Review of Dark Star by Alan Furst (Phoenix, 1991)

A Polish Jew bought up in early twentieth century Russia, Pravda foreign correspondent André Szara is a born survivor.  But as Stalin conducts his purges and Europe teeters on the edge of war, staying alive requires both wits and luck.  As the Czech’s try to hold back Germany’s demands Szara is drawn into the clutches of the NKVD and a deadly rivalry between factions.  Set up as the deputy director of spy rings in Paris and Berlin, Szara criss-crosses Europe using his role as a journalist as cover.  But what he and his agents discover is as dangerous as the agency running them.  Szara thus resorts to a tricky game of piggy-in-the-middle, playing the various foes against each other while trying to find a way out of their various predicaments.  And in the meantime, Europe becomes ever more dangerous for Jews and edges towards war. 

Dark Star is the second book in Alan Furst’s Night Soldier’s series set in 1930s and 40s Europe.  Like the first in the series, the tale is an epic adventure traversing several countries including Belgium, Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, Poland and Russia, tracking the fortunes of André Szara, a foreign correspondent for Pravda and reluctant Russian spymaster, over a four year period.  Like the geography and time frame, the scope of the story is similarly expansive revolving around a conspiracy within the NKVD related to Stalin and his purges and German/Soviet relations pre-war.  Szara unwittingly stumbles into the middle of a secretive and deadly game of cat-and-mouse and is thrust into its centre.  Despite its expansiveness, Furst keeps a tight grip on the storytelling setting out a complex and layered plot in 400 pages.  It’s a remarkable feat given the richness in the descriptions of people, politics, situations and places and the well-developed characterisation.  Szara, in particular, and his various interactions and reflexive thoughts is nicely penned.  The plot does become a little convoluted and seemingly fanciful at times – Szara is certainly blessed with a lot of luck – but it is also compelling and very well contextualised with respect to the events and manoeuvring of the time.  The result is a gripping tale of espionage and a man living on the edge.

Review of Night Soldiers by Alan Furst (1988, Phoenix)

Vidin, Bulgaria, 1934, Khristo Stoianev witnesses his brother being kicked to death by local fascists.  A couple of weeks later he is sailing down the Danube towards the Black Sea on his way to Moscow.  There he starts to train as an agent for the NKVD, discovering a rare talent for field operations, and forming a close bond with a small group of other recruits.  After proving himself in a regime full of tests - some obvious, many less so - he is sent to Spain, where he works with Republican forces.  As Madrid teeters on the edge of falling to Franco’s forces, Khristo is warned that he is about to become the victim of one of Stalin’s purges and he takes flight to Paris.  There he finds work as a waiter, hoping that he can avoid those searching for him, and that the growing threat of war will dissipate.  But trouble always seems to find him and once again he has to rely on his tradecraft and old friends to survive.

Night Soldiers is the first in Alan Furst’s series of espionage novels that take place in 1930s and 40s Europe.  It’s an ambitious book charting the adventures of Khristo Stoianev between 1934 through to 1945, starting with the death of his younger brother, killed by Bulgarian fascists, and his recruitment by a Russian agent.  The story then switches to his training by the NKVD in Moscow, followed by a posting in Spain, then flight to pre-war Paris, followed by his war years.  Criss-crossing Europe and playing games with soldiers, spies, and others, Khristo lives a life full of incident whilst trying to stay in the shadows.  Furst is an excellent storyteller and the narrative is expressive and engaging throughout, and full of historical detail.  The characterisation is well realised, with some very nice interactions and points of departure and reconnection across the story.  The first half of the tale, up to Khristo’s time in Paris is excellent, being tight in focus and absorbing.  The second half, however, is much less convincing, with the storyline becoming stretched and thin in places and the denouement fanciful.  The story in the end became too expansive and reliant on unlikely threads and connections.  Nonetheless, Night Soldiers is a very good read, full of intrigue, adventure, friendship and dark encounters.

Review of Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst (Victor Gollancz, 2000)

March 1938 and former Hungarian cavalry officer, Nicholas Morath, travels Europe from his Paris base performing duties for his uncle, the diplomat, Count Polanyi.  Polanyi trades information, favours and conspiracy with the intelligence agencies and rogue agents of various countries as he tries to steer Hungary away from the clutches of the fascist Arrow Cross party and Nazi influence.  Morath drifts through the shadows, carrying information, aiding people cross borders, funding political activity, encouraging and cajoling reluctant patriots, and trading intelligence, traipsing between Paris, Antwerp, Vienna, Budapest, Romania, Ruthenia, Slovakia and Sudeten mountains for clandestine meetings.  It is clear the war is coming and the pressure is starting to build as Morath tries to ease political tensions, persuade his mother and sister to leave Hungary, maintain his relationship with Argentinian mistress, Cara, and keep his advertising business ticking over.

Furst’s novels are multi-layered, atmospheric affairs, full of crafted prose and understated plotlines.  Kingdom of Shadows is no different.  An awful lot happens in what is a normal length novel, as Morath criss-crosses Europe sliding in and out of various scrapes, and yet the pace seems leisurely and evocative.  Furst is very good at setting a scene, placing the reader into a landscape, and in providing in an economical fashion the contextual politics both locally and at a European scale.  In this sense, the reader comes to understand the fully geopolitical complexity of what was going on, without it swamping the narrative.  That takes some skill and yet Furst makes it look effortless.  As with his other novels, various strands are left somewhat ambiguous, a snapshot of one set of social relations at a particular place and time.  My only critique is sometimes the storytelling is a little too understated, especially when something truly dramatic is taking place (being shot at and chased has the same tone and feel as meeting a girlfriend), and there is a little too much ambiguity at times.  But when all said and done, Furst has a distinctive voice and its always a pleasure to read one of his books.

Review of The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst (Phoenix 2008)

Jean-Francois Mercier, the French military attaché to pre-war Poland, spends his time sweet talking the Polish military into buying French armaments, running various informants and spies, working the embassy cocktail circuit, and dealing with the internal politics of French military intelligence.  A veteran of the First World War, and contemporary of de Gaulle, Mercier is confident and resourceful.  When he foils the attempted abduction of Edvard Uhl, a German engineer and informant working on tank armament, he creates a hole in his knowledge network.  Uhl has suggested that the Wehrmacht is testing tanks in hilly, forest terrain.  Mercier needs to establish the veracity of the claim as it suggests that if the Germans attack France it will be through the Ardennes, a route deemed impossible by French high command.  Whilst plotting and undertaking his various excursions, he falls in love with a beautiful League of Nations lawyer, who is already in a relationship with a Russian journalist.  With the threat of war looming, Mercier must find a way to uncover the Nazis invasion plans and steal Anna from her present partner.

Furst excels at weaving the humdrum of everyday life through a larger geopolitical story spanning a number of countries.  And so it is with The Spies of Warsaw, which traces the convoluted life of Jean-Francois Mercier in the lead up to the Second World War, and his various dalliances and missions.  The plotting is slow and ponderous at times, and occasionally a little clunky, but Furst works to draw the reader in and tug them along, and as with previous books the narrative is highly informative, detailing the place, social relations and politics of the era.  The characterisation is, for the most part, excellent, though some of the Nazi thugs and French military personnel drift toward caricature at times.  The story itself was quite muted and although the tension should have been ratcheted up at certain points, as Mercier undertook dangerous missions, the narrative really lacked an edge.  The biggest let down, however, was the ending: the book very nearly sailing through the air as I read the last paragraph.  In fact, it would have been a stronger end if that paragraph had been omitted.  Overall, an enjoyable enough read, but not one of his best.

A poor hunt turns good

Last Thursday I had to travel into Dublin for a meeting. Since my pre-order splurge has still not arrived I went armed with a list of 15 books I wanted to read and took the opportunity to quickly browse in Murder Ink, Hodges Figgis and Waterstones. I managed to find only two of those desired, but I did manage to come away with four others, so I did feel somewhat sated.

One thing that strikes me about these covers is that they're all quite different, but with perhaps the exception of the rather generic Frost at Christmas, they're also very good and strong designs. There does seem to be a trend at the minute to have quite generic covers with 'atmospheric' tinted photos that bears no relation to the story (for example, Graham Hurley's The Price of Darkness that I reviewed recently), so these are a welcome change.





I'll be posting a review of Queenpin tomorrow and looking forward to tucking into the others in the coming days (although I'm saving the Frost book until Christmas).

Review of The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst (Phoenix, 2006)

Carlo Weisz is an Italian émigré in Paris, an exile from Mussolini’s fascist regime, who has found work as a foreign correspondent for the Reuters news agency. Whilst working on news assignments, he also finds time to write for Liberazione, a resistance newspaper that is cobbled together by like-minded émigrés, which is smuggled into Italy on a monthly basis. Weisz is in Spain witnessing the final days of civil war, interviewing fellow anti-fascist, Colonel Ferrara, when the Liberazione’s editor and his mistress, a French politician’s wife, are killed by agents of the OVRA, Mussolini’s secret police. On returning to France he agrees to become the new editor and is soon being pursued by British Intelligence, aware that war is coming and keen to expand Liberazione’s operations and to exploit the heroic pursuits of Colonel Ferrara who they’ve managed to smuggle to Paris. He’s also attracted the attentions of the French Surete and OVRA are harassing his close friends. While on assignment in Berlin, Weisz re-kindles his affair with the love of his life, the married aristocrat, Christa Von Schirren. Like Weisz she is engaged in dangerous resistance work and is unwilling to abandon her friends and country for love. Weisz is in over his head, a pawn in a game being played out on a European stage, but he’s determined to find a way to resist and rescue his love.

Alan Furst’s stories are thrillers with a small t. They grab and pull you along, but the storytelling is subtle and deep, avoiding melodrama and high tension plotting that often characterise capital T thrillers. They are sumptuous meals of carefully blended tastes, rather than the zip of junk food. And so it is with The Foreign Correspondent. As with all Furst novels, the prose is excellent, the narrative is well structured and textured, and his characters are complex, living multi-dimensional lives that are filled with difficult choices, conflicting emotions, contradictions, and doubts. In particular, Furst is very good at conveying a scene with few words, conjuring a mood, atmosphere, a sense of place or a character in a few sentences; at historically contextualizing the story, and at effortlessly working across scales – small lives and how they fit into a continental landscape of political turmoil. The result is a well told, multi-layered story that hooks you in early and makes you care about the characters and the politics, and at the end leaves you sated and looking forward to next meal at a Michelin starred restaurant. (I’m aware that one of the criticisms of Furst is that his stories have open or ambiguous endings, but for me that’s a plus – I’m tired of nice, neat endings that rarely happen in real life).

The largest geopolitical project in living memory

Over the past year I've read a number of novels set either just before or during the second world war including books by Alan Furst, Philip Kerr, John Lawton, Marek Krajewski, Hans Fallada, Carlo Lucarelli and others, along with some straight history books, but I haven't been keeping track of history itself. Today marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War and Germany's invasion of Poland (The Polish Officer by Furst does a good job of capturing the first few days as Poland desperately tries to put in place the basis for resistance knowing that it is being over-run).

Of course, I haven't pre-prepared a post, but I have been thinking about doing one based on a conversation I had with Martin Dodge last week, so I'm hastily moving it forward. At his Mapping Manchester exhibition we were talking about whether the John Ryland's library had survived the blitz intact and that led onto a discussion about bomb census maps. Martin kindly sent me on a link to a story that discussed them. I'd be really interested to take a look at them in more detail. I always remember the two old ladies who lived next door when I was growing up who used to describe going up Caldy Hill to watch Liverpool and Birkenhead docks being bombed. They were great story-tellers - you felt like you were there watching the cities burn.

The tracing below is from the Christmas raids of Dec 20-22, 1940 on the Merseyside area when 365 people died. It is designed to be overlain on a base map, hence why there are so few roads, etc. shown (much cheaper to keep a clean map and have lots of tracings). A daily tracing would be taken so that the pattern of bombing could be tracked over time.


The tracing shows the area between Bootle and Walton and plots 26 separate incidents in quite a confined area. Each incident is given a number, followed by the size and type of bomb, and the location of any unexploded ordnance. Collectively the maps reveal that by the end of the war Liverpool was the second most bombed UK city after London.

These other maps are of Brighton and Bristol.

I've been fascinated by the Second World War for a while now given it was the largest and most complex geopolitical event in modern history with many civil wars operating inside transnational wars, and political ideology explicitly reshaping territory and lives through violence. I've been trying to collect books that explains what went on different parts of the world, including some that traditionally get looked over (e.g. Aleutian Islands [the only bit of the USA occupied by the Japanese], Malta, Isle of Man, Ireland, etc) so I can have a go at mentally stitching the whole lot together.

I'll perhaps try to do something on Irish neutrality tomorrow. Ireland declared its neutrality on the 2nd Sept, the day before Britain and France declared war. It was a policy that was rigidly maintained right to the end of the war.

Lest we forget ...