The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst
Random House 2008 266 pp.
Copyright Steven E. Alford
By April 1938, the Anschluss was complete: in a plebiscite, Austrian voters had
decided by a landslide to create the Austro-German union. In Spain, Vinaroz had been overrun by
Francos army, effectively isolating Castile. Despite these ominous events, in Warsaw the eternal round of
diplomatic parties continued: pleasantries exchanged between sips of champagne
among the French, Russians, Germans, and Poles, in language that concealed
plans, hopes, and fears for the future of Europe.
To
the Poles, of course, anxiety about their fate was nothing new. For over one hundred years prior to the
end of World War I during the time of the Partition, their beloved land had
been a political football. Yet, with the rebirth of Poland in 1918, the new
borders left a million Germans in Poland and two million Poles in Germany,
which guaranteed that the bad blood would stay bad. The borders had been drawn and re-drawn so many times that
a man would rise from his bed in Poland, then go into his kitchen for
breakfast in Germany.
Enter
Colonel Jean-Franois Mercier de Boutillon,
forty-six, minor aristocrat, widower, former colleague
of Charles de Gaulle, and, by 1937, French military attach in Warsaw. In other words, a
spy.
French-friendly
Poland was an ideal post: here information could be gathered and exchanged
among future combatants without the bother of law-breaking,
as everyone was on neutral ground.
Merciers days are taken up with routine information gathering, his
nights with the glittering boredom of cocktail receptions. Two things motivate Mercier: the
equally exciting promises of new love and new information that might reveal the
Nazis plans for France.
Widowed
for three years, Mercier has no intentions of dallying with anyone other than
the occasional prostitute until he spies, as it were, the lawyer Anna Szarbek, beautiful, blonde, and not quite single, living
with a Russian journalist. While
plotting to pry her from the Russians grip, he has other plans afoot with the
Black Front, an underground group of nationalist Germans opposed to
Hitler. Pistol shots ringing out
in the night on cobbled city streets, a desperate woman banging on his door in
the bone-chilling darkness, an angry German officer ambushing him with a riding
crop and two large friends, Merciers life rockets from intense boredom to
life-threatening attacks at the turn of a street corner.
Most
of us are suckers for the story of the ordinary person caught up in
extraordinary circumstances, in which he/she discovers reserves of competence
and commitment to solve the problem.
Artists like the idea too—look at middle Elmore Leonard, to say
nothing of Hitchcock. The most
compelling element of this scenario involves removing some grand moral
imperative and replacing it with something smaller and more human. The character acts not to save the
nation, someones virtue, or an endangered child, but just because . . . thats
what one does. This leaves us with
an intriguing speculative lacuna: why risk your life for That?
Alan Fursts books fall into this
category. Sure, its World War II
and the fate of the West hangs in the balance, but his characters (despite
their sophisticated backgrounds) are more concerned with getting into the
railway office after midnight, or not running the boat theyre piloting onto
the reef, or getting the documents from here to there. His characters are so compelling
because they respond to events as you or I might; yet the consequences of their
acts reveal them to be heroes of the highest order.
Comparisons have dogged Fursts
publishing career: is he the next Eric Ambler or John le Carr? With The Spies of Warsaw, his tenth novel, we can hopefully ignore the
comparisons and state that Furst has reinvented the
spy thriller and made it his own.
Like Graham Greenes Greenland, Furst has
brought us in these novels an exotic world of sex and intrigue that is
instantly recognizable as Furstland. The
Spies of Warsaw adds another layer to the world he has created, and this
engaging historical fiction should be read by anyone who loves a compelling
story well told.