SPY NOVELS TEND TO FOCUS ON the few people who rise above self-interest, but the best also give voice to those who don't. Furst's latest novel begins with just such a specimen: Edvard Uhl, a plodding, middle-aged German engineer with business in Pola
nd who, on the eve of the Second World War, is seduced, then blackmailed into slipping military secrets to French intelligence. Uhl feels the occasional pang of fright, but not guilt. "In such chaotic times," his French handler reasons with him, "smart people understood that their first loyalty was to themselves and their families."
Characters who are braver or more far-sighted have a special doomed poignancy. Furst's tales, usually set in Paris and Eastern Europe and involving the Nazis or the Soviet secret police, are infused with the melancholy romanticism of Casablanca, and also a touch of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.
The Spies of Warsaw follows Jean-François Mercier de Boutillon, a French aristocrat and veteran of the First World War who, as the military attaché in Warsaw, studies German preparations for war. He runs agents and conducts some risky fieldwork of his own, but it doesn't take much for him to deduce that Hitler plans to go around the Maginot Line and invade through Belgium: articles in German military journals all but spell it out. Official France pays no heed.
Most assignments in historical thrillers are futile: readers know what's coming, while those characters who suspect the worst cannot fully comprehend the looming cataclysm even as they risk their lives trying to forestall it. The mission in a Furst novel is never as interesting as the men and women who volunteer – or are forced – to complete it. Polish counts, SS officers, French film producers, damsels and demimondaines are drawn into the action, but so are Jewish Bolsheviks, Slav partisans, Hungarian diplomats and Bulgarian fishermen.
From Lisbon to Malmo, Furst's novels are full of stark contrasts and weird congruities: he links the Bulgarian National Union marching along the Danube to expatriates in Paris ordering Champagne and another platter of oysters at the fashionable Brasserie Heininger. Characters who loom large in one novel reappear as minor figures in another, sometimes at the next table in Heininger's, where one mirror, cracked by a bullet, is left unrepaired as a memorial to the day thugs shot up the dining room and left the Bulgarian head waiter dead in the ladies room.
It is there, in fact, over choucroute and champagne, that Mercier briefs one of the few French generals who share his mistrust of Petain's defence strategy. The other, of course, is Charles de Gaulle, after whom Furst has clearly modelled Mercier; the fictional Mercier is an old friend of de Gaulle's and shares much of his life story.
Like de Gaulle, Mercier has aristocratic roots, graduated from military school in the class of 1912, spent time in a German prison camp during the First World War and helped Polish troops fight the Red Army in 1920. But whereas de Gaulle eventually returned to Paris, Furst's hero is redeployed to the French Embassy in Poland.
Furst's early works were thickly braided with history, subplots and dozens of vividly drawn minor characters. But even masters of the genre can slow down, stretch material and fall back on formula. His previous novel, The Foreign Correspondent, about an Italian newspaperman in Paris and Berlin, was not very convincing. The Spies of Warsaw is more satisfying, but it too seems thin: the plot spare, and Mercier – a tall, handsome, rich widower – is de Gaulle as Harlequin romance hero.
Furst is often likened to Graham Greene and John le Carré, in part because he delves so persuasively into the darker corners of history.
The Spies of Warsaw is not as richly complex as his earlier novels, but it is still smarter and more soulful than most espionage novels being written today.
The full article contains 665 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
