Review of The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst (Phoenix 2008)

Jean-Francois Mercier, the French military attaché to pre-war Poland, spends his time sweet talking the Polish military into buying French armaments, running various informants and spies, working the embassy cocktail circuit, and dealing with the internal politics of French military intelligence.  A veteran of the First World War, and contemporary of de Gaulle, Mercier is confident and resourceful.  When he foils the attempted abduction of Edvard Uhl, a German engineer and informant working on tank armament, he creates a hole in his knowledge network.  Uhl has suggested that the Wehrmacht is testing tanks in hilly, forest terrain.  Mercier needs to establish the veracity of the claim as it suggests that if the Germans attack France it will be through the Ardennes, a route deemed impossible by French high command.  Whilst plotting and undertaking his various excursions, he falls in love with a beautiful League of Nations lawyer, who is already in a relationship with a Russian journalist.  With the threat of war looming, Mercier must find a way to uncover the Nazis invasion plans and steal Anna from her present partner.

Furst excels at weaving the humdrum of everyday life through a larger geopolitical story spanning a number of countries.  And so it is with The Spies of Warsaw, which traces the convoluted life of Jean-Francois Mercier in the lead up to the Second World War, and his various dalliances and missions.  The plotting is slow and ponderous at times, and occasionally a little clunky, but Furst works to draw the reader in and tug them along, and as with previous books the narrative is highly informative, detailing the place, social relations and politics of the era.  The characterisation is, for the most part, excellent, though some of the Nazi thugs and French military personnel drift toward caricature at times.  The story itself was quite muted and although the tension should have been ratcheted up at certain points, as Mercier undertook dangerous missions, the narrative really lacked an edge.  The biggest let down, however, was the ending: the book very nearly sailing through the air as I read the last paragraph.  In fact, it would have been a stronger end if that paragraph had been omitted.  Overall, an enjoyable enough read, but not one of his best.

A poor hunt turns good

Last Thursday I had to travel into Dublin for a meeting. Since my pre-order splurge has still not arrived I went armed with a list of 15 books I wanted to read and took the opportunity to quickly browse in Murder Ink, Hodges Figgis and Waterstones. I managed to find only two of those desired, but I did manage to come away with four others, so I did feel somewhat sated.

One thing that strikes me about these covers is that they're all quite different, but with perhaps the exception of the rather generic Frost at Christmas, they're also very good and strong designs. There does seem to be a trend at the minute to have quite generic covers with 'atmospheric' tinted photos that bears no relation to the story (for example, Graham Hurley's The Price of Darkness that I reviewed recently), so these are a welcome change.





I'll be posting a review of Queenpin tomorrow and looking forward to tucking into the others in the coming days (although I'm saving the Frost book until Christmas).

Review of The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst (Phoenix, 2006)

Carlo Weisz is an Italian émigré in Paris, an exile from Mussolini’s fascist regime, who has found work as a foreign correspondent for the Reuters news agency. Whilst working on news assignments, he also finds time to write for Liberazione, a resistance newspaper that is cobbled together by like-minded émigrés, which is smuggled into Italy on a monthly basis. Weisz is in Spain witnessing the final days of civil war, interviewing fellow anti-fascist, Colonel Ferrara, when the Liberazione’s editor and his mistress, a French politician’s wife, are killed by agents of the OVRA, Mussolini’s secret police. On returning to France he agrees to become the new editor and is soon being pursued by British Intelligence, aware that war is coming and keen to expand Liberazione’s operations and to exploit the heroic pursuits of Colonel Ferrara who they’ve managed to smuggle to Paris. He’s also attracted the attentions of the French Surete and OVRA are harassing his close friends. While on assignment in Berlin, Weisz re-kindles his affair with the love of his life, the married aristocrat, Christa Von Schirren. Like Weisz she is engaged in dangerous resistance work and is unwilling to abandon her friends and country for love. Weisz is in over his head, a pawn in a game being played out on a European stage, but he’s determined to find a way to resist and rescue his love.

Alan Furst’s stories are thrillers with a small t. They grab and pull you along, but the storytelling is subtle and deep, avoiding melodrama and high tension plotting that often characterise capital T thrillers. They are sumptuous meals of carefully blended tastes, rather than the zip of junk food. And so it is with The Foreign Correspondent. As with all Furst novels, the prose is excellent, the narrative is well structured and textured, and his characters are complex, living multi-dimensional lives that are filled with difficult choices, conflicting emotions, contradictions, and doubts. In particular, Furst is very good at conveying a scene with few words, conjuring a mood, atmosphere, a sense of place or a character in a few sentences; at historically contextualizing the story, and at effortlessly working across scales – small lives and how they fit into a continental landscape of political turmoil. The result is a well told, multi-layered story that hooks you in early and makes you care about the characters and the politics, and at the end leaves you sated and looking forward to next meal at a Michelin starred restaurant. (I’m aware that one of the criticisms of Furst is that his stories have open or ambiguous endings, but for me that’s a plus – I’m tired of nice, neat endings that rarely happen in real life).

The largest geopolitical project in living memory

Over the past year I've read a number of novels set either just before or during the second world war including books by Alan Furst, Philip Kerr, John Lawton, Marek Krajewski, Hans Fallada, Carlo Lucarelli and others, along with some straight history books, but I haven't been keeping track of history itself. Today marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War and Germany's invasion of Poland (The Polish Officer by Furst does a good job of capturing the first few days as Poland desperately tries to put in place the basis for resistance knowing that it is being over-run).

Of course, I haven't pre-prepared a post, but I have been thinking about doing one based on a conversation I had with Martin Dodge last week, so I'm hastily moving it forward. At his Mapping Manchester exhibition we were talking about whether the John Ryland's library had survived the blitz intact and that led onto a discussion about bomb census maps. Martin kindly sent me on a link to a story that discussed them. I'd be really interested to take a look at them in more detail. I always remember the two old ladies who lived next door when I was growing up who used to describe going up Caldy Hill to watch Liverpool and Birkenhead docks being bombed. They were great story-tellers - you felt like you were there watching the cities burn.

The tracing below is from the Christmas raids of Dec 20-22, 1940 on the Merseyside area when 365 people died. It is designed to be overlain on a base map, hence why there are so few roads, etc. shown (much cheaper to keep a clean map and have lots of tracings). A daily tracing would be taken so that the pattern of bombing could be tracked over time.


The tracing shows the area between Bootle and Walton and plots 26 separate incidents in quite a confined area. Each incident is given a number, followed by the size and type of bomb, and the location of any unexploded ordnance. Collectively the maps reveal that by the end of the war Liverpool was the second most bombed UK city after London.

These other maps are of Brighton and Bristol.

I've been fascinated by the Second World War for a while now given it was the largest and most complex geopolitical event in modern history with many civil wars operating inside transnational wars, and political ideology explicitly reshaping territory and lives through violence. I've been trying to collect books that explains what went on different parts of the world, including some that traditionally get looked over (e.g. Aleutian Islands [the only bit of the USA occupied by the Japanese], Malta, Isle of Man, Ireland, etc) so I can have a go at mentally stitching the whole lot together.

I'll perhaps try to do something on Irish neutrality tomorrow. Ireland declared its neutrality on the 2nd Sept, the day before Britain and France declared war. It was a policy that was rigidly maintained right to the end of the war.

Lest we forget ...