Night and fog: Alan Furst and the literature of espionage

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.

The plots and action of Furst's novels focus heavily on the importance of transport. Blood of Victory (originally published in 2002) is about the attempt to block the passage of oil barges from the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti up the Danube, by blocking the river at the narrows called the Iron Gates. Red Gold (1999) is about the attempt by a small group of would-be resistance officers in the Vichy regime to forge an alliance with the French communist underground, the Franc Tireurs et Partisans, by shipping them large stocks of weapons from arms depots in Vichy-held Syria and Lebanon. In return, the communists are to help block the French canal system to stop gasoline from the French refineries at Rouen from heading south to Marseilles and across to Rommel's Panzers in North Africa.

The time, April 1941, is pivotal, falling within that final three-month period when Britain stood alone against Hitler before the invasion of the Soviet Union in June. It is before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December plunged America into the war. These are the months of Hitler's invasion of Serbia and Greece, of Britain abandoning the prospect of overwhelming victory in North Africa to rush tanks and troops and ships to a doomed effort to help the beleaguered Greeks. It is the springtime of coups in Romania, of the paratroop assault on the island of Crete, and of the summer when Operation Barbarossa suddenly turned the Communist Parties of Occupied Europe from Hitler's sullen allies into his fierce enemy, the year when the Resistance became real. For Americans, a world away from Furst's novels, December 7, 1941 is the day that will live in infamy. For occupied Europe, it was the day Hitler promulgated the Nacht und Nebel decree. The phrase translates as Night and Fog, and it was the infamous order that said anyone resisting German authority was simply to disappear, with no information on their fate. No word would come from prison or the camps or the grave; better not to risk oneself by even daring to ask.

FURST WRITES beautifully, in what has become the classic, spare style of the genre. Take the following three examples:

   The boat left the Quai de la Joliette in
   Marseilles harbour about midnight. It was
   new moon and the stars were bright and
   their light hard. The coast with its long garlands
   of gas lamps faded slowly away. The
   lighthouses emerging from the black water,
   with their green and red eyes, were the last
   outposts of France, sleeping under the stars
   in her enormous, dishonored nakedness,
   humiliated, wretched and beloved.

   The night was stormy and the wind blew
   cold from the mountains, but the stodgy little
   steamer plodded sturdily through the
   choppy waters of the lake. A scudding rain,
   just turning into sleet, swept the deck in
   angry gusts, like a nagging woman who cannot
   leave a subject alone.

   Earlier that day there'd been fighting on
   the waterfront, a band of fascist Iron Guards
   pursued by an army unit loyal to Antonescu.
   So said the barman at the dockside tavern.
   Intense volleys of small arms fire, a few hand
   grenades, machine guns, then silence.
   Serebin listened carefully, calculated the distance,
   ordered a glass of beer, stayed where
   he was. Safe enough. Serebin was forty-two,
   this was his fifth war, he considered himself
   expert in the matter of running, hiding, or
   not caring. Later, on his way to the pier,
   he'd come upon a telegraph office with its
   windows shattered, a man in uniform flung
   dead across the threshold of the open door,
   which bumped against his boot as the
   evening wind tried to blow it shut.
   Roumania had just signed the Tripartite
   Pact with Germany, political assassinations
   were daily events, civil war on the way, one
   poor soul had simply got an early start.

The last is from Furst's Blood of Victory; the first is Arthur Koestler; and the second is from Somerset Maugham's Ashenden, which Furst suggests in his introduction to the new Anthology of Literary Espionage might be the best spy story ever written. There is a common voice at work, laconic and world-weary, fatalistic but pressing on. It is a voice that owes some of its language to Hemingway, and some to Camus, an existential attitude of the genre that has become a tradition that Furst respects. He uses the Koestler extract as an epigram in one of his books, and Maugham is one of the writers he chooses for the anthology. Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, John Le Carre, Charles McCarry and Eric Ambler pick themselves. Other selections are idiosyncratic: Baroness Orczy, creator of The Scarlet Pimpernel, is an unusual choice, and Maxim Gorky verges on the bizarre. Anthony Burgess is included, presumably to provide comic relief.

In his distinctly unrevealing introduction to the anthology, Furst remarks that characters in spy novels

   work at the blurred edge of the Manichean
   universe, where Good struggles with Evil for
   the destiny of humankind. Work, often
   enough, is plagued by moral uncertainty, and
   always in secrecy--thus always in danger, in
   foreign lands, living the sort of independent
   and adventurous existence that may lead to
   love or lechery or both.

Furst tells us far more of what he really thinks in a brief but devastatingly acute passage on John Le Carre, for whom the Cold War was "44 years of obliquity, treachery, lies and counter lies--the perfect battleground for the Le Carre style, which is dark, ironic, and bristling with aristocratic contempt, a very sharp tool encountered far more agreeably in literature than in daily life."

Furst, who has no professional intelligence background, notes that those who do (Greene, Le Carre, Maugham and McCarry)

   write with a kind of cloaked anger, a belief
   that the world is a place where political
   power is maintained by means of treachery
   and betrayal, and worse, that this gloomy fact
   of life has as much to do with elemental
   human nature as it does with the ambitions of
   states. By the final paragraph, it's evident that
   victory is not a moral triumph, and with a few
   turns of the globe and changes in politics, no
   longer victory. Not good.

That is not Furst's view at all. His characters are the good guys, whatever wicked deeds and betrayals they might perform. There is none of the squalid moral equivalency of Greene or Le Carre. This is refreshing; we know where we are. They may be bumbling, incompetent, out of their depth, but Furst's heroes believe in the historic and human necessity of fighting against Hitler, or rebelling against Stalin. Furst's first effort, Night Soldiers (1988), emerged from a travel-journalism assignment to the Danube in the mid-1980s, as the Soviet empire began to crumble from within. This first novel, a clumsy effort by later standards, begins with a Bulgarian village's local fascist group bullying its enemies. A boy is killed; his brother is recruited by the communists, taken to Moscow and trained to become a Comintern agent. He is the sent to Spain's civil war, falls in love with a young American woman and becomes disillusioned with the betrayals and anti-Trotskyist purges of his Stalinist masters and escapes to France, and after many adventures is drawn into the French resistance. The second novel, Dark Star (1990), covers much the same ground, with a thoughtfully drawn Russian Comintern agent and Pravda foreign correspondent, who again grows disillusioned with the NKVD'S internal purges.

The third novel, The Polish Officer (1994), marked the coming of the mature and distinctive Alan Furst, with its focus on one of the minor players of the war. Most World War II novels and spy tales have concentrated on the heavyweights, on British and German intelligence, or the Russians and Americans. Furst has mined the other belligerents to brilliant effect. The Polish Officer begins with the doomed defense of Warsaw in September 1939, and then our hero, Alexander de Milja of the cartographic service of the Polish general staff, has to organize the evacuation of the central bank's gold reserves. (A distinctive feature of Furst's writing is that he understands the importance of logistics and of money in war and espionage; a sub-plot of Night Soldiers is the Russian ploy to secure the gold reserves of republican Spain.) With Poland overrun and occupied, he then has to make the country useful by building its own intelligence service in a way that supports the essential British ally while preserving some element of independence.

The fourth and fifth novels, The World At Night (1996) and Red Gold, feature the French film producer Jean Casson. The sixth, Kingdom of Shadows (2000), takes us back to pre-war Paris in the appeasement years. Nicholas Morath, a young Hungarian aristocrat who runs a small advertising agency, is recruited into a small anti-Nazi intelligence operation by Count Janos Polanyi, his uncle. Polanyi, a very loosely drawn character who reappears in other novels, works closely with British intelligence. The seventh novel, Blood of Victory (2002), introduces the exiled Russian writer I. A. Serebin, whose nationality makes him a neutral in that year between the fall of France and the invasion of Russia, and thus unusually free to travel. He is also recruited by Polanyi. Serebin's mistress, the wife of a complaisant French diplomat based in Trieste, calls him "mon ours" (my bear) and is one of Furst's few successful women characters. Most seem there to provide bedmates, romantic interest and some reasonably dignified sex scenes. But then, who needs classic characterization, when Furst can conjure so much of a woman from the handful of words he uses to describe Serebin's previous mistress, Tamara? "They'd had two love affairs; at age 15 and again at 35. Then Russia had taken her, as it took people."

It is a curiosity of Furst's writing that some of his minor characters are far more memorable than his stars. The blackmailing of one of Casson's mistresses, a partly Jewish woman, by a colleague in a Paris travel agency, is a memorable and wholly convincing sub-plot. Other minor figures like Weiss, one of the top communist agents in Paris, who simply fell into the Soviet service after being released from a prisoner-of-war camp by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, are equally credible. Weiss, a bureaucrat of the underground who obeys Moscow's orders even when he thinks them foolish, remains a decent fellow; even when launching the killings of random German officers in the knowledge that they will lead to bloody reprisals. Other minor characters--a Jewish scriptwriter who can churn out charming resort hotel comedies while on the run, a Dutch naval officer trying desperately to find some tools and human assets that will make him useful to the British, a Romanian professor who gets shot by a random bullet in a coup--stick in the memory.

FURST'S NOVELS work, and satisfy on a very high level, because the real character is Europe itself, a sprawling yet controlled and familiar landscape being subjected to the indignities of war and occupation. It is Europe as victim, as pawn in the ideological clash between Nazism and communism, while Furst's characters strive not to be victims of history and to retain some sense of self, of choice and of decency even when so little of their fate is in their own hands. Because of the intensity of the morality play, World War II has become to the modern West what the Troy tales were to classical civilization--instructive drama as well as founding myth--and this is the landscape that Furst has made his own.

He is not the first in this field. In Hollywood, the Epstein brothers saw the opportunity even as the war raged, and Humphrey Bogart played his finest role as Rick, a character who would be entirely at home in a Furst novel. As Walter Shapiro noted in a review in Time, "Nothing can be like watching Casablanca for the first time, but Furst comes closer than anyone has in years." And as master of the ambience of Europe in the years of 1933-45, a time defined by the grim shadows of Hitler and Stalin, he has won a devoted body of admirers. They include some formidable modern novelists. In reviews in Britain, Robert Harries (of Enigma fame) has called him matchless, and William Boyd says, "in the world of the espionage thriller, Alan Furst is in a class of his own." The Berkeley economist Brad de Long gives copies of Furst's novels to his new graduate students, to emphasize the brute power of barbarism and the vulnerability of civilization. Newt Gingrich, a compulsive reader whose prolific reviews on ( Amazon.com are worth following, sees him as "our pre-eminent historical-espionage novelist."

"Anyone seeking to understand the horrors of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and North Korea should read Furst's books", Gingrich recommends.

   In the end, the horror of one man or woman
   being destroyed and tortured by another
   within a state system of power is remarkably
   the same even if the reason is different. Furst
   clearly grasps this larger moral issue: 'Hitler
   wasn't mad, he was evil', he writes. 'And that
   was a notion educated people didn't like, it
   offended their sense of the rational world.
   Yet it was true. And just as true of his mirror
   image, Stalin.' This is the insight that made
   Churchill historic and Chamberlain impotent
   in dealing with evil. This is the insight that
   enabled Ronald Reagan to bring down the
   Soviet Union. And it is this kind of insight
   that makes Man Furst worth reading.

After its extraordinary flowering in the 1960s and 1970s, we have come to think of the spy novel as the distinctive literary form of the Cold War. In the absence of direct hostilities, the war of the shadows and of John Le Carre's Berlin Rules became a hospitable platform for cheap thrillers and serious novels alike, for dashing heroes and crude villains, for simplistic anti-communism and the most complex subtleties of betrayal. There were certain similarities to the form, even across the Iron Curtain. The West had its James Bond and the Russians had Julian Semyonov's Stirlitz, the ultimate Soviet spy, who drove a magnificent Horch sports car very fast, listened to Edith Piaf, and single-handedly frustrated the dastardly Anglo-American plot to sign a separate peace with Hitler. His Seventeen Moments of Spring, in which Colonel Maksim Isaev masqueraded as Standartenfuhrer Stirlitz of the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (the intelligence arm of the SS), became perhaps the most successful example of genuinely popular culture that the Soviet Union ever produced. Streets emptied and Aeroflot planes delayed their flights when the TV series was broadcast.

But the Cold War was not the only period in which the spy novel flowered. The first widespread appearance of the genre came in England in the years before 1914, as war with the Kaiser's Germany became more and more likely. Erskine Childers's The Riddle Of The Sands, the 1903 tale of a yachting trip to the Friesian Islands that uncovers a secret German invasion plan, is sometimes cited as the first herald of the new genre. There were many others. Sherlock Holmes investigated the loss of naval secrets. Although rooted in the great games of India and Central Asia rather than Europe, Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) still has claims to be the finest of all novels of espionage. But Edwardian best-sellers like E. Phillips Oppenheim's The Great Impersonation and The Double Traitor are more typical of the wave of popular spy fiction. There was a second wave in the years before 1939, with Graham Greene's Stamboul Train and The Confidential Agent and Eric Ambler's A Mask for Dimitrios.

The point is that revivals of the spy novel as a genre do not come out of nowhere. They are products of particular times, when the international situation heats up, when war seems near, when civilization is in peril and the battle in the shadows is already joined. Such, of course, has been the current condition since September 11, 2001, finally ending that decade-long holiday from history after the Soviet collapse. Once again, the West faces attack from an enemy who can be neither bought off nor placated. We have no choice in this war that has been thrust upon us. Furst has an acute sense of the responses this can provoke. One of his best characters, Jean Casson, is watching a troop of French cavalry trotting through Paris in May 1940, just after the German attacks had begun.

   Now the band played the Marseillaise and
   Casson held his hand over his heart. War
   with Germans, he thought, it doesn't stop.
   They'd lost in 1870, won--barely--in 1918,
   and now they had to do it again. A nightmare:
   an enemy attacks, you beat him, still he
   attacks. You surrender, still he attacks.
   Casson's stomach twisted, he wanted to cry,
   or to fight, it was the same feeling.

It is thus at once fitting and no accident that Furst's novels have made the transition from succes d'estime to bestseller status in the last three years as we have come to understand that the enemy is a new kind of fascism, in a new kind of war that must be fought in the shadows and alleys as well as the airwaves and cards and mosques and minds. Furst himself understands this. As one of Casson's chiefs tells him in Red Gold: "The sad truth is a country can't survive unless people fight for it." Furst explicitly understands this connection to 9/11, as he made clear recently in an interview with the magazine The Writer. In Blood of Victory, one of the characters declares: "If you don't stand up to evil, it eats you first and kills you later, but not soon enough." In his interview, Furst commented:

   I put that passage in after 9/11 as a memorial.
   I did it absolutely on purpose. That was a
   late fix. At the end of the day after that experience,
   I thought, well, it's the truest thing I
   know to say. I'm not a public spokesman or
   anything like that, but I do write books and
   they are publicly read. That gives me the
   right to say something sometimes that's close
   to my heart. That's exactly what I did. The
   world is a place where good struggles with
   evil. You can see it. Turn on the television.
   It's not far away from you. And that has been
   true in all history. When didn't you have terribly
   negative things going on, evil people,
   brutal things, catastrophes, predatory people?
   Then you have heroes who come along
   and try to save the day. To save is such an
   elemental part of humanity. When you see
   how 9/11 finally is playing itself out ... we
   have chosen to think about it in terms of the
   fireman and policeman. That is the emotional
   final paragraph of 9/11. That's the hopeful
   thing [we] found in it--that there are people
   who are heroic. What does it mean to be
   heroic? It means you try to save people when
   they need to be saved. My books are about
   that all of the time. None of these people
   have to do what they do. None of my heroes.
   I always give them an option.

Martin Walker is editor-in-chief of United Press International.

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