The World At Night (Paris 1940) by Alan Furst
I’ve written reviews of Alan Furst’s novels, all of which take place in the dark and somber days leading up to and during the Nazi era. I get a hunger for them. When you pick up The World At Night, as with his other novels, you don’t really read them, you live them, your overcoat clutched tightly to your chest, as you wander darkened street, embraced by the heavy fog of war, passing friends and enemies, without full knowledge of who is who.
Furst’s fully packed novels, of which The World At Night is a prime example, blanket the scope of the filthy whirlwind that swept Europe, tearing it apart from 1939 to 1945, capturing the period year by year, from the Balkans to France and England, and Spain, always with a cast of indelible characters that follow crooked roads to survive or perish.
Characters are innocent men and women smeared with the horror of war, as they plot their way from day to day. And as they do, things always happen to push them into positions they don’t want to be in. They’re not spies, but circumstances make them spies, still wedged between friend and foe. They’re not resistance fighters, but many times they must fight. And meanwhile life goes on. They fall in love, bargain with those they hate, meet in both elegant and seedy cafés, always treading on the razor’s edge.
Jean Claude Casson is not Parisian, but he lives in Paris and does his best to mind his own business. He’s connected with the film world, which even in the midst of conflict carries on the business of making movies, writing scripts, collecting actors, scraping for financing, and finally getting stories on the silver screen. He knows people. A lot of people. Some want to use him, in fact most do, for both political and personal reasons.
The war in Europe was not just fought on the battlefields, by hordes of well-armed armies and ships and airplanes, but by the common people, the store clerks and farmers, restaurateurs, journalists, writers, and yes, the movie crowd. Nor was it seldom fought by just one country and within one country. I mentioned whirlwind and that’s the way it was.
Paris, Lisbon, Warsaw, even Berlin and London were a dark and active collection of those who lived underground in every sense of the word. Trust? Trust no one. The need was a tangle of money, weapons, organizations of all sorts, and friendships made and broken for every reason under the sun, moon, and stars.
To use an old cliché (I haven’t heard of any new ones), Furst has a way with words, and his heavy knowledge mined from libraries, letters, and persons who were there, weaves the words into a world of truth, torment, and terror, love and circumstance.
I must give you an example of the use of his remarkable prose!
He shaved, smelled the lotion he used to wear, then put the cap back on the bottle. Went for a walk. Rue de Vignes. Rue Raffet. Paris as it always was – smelly in the heat, deserted in August. He came to the Seine and rested his elbows on the stone wall and stared down into the river --Parisians cured themselves of all sorts of maladies this way. The water was low, the leaves on the poplars parched and pale. Here came a German officer. A plain, stiff man in his mid-thirties, his Wehrmacht belt buckle said Gott Mit Uns, God is with us. Strange god if he is, Casson thought.
One of the wonderful things about Furst is how he sets the stage so elegantly, and when the twists and turns and action come, you know the setting, the smell of fresh bread, the taste of the wine, the burn of brandy when you come in from the cold, the deep and unselfish reasons you turn away from a friend, the complications of who you know, and who’s involved and what the stakes are; a perfect tableau for what is to come and why it startles and keeps you reading and makes me wish I could go back to Paris, now that it is Paris once again, and I thank god I wasn’t there when it wasn’t.
My other book reviews on Alan Furst:
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