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.

Subscribe:  Should you wish to subscribe, which I greatly encourage, especially if you enjoy travel, recipes, book reviews, and humor, all without the cesspool of politics ...  click on the "follow" or the "subscribe" button about midway up the right side of the page.  Live a little!  Join the jolly few!

 

John le Carré: Call for the Dead

The first thing a book reviewer should tell you is what connects the books he favors.  Your fertile mind already knows why a reviewer’s preferences are relevant.  But wordy bastard that I am, I’m going to tell you anyway. 

Books that are page-turners for one reader are slogs in ankle deep mud for another.  Why is that?

As Louise Rosenblatt famously wrote, there are three points of view involved in reading a book:  what the writer intended to write, what he actually wrote, and what the reader’s experiences bring to the book.

Let’s say an automotive enthusiast thinks he’s writing a thriller, but what really comes out is a plot strung together with fists full of engineering details.  The Tom Clancy of Detroit.

Along comes a reader who’s an engineer.  He’s enthralled!  Along comes yours truly, who knows how to change oil, put gas in the tank, and on rare occasions (thank goodness) knows how to use a jack and a spare tire.  Which one of us is this book going to thrill?

So what kind of reader is this reviewer?  I like character driven plots.  And by that, I don’t mean angst upon angst, but rather main characters who embrace the human element and are strong and true to themselves.  Don’t give me a detective that is suddenly afraid to pull the trigger, or a terrified wife who cannot overcome her fears and rise to the occasion.  Don’t bore me with twenty pages of divorce and finding solace in a bottle.

How about the plot?  I demand twists, turns, and even a few digressions, but not to the detriment of this reader’s attention span.

At the top of my list is prose that flows as smoothly as water over glass, without pretentiousness or contrivances.

Now that you know. let’s breeze off into the world of espionage, 1950’s style, with John le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead, where we’ll meet Carré’s most famous character, George Smiley.

“When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary…Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.”

This is our hero, our main character in an espionage novel???  Unlike James Bond, who roams the globe in fast cars, with the fast women, while winning vast sums in casinos, and staying in the world’s grand hotels, George Smiley lives in an unremarkable apartment in London.  In the war he distinguished himself with hard work and undeniable results.  But, he just didn’t fit the model of a leader, so while he was kept on after the war, he remained ordinary and a bit of a necessary pain for the bureaucrats in charge.

But, most of all, George Smiley has a mind that processes bits and pieces that don’t quite fit.  He also has the constitution of a bulldog whose teeth never loose their grip, no matter how many other minds distract his path of inquiry.

Call for the Dead begins with a suicide.  Immediately Smiley is under the gun.  He interviewed the man only yesterday.  Did the interview go badly?  Was it something Smiley said that caused an unintended event?

Smiley seems to have been affected only by the tragedy that produced a death and a widow, not by the snide inquiries into his own behavior.  Something bothers him and it’s not the bureaucratic heat.

For the next 150 pages the book would not release me from it’s thought provoking pages.  When I wasn’t reading, I was thinking.

It’s no wonder the Sunday Telegram glowed with enthusiasm:  “Intelligent, thrilling, surprising…makes most cloak and dagger stuff taste of cardboard.”

George Smiley flows off the page, just as real as if we were sitting with him in some innocuous parlor, sipping tea from cracked cups.  And the plot, even with the unexpected twists and turns, never waivers.

Toss away thoughts of James Bond’s world, singlehandedly stopping madmen from producing nuclear weapons and controlling the planet.  Instead, pick a quiet time, pour yourself a whiskey with soda, settle into an easy chair, and blissfully wander into George Smiley’s world of quiet, deliberate espionage. But, don’t be lulled, it’s a thriller.