Thursday, January 02, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Anti-Bond spy lit

By John Ziebell

War is hell, it's true, but only for those who can't avoid it.

Whenever and wherever the world abandons sanity there is always a protected caste, a class of people rich or well-connected enough that civil unrest for them is less a dire physical threat than an inconvenience. Politicos, artists, heiresses, business moguls and their concubines--and the spies, of course, who move among them. This was true in ancient Rome and it's true right now in Washington and it was true in 1940 in Europe's beleaguered capitals, the fictional turf of the evocative historical novelist Alan Furst.

Blood of Victory is Furst's seventh novel set, roughly speaking, against the background of Hitler's ascendancy. The books are classified as espionage fiction for lack of a better term. They surpass standard genre offerings in depth, accuracy and polish, but while the stories are intelligent and politically aware, it's Furst's skill as a writer that sets his work apart from lesser spy fables. Plots are intricate and elliptical; characters--especially the supporting cast--are well-drawn and totally credible; narratives are eloquent and rich in metaphor, eminently seductive. In Furst's language, unlike the chaotic human tangle of his re-created worlds, things rarely go astray.

Furst likes Central European exiles living in Paris: Russians, Poles, Hungarians. The protagonists of his novels are drawn from these ranks and are, though not problematically so, of a type; intelligent, urbane, just rich enough to have access to higher social circles. Above all, they are survivors. They might have been war heroes once, when it was required of them, but that was years ago. What matters to them now is the quality of their wines and suits and automobiles and, more than anything else, exotically ornamental women half their age.

Ilya Serebin is one of these. Decorated veteran of the Russian revolution and the war against Poland, a writer of minor significance embraced by the Russian literary community, a professional exile who escaped to Paris before the Stalinist purges that disappeared so many of his friends. His grandfather's fortune is safe in Switzerland, and even under Nazi rule Paris is a kinder, gentler place than those from which most of its refugees have fled. It would seem that there's not a single good reason for him to risk all that by participating in a half-baked attempt to slow Hitler's forward progress, but, of course, that's what he does.

The "blood" of the title refers to oil, the mineral element most essential to success in modern warfare; more specifically to the Romanian oil reserves near Ploesti, which were needed to fuel Hitler's forces just as they had fueled the German military in World War I. A seemingly unconnected chain of circumstances finds Serebin becoming the key figure in a plan to disrupt, however temporarily, the delivery of that product.

This isn't the Hollywood version of a spy's life, but one that's much more real. Leverage is applied for no apparent reason; people betray others for no apparent gain; trust and truth are abstractions, if not outright fantasies. Secrets are revealed slowly, a fragment at a time. When knowledge is the only real currency, its value becomes brutally transient. Shootouts and narrow escapes do occur, but they're rare; real spies like Serebin spend half their time waiting for something to happen and the other half worrying about being sold out.

Things were tough in 1940, and Hitler's minions weren't the only irredeemable jackals operating in Europe; everybody north of the Mediterranean had some kind of homegrown fascist social club, and one thing they shared was a love for secret police. The faceless nature of military oppression is tangible in Furst's prose. There's a strong validation of paranoia and wariness, an acknowledgement that David could lose to Goliath in today's world. Tyrants aren't overcome by commando raids or carpet bombing, but finally by the collective altruistic actions of ordinary people who believe in the promise of a better life. Or so the author would have us believe.

And he does a good job. Furst knows just how to push the right emotional buttons, but he's rarely too heavy-handed. His ear for dialogue is dead on, and even the sex scenes are graceful. Whether it's a decadent nightclub or a Metro trip through Paris or fascist rioting in Bucharest, Furst's descriptions are highly visual. His images are vaguely familiar and somehow comfortable, echoing a compendium of famous period photographs from, say, the Magnum Agency archives. Very often narrative vignettes don't end, but seem to fade into cinematic dissolves.

Furst, a journalist who lived in Paris, is obviously a connoisseur and a fiend for research. It's easy to cheat when you're writing about 60 years ago. Does it really matter what was on the menu of better Parisian restaurants during the Nazi occupation, or where the demimondaines shopped for their underwear? Yes. That's why we believe him. It's the perfect, moody, resonant tone of Blood of Victory that allows us to forgive everything else--even the author's insistent, though in this novel somewhat mitigated, misuse of commas.