The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst
Yes, I’ve written about Alan Furst before and YES I am addicted to his tales of intrigue, wrapped around a Europe that is drifting toward war. Paris, Spain, Berlin, The Balkans, all hold prominent places in his wonderfully written and carefully researched novels. In The Foreign Correspondent, Furst takes the reader into the foggy darkness that hovers over the rich, the famous, the down-and-out corners of 1938 Paris.
Carlo Weisz is a foreign correspondent for Reuters, living from story to story, always searching for more. He becomes entangled with Italian expats who are publishing an anti-fascist newspaper. The Italian secret police are operating all over Paris and have already killed one member of the anti-fascist group. The others are still meeting, but on the run. Among their number is a traitor.
Allow me to digress a moment. I know some, who don’t know any better, will toss off fiction as a waste of time, a flim-flam effort of butchering history. I heartily disagree. Moi? Surely this solid rule follower wouldn’t dare compare mere fiction to well researched history! Oh, yea, oh yea, I would indeed. I’m not at all denigrating historians, but well researched novels breathe the breath of life into an historical context. With Alan Furst, history lives.
You lovers of historical romance novels know exactly what I mean. Girl meets Lard, is captured by a pirate, rescued by the Lard and whisked away to his ancestral land in the Scottish highlands.
No matter how you feel about the substance or thinness of the plot, the details tell you more about personal lives and customs and other details of the mid-centuries than you’re likely to find in any history book. History deals with facts. Historical novels, in their many forms, deal with life.
Another example from my own jaded past: I studied the French Revolution in high school and beyond and am familiar with the bones of this huge event. But I never really understood the way lives were caught up in the bloody, nation ravaging turmoil until I read A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. Yes, that’s right, he of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol fame. A Tale of Two Cites deals, not with events as much as people caught up in events.
The same is true of Alan Furst’s novels. When you read Alan Furst, you are taken bit by bit through the race to war, you learn what the people of Paris (in this case) were going through, and the people in Berlin, and the people of Italy, and countries that were on both sides of the politics, and those who were stilling on the fence, just hoping to survive.
The protagonist, Carlo Weisz, can’t bring himself to sit on the sidelines, no matter the danger. To complicate things, British spy agencies also want to discover the operations of the Italian and German anti-fascist group, but for different reasons.
Furst leads you into smoky cafes and fashionable homes and restaurants, where lives are bought and sold, and where good and evil lurk in equal number. Sometimes it’s a conundrum, with both faces of Janus residing in one man…or one woman. The tension is palatable, the danger is real, and survival is fragile. Life and death may hinge on a single word, or a single time and place, or a single friend, or the twist of a key in a lock.
As a bona fide member of the media, Carlo has access to many people at all levels of government. It’s up to him to sift truth from falsehood and friend from foe. Sometimes they co-mingle. Often he struggles in the dark, while many lives depend on his raw judgment.
From start to finish, we are drawn in by a story that captures the period, the people, and the smell of a fetid wind of a war that change Europe forever.
