Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

 

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The spy novel is a genre not always considered literary. But its emphasis on tensely dramatic moments, clandestine romantic scenes, and characters who fight the good fight lend it the potential for beautiful and insightful writing. Exploiting all of these possibilities is Alan Furst, who, although not yet enjoying the fame of other writers of elegant espionage, such as John le Carré, is a skillful creator of novels with the silken feel of film noir.

A native of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Mr. Furst, 60 and Jewish, grew up surrounded by refugees from Hitler’s Europe. These people – those marginalized by World War II – fill his novels. And as an ardent Francophile who lived in the country of his affections for many years, he has made Paris the epicenter of many of his plots. Now a Long Island resident, he claims that his writing was inspired by a trip to the Soviet Union, during which he was shocked to see the fear its people lived under. Mr. Furst’s past five books, like his latest work, Kingdom of Shadows, revolve around Paris and depict intrigue in Europe, primarily between 1937 and 1941. In them, Mr. Furst’s subjects, like the individuals he saw earlier in life, have been the victims of the peculiar, fascist evil of their time.

In his most recent book, Nicholas Morath, a Hungarian aristocrat, is recruited by his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, in 1938 covertly to undermine Nazi-supported plans for toppling their country’s government. Morath is an apolitical bon vivant who, like his uncle, lives in Paris’ expatriate community during the years leading up to World War II. He did, however, fight in World War I, and has little choice when Polanyi asks for his service once again.

In keeping with the title, which succinctly evokes Europe’s pre-war confusion, this book deliberately obscures details. Exactly what the finer points of Morath’s mission are, we never find out. And just as all Europe is a thoroughly confused place in the months before the War, so is Morath’s existence. His mother stays, at her peril, in Budapest and appears to have little contact with her son. The borders of Hungary have shifted periodically since the First World War, thereby dispossessing the Moraths of their ancestral estate. While living in Paris, Morath also sees the public’s complacency before the impending catastrophe he tries to help avert. The more dire the political situation becomes, the more mangled European thinking is; existing at a psychological distance from, yet in the middle of, the events is Nicholas Morath.

One of the remarkable features of this book is indeed its understanding of the tone of Europe during this time. Furst evokes the era’s exasperation with passing references to Hitler’s activities – "Poland, that’s what he’s screaming about now," Polanyi tells Morath. Early on in the book, Morath reflects that "It had a life of its own, the war, like an immense rumor, that wound its way through the newspapers, the cafés, and the markets. But somehow, in Polanyi’s voice, it was fact, and Morath, for the first time believed it." The mind-set of Europe before the war is crystallized becaues the reader understands it from Morath’s perspective, whose uncle’s assignments force him to grapple with this subject that most avoid in exhaustion.

While the novel’s Europeans despairingly lack a moral perspective on politics, Morath remains heroic. But what keeps him from becoming an implausible knight in shining armor is Furst’s inclusion of the less savvy aspects of his social class. When Morath and the baroness Frei, a family friend and mother figure for him, discuss Prince Hrubal, who we understand has a background similar to the Moraths, they speak bluntly. The baroness tells Morath that Hrubal, who has a mania for charity, is "an aristocrat of the blood trying to become an aristocrat of the heart. ‘Poor man. Thirty generations of ancestors, brutal and bloody as the day is long, roasting rebels on iron thrones and God knows what, and only one lifetime for redemption.’"

Not only do these well-intentioned members of the nobility avoid arrogant presumptions about dynastic duties or entitlements, they have personal flaws as well, which render their conflicting traits during an ambiguous period. Polanyi, for instance, who works tirelessly to defeat the Hitler he sees as evil, employs both high-priced call girls and questionable people management strategies, like shooting a defector in his office. At the same time, scenes of dramatic assassinations and gracefully described romance, possible opposites in terms of mood, unite to give it the sumptuous, attention-holding feel of intrigue. Because of his intelligence work, for instance, Morath is forever missing liaisons with his Argentine mistress, Cara. He describes her as "Small, perfect, wicked, slippery," and after having spent a night falling in and out of sleep waiting for him, she half-laments that her dreams were "Like blue movies, Nicky, my fantasies, good and bad, but it was you in every one of them." One can hear the small, perfect, wicked, and slippery pouting while still thinking of the latest blast from a gun.

Contributing to the feel of his book is Furst’s unusual skill for constructing a scene with perfect tweaks of irony. As Morath is on his way to the baroness Frei’s house on an obscure Parisian street, the narrator tells us that the buildings there are numbered "in a sequence whose logic was known only to God and the postman." Going home later, he passes a doorman who holds "a black umbrella in the final hours of life on a windy night." In separate incidents, Furst expresses the gallows humor of a world on the brink of war. While Morath hides from a group of trigger-happy soldiers in a Czech forest, his companion fires a gun in response to their opponents, a "single shot (that) had made an eloquent statement, had altered the social contract: sorry, no free killing tonight." Throughout the book, Furst maintains that same, albeit oxymoronic, charmingly detached view as he gently stitches his narrative together. What he gives us in Kingdom of Shadows is a rendering of the spy novel’s captivating intrigue and unlikely drama, but one framed with literature’s grace.