This morning I finished reading Alan Furst's latest book, The Foreign Correspondent. Furst is one of my all-time favorite writers (along with Terry Pratchett), and so when I was packing for the trip, his new book was an obvious thing to take along.
I discovered Alan Furst a couple years ago in the Penn bookstore, when I was in Philadelphia for a conference, and needed something to read in the evening. The covers caught my eye, and I bought The World at Night and The Polish Officer more or less on a whim, and I still reread both. I often travel with one of his books now: they're easy to slip into, and just the thing to read when I'm having dinner at some cool Polish restaurant in London, or soaking in the tub at the end of the day.
For those who don't know him, Furst's novels are all set in Europe, in the 1930s and early 1940s. He rarely ventures past 1942 or so, in part because the outcome of the war was still uncertain then, and Furst's novels are studies in decent but not superheroic people-- journalists, petty nobility, tramp steamer captains, waiters-- trying to keep their balance in universes defined by uncertainty. Often they're on the losing side of the struggle against fascism-- they're emigres who've been lucky enough to make it to Paris, or officers or diplomats from the smaller countries unlucky enough to be located between Germany and Russia-- and are forced by circumstances into intelligence work. The personal is political, as they say.
But while all of them eventually end up covertly fighting the Axis, none of them ever is responsible for the key act that turns the tide in World War II: they smuggle weapons, carry secret plans, do the occasional exfitration or rescue, but it's often not clear what difference their actions make. In part, the struggle itself is the point in Furst's books; but I think he also is making the point that modern history, and especially a titanic event like World War II, doesn't boil down to such turning-points. Total war pits economies and societies against each other, and his characters are but small cogs in those machines. At first I found this confusing, and a bit irritating; now, however, I find it completely convincing, and rather like the fact that the reader has to share the character's confusion about whether the tide will turn, and their sacrifices will matter.
If Furst's characters never really know whether whatever you've risked your life to do makes a difference to the war, however, you (the reader) know that sooner or later, they're going to end up in Paris, in one or another setting familiar from one of the earlier books. Furst clearly loves Paris; he can't stop writing about it. Most of The Foreign Correspondent takes place there, in the tangled world of Italian emigres and anti-fascist exiles. Paris is at once the City of Lights that beckons to everyone, and a thousand little mutually exclusive worlds of Balkan emigres and exiles, Soviet emigres, Polish emgires, etc etc. It's at once universal (both in its attractions and irritations) and highly particular. But after about ten books covering the same territory, he's now created a whole little alternative Paris-- or rather, a real Paris with an extra layer of fiction on top-- I can understand why he wouldn't want to tear it up.
The recycling of characters is a bit more problematic. Almost every new book now includes cameos by characters who were in earlier books. In the earlier books, this made a lot of sense, because it gave Furst a chance to fill in back-stories; but now I have mixed feelings about it. In The Foreign Correspondent, Carlo Weisz spends an evening with several people who were central in The World at Night and Dark Star; it's not a bad or unbelievable scene (Furst specializes in characters who travel in very wide circles, so it's not surprising that people from different books would meet up), but you learn nothing new about Nicholas Morath or Andre Szara or anyone else, and you do have to put up with the story of the bullet-hole in the mirror behind Table 14 yet again.
This particularly is a shame because there are some characters-- major ones like Count von Polyani, and minor ones like Lady Angela Hope-- who are fascinating and opaque, and could do with some fleshing out. If these scenes revealed a new aspect of a familiar character, they'd be very cool; but often they feel more like attempts to extend the franchise, making sure that the inventory in the House of Furst is put to good use.
Interestingly, the people who see the world in black and white are among the most dangerous: namely, the Communists. Furst's books make the appeal of Communism in the 1930s comprehensible: all the other major political parties and figures-- Churchill excepted, but he's only a quote in the newspaper-- are constitutionally incapable of standing up to fascism, even as they see Hitler marching through central Europe. The Communists, in contrast, are willing to take action and take losses: they know what they're up against, and don't screw around. But Furst isn't romantic about them, especially in Dark Star and Night Soldiers, the two books featuring prominent Soviet characters. The Communists aren't noble, just every bit as ruthless as Hitler and Mussolini. (Americans are almost completely absent in these books, but America comes out looking really good, given the horrors of the Axis and the cultured ambivalence of Western Europe.)
As much fun as the Paris books are, I'd love for Furst to broaden out more. Dark Voyage was off the map, and an excellent book as a result. I'd like to see him write a book set mainly in Berlin-- his style is well-suited to the menacing yet cultivated atmosphere of that city in the 1930s. Or write something set mainly in Vienna or Copenhagen or London, for that matter.
Technorati Tags: alan furst, books, foreign correspondent
Recent Comments