A Hero of France by Alan Furst

 

A Hero of France by Alan Furst

 

Yes, I have written of Alan Furst many times, always with a yearning that his books would never end, his characters would linger and progress through the rest of their lives.

 

He writes of Europe during the Second World War as if it were now, weaving the tales in personal tones of fear and strife and sorrow and resolve.

 

A Hero of France, set in 1941, is one of his many books that document the plague of Nazism. Let me loan you a few of the poetical lines that make you want to wander and linger.

 

            Paris, 29 March.  That afternoon the city wore its habitual colors

-gray skies, gray stone –triste if you were melancholy, soft and  inspiring if life went your way.

 

…Mathieu and Chislain had been friends long before the war, so their real names and circumstances were no secret, which was also true of Chantal and many others in their cell, trusted friends, acquaintances, and business associates who had chosen to resist the Occupation.

 

…

Chislain was now in his sixties, with white hair and eyeglasses in thin silver frames –the sort of glasses a priest might wear, his face set in a speculative, patient half smile, and always he paused before he spoke.

 

Yes, this is espionage in its purest form, woven into the lives of the normal men and women who live with purpose and truly risk their lives in pursuit of things they believe in.  They lack the fanfare of expensive cars, and casinos, and a lifestyle we all envy.  Instead, they meet in street cafes, live life in the shadows, blended and entwined into the ordinary aspects of life.  Until they are not.  Until they do the brash, the important, the things that most people fear to do.

 

Let us not forget the danger that resides and hides beyond every street corner, and in every whispered word in a café.  Their world spirals this way and that, accompanied always by the threat of discovery, flavored by death and torture and the loss of loved ones.

 

Alan Furst captures all of this and more, with page after thrilling page, sentence after beautifully constructed sentence.  You, the reader, are there, smelling the cigarette smoke waif through the bars, tasting the brandy, racing down blackened streets to save yourself and those you love, and those you have inadvertently endangered.   You are no James Bond, but ordinary men and women.  There is nothing special about you, but your courage.

 

In the twisted, tortured world of Paris under the Nazi occupation, you live a seemingly normal life, surviving on little food, few chunks of coal to heat your shabby apartment, but with an iron will to face the vicissitudes of betrayal and the keen edge of death.

 

Once again, Alan Furst pulls you into the abyss, makes you live the squalor of Paris in the dark plague of war, and the persistence that makes you A Hero of France.

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