Books & Poetry

The world of Alan Furst’s wartime thrillers is becoming so populous it’s a wonder anyone can get a seat at that favourite table in Paris’s Brasserie Heininger, the one beneath the mirror with the bullet hole, sustained on the night the head waiter, Omaraeff, was killed. But walk to table 14 and the familiar names are all there: Hungarian Count Polanyi, his nephew Nicholas Morath, screenwriter Louis Fischfang, Lady Angela Hope…

We’ve been to the Spanish civil war, where this book opens, with Furst before too – in ‘Night Soldiers’ – although here it feels less immediate, perhaps because our host, Carlo Weisz, is a journalist. Journalists report, they don’t act – perhaps that’s the problem with the usually reliable Furst’s latest. Nor does the requisite failed amour feel truly melancholic enough, while the British agent S Kolb, who wandered into the novelist’s last work, ‘Dark Voyage’, remains a necessarily shady presence.

On the eve of WWII, Weisz travels into the lion’s den – Berlin – and then even further, to his native Italy, aiming to spread the word of his underground, resistance newspaper. Presumably Furst wants to say something about the power of propaganda and how smaller players could become involved by force of circumstance, coercion and, just maybe, moral volition. As Weisz hunts beneath the noses of the enemy for the printing presses to expand his operation he meets a ‘supplier’, Emil, somewhat surprised, even perplexed, by this new front in the battle. ‘He was, evidently, in the normal course of life, more of a guns and bombs man.’ Evidently, so am I.