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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
At times, the sophistication of the world Furst describes suggests the films of Ernst Lubitsch -- wry elegance with a touch of the earthy. In "Kingdom of Shadows," a Hungarian aristocrat called away on a mission as he's about to take his mistress on vacation arranges to have a bracelet delivered from Cartier to appease her. He recalls the wisdom of his uncle, the count. "Polanyi," Furst writes, "liked to say that the great fault of poets was that they never sang of the power of money in affairs between men and women. 'So for that we are left to the mercy of cynics -- bartenders, novelists, or lubricous aunts.'" At other times, Furst seems to be channeling the melancholy of songs like "I'll Be Seeing You." In this passage from "The World at Night," the hero, a French film producer named Jean Casson, looks at Paris on the dawn that German troops cross the borders:
He got out of bed, walked to the glass door that opened on the little balcony. He pushed the drape aside; you could see the Eiffel Tower across the river. The rue Chardin was quiet -- the 16th Arrondissement was always quiet, and Passy, its heart and soul, quieter still. One or two lights on, people didn't know yet. So beautiful, his street. Trees in clouds of white blossom, dawn shadow playing on the stone buildings, a lovely gloom. He'd shot a scene from "No Way Out" here. The hero knows the cops are onto him, but he leaves his hideout anyhow, to see his rich girlfriend one last time.
Casson, the most romantic of Furst's heroes (he returns in the sequel "Red Gold"), embodies the tendency to see life as a movie. What Furst has in mind for him is both as romantic and as unromantic as anything he can imagine.
A great entertainer, Furst would probably be considered our finest practicing historical novelist if he weren't writing espionage novels. He's as good a historian as a novelist can afford to be. The result of prodigious research, Furst's books cram in all manner of information about the competing factions that existed in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, which group controlled which regions in which years, the particular hazards of train travel across European borders in the late '30s and so on. At the turn of a page, you'll find anything from an explanation of the covert signals of the Moscow show trials of the '30s to a list of people recruited by the American OSS (among them Julia Child, Archibald MacLeish, Sterling Hayden, John Ford, Arthur Scheslinger Jr. and circus heir John Ringling North).
Driven by the missions and schemes of one central character more than by the events and institutions that dominate most espionage novels, Furst's books are full of shards of information, anecdotes, heartbreaking stories. In "Night Soldiers" an aged Frenchman too ill to flee the advancing Germans is lovingly nursed and then just as lovingly buried by the housekeepers who have taken care of him for 30 years. And there are deeper currents of sadness in Furst's stories, like the old Polish Jew who tells the hero of "Dark Star": "This is my fourth time along this road. In 1905 we went west to escape the pogroms, in 1916 east, running away from the Germans, then in 1920, west, with the Bolsheviks chasing us. So here we are again."
My favorite of Furst's anecdotes (and this one is true, as it turns out) is told by German Jews lucky enough to make it to New York in 1937. They dock at Ellis Island and a well-dressed man appears and offers to buy their clothing in exchange for both money and good American clothing. "After that experience," Furst writes, "who could convince them that they were not in the promised land?" It's a good joke, a variation on the immigrant myths about cities where the streets are paved with gold. We get the punch line a few pages later. An OSS officer has begun stockpiling European immigrants' clothing and storing it in warehouses with instructions that it not be dry-cleaned. "Because of his foresight, agents going into Europe would, at least, not be dressed by Brooks Brothers."
