked on the walls. Rue du Marche des Blancs-Manteaux, the smell of onions frying in chicken fat made Casson weak at the knees. He'd been living on bread and margarine and miniature packets of Bouillon Zip when he could afford the fifty centimes. This is a device Furst deploys often, using the atmospherics to advance the plot, to reveal a little more about the character. The place may be the same, but the character's circumstances have changed, and the world has shifted disconcertingly on its axis. In another example it is Paris again, and the same character, a modestly successful film producer named Jean Casson, who is on the run from the Gestapo, is in familiar surroundings, but exploring the wholly different topography of poverty:

Place Clichy. He sat at an outside table at a card and sipped the roast barley infusion the waiter brought him. Coffee, he thought, remembering it. Very expensive now, he didn't have the money. He stared out at the square. Clichy a little lost in the daylight, the cheap hotels and dance halls gray and crooked in the morning sun, but Casson didn't mind. He liked it--in the same way he liked deserted movie sets and winter beaches. Furst's scene is not always Paris, and even Paris is not always under German occupation. But even at decadent peace in the 1930s, with American heiresses parading at parties dressed only in diamonds, or English gentlewomen spies holding court at brasseries while waiters are shot in the lavatory, Paris is simply awaiting the coming of its jackbooted new masters. And almost effortlessly, Furst can achieve the same pitch-perfect sense of location at a Moscow spy school in 1932, in Warsaw as war breaks out, in Bucharest during a coup or in Istanbul as the spies bicker and plot their moves. He loves the lonely bustle of railway stations and ports, the anonymous intimacies of cheap hotels, the drama of even the most legal of border crossings. Furst opens his new novel, Dark Voyage, in a new location, but in his same old style.

In the port of Tangier, on the last day of April, 1941, the fall of the Mediterranean evening was, as always, subtle and slow. Broken cloud, the color of dark fire in the last of the sunset, drifted over the hills above the port, and street lamps lit the quay that lined the waterfront. A white city, and steep; alleys, souks, and cafes, their patrons gathering for love and business as the light faded away. Out in the harbor, a Spanish destroyer, the Almirante Cruz, stood at anchor among the merchant steamers, hulls streaked with rust, angular deck cranes hard silhouettes in the dusk. On board the tramp freighter Noordendam, of the Netherlands Hyperion Line, the radio room was like an oven and the Egyptian radio officer, known as Mr Ali, wore only a sleeveless undershirt and baggy silk underdrawers. He sat tilted back in his swivel chair, smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder and reading a slim, filthy novel in beautifully marbled covers. Silk and ivory. Mr. Ali is a man of private luxuries, and he is about to hear a QQQQ call on his radio, the merchant shipping distress call for "I am under enemy attack." Somewhere at sea, the submarines and bombers and E-boats pursue their crucial war of logistics, sinking the ships and tankers that fuel the armies in North Africa, and the good ship Noordendam is about to be recruited into the great game.

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