The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel

Alan Furst has done it again. A delicious read, wonderful characters, deep suspense, romance, action, everything that has made me a longtime fan of his novels. He is a very gifted writer who transports the reader to his chosen time and place, and then lets you enter the story and experience the excitement. Highly recommended.

Part of what makes this work by Alan Furst so compelling is the setting, Warsaw on the eve of World War II. Every knowlegeable reader knows what will happen in less than two years and one cannot shed the great foreboding that all these people are doomed in one way or another. Colonel Mercier is the French military attache in Warsaw assigned to gather what intelligence he can on Poland's and France's mutual threat Germany. He is convinced that France's next threat will come from Germany through the Ardennes (around the Maginot Line) on the treads of Heinz Guderian's panzers. This is contrary to conventional French military thinking and Mercier takes tremendous risks to prove his theory.

In his rounds of agent meetings, mindless bureaucratic tasks, and embassy social events he meets emigres, spies from other countries, and more than one beautiful woman. His work as a spy (military attaches are expected to spy) Mercier travels from Warsaw to Paris to Germany and across central Europe. One trip in particular includes a wonderfully steamy encounter in a Wagon Lits compartment with a League of Nations lawyer who has caught his eye.

After this and The Foreign Correspondant I'm now a Alan Furst fan.

Alan Furst has carved out a niche for himself with espionage thrillers set in the Eastern Europe of the 1930s.

"The Spies Of Warsaw" takes place in the Warsaw in 1937. The city is crawling with German, Soviet, French and other spies, many of whom have a cover as diplomats. Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, the protagonist of the novel, is the military attache at the French embassy.

A career officer in the French Army and battle-scarred veteran of two wars, Mercier feels he has reached the end of the line, stuck in what he perceives as an unchallenging assignment - attending diplomatic functions and handling spies. He is in his mid-forties, a widower for three years and of a noble, but increasing financially strained background.

Furst paints a compelling picture of a Europe being pushed to war by Hitler, but unwilling to confront the dictator. Mercier sees what is on the horizon and fears for the future.

Bit by bit, Mercier becomes more engaged with his work and has some reasonably exciting adventures in the course of it. There's no shortage of both heroes and villains.

"The Spies Of Warsaw" is a bit weaker than other Furst novels. It has a feeling of being padded with atmospherics, like the scenes that take place on trains, with an abundance of detail about the compartment, the stations, the locomotives and so on. Unusally for Furst,there is a lot of sex in this novel. That seems to be a trend in thrillers lately - interludes of passionate sex in between the spying and mayhem making. Furst handles it reasonably well, but it still distracts from the story.

The pacing of nearly all Furst novels is a bit on the slow side, reflecting the nature of European society in the 1930s. But there is substantial substance to Furst's characters. Mercier is the primary character and has considerable depth, much more than any of the other characters, some of whom are rather flat.

The plot holds together well as Mercier goes from being the reluctant military attache to an active participant in some substantial espionage schemes.

Like most Furst novels, the climax is somewhat anti-climatic. You know that Europe is doomed to war in a few years, but you don't know what will become of Mercier and the other characters.

Overall, though a bit weaker than previous Furst novels, "The Spies Of Warsaw" is an engaging espionage tale. It's a bit dark and moody, which is typical of Furst. A solid read.

Jerry

Really Alan, you must stop churning out books every two years. You simply are in danger of being "written out". Or is it your publishers who are pushing you to crank 'em out?


I have read ALL of Furst's books, and consider his early works to be some of the best novels that I've ever read.

Not so his past two or three, including "The Spies of Warsaw". More and more, he is taking short cuts with characterizations, leaving plot lines hanging, spending far too much time describing cocktail party or restaurant menus (and if he tells the story about the bullet hole in the mirror at Heiningers AGAIN, I will throw the book against the wall).

(I also found the random and unnecessary childhood "scene" with Mercier and his cousin Albertine quite creepy).

So Alan ---- take some time off, and perhaps reread your own early books to refresh your memory on how to write a truly good story.

As another reviewer said, this is not a spy novel but a novel about spies. As usual Furst gets the atmospherics right as he evokes the world of the "spies of Warsaw" in 1937, when the world seems inexorably sliding to war. These people are very real and very human. Here the tale centers around whether disreputable tasks can be done with some decency and honor or not. This is a beautifully done morality tale, with perhaps some application to other walks of life.

Jean-Francois Mercier, a French lieutenant-colonel recently posted as military attache' in the French embassy in Warsaw, does not like his job. Warsaw in 1937 is a hotbed of espionage, with Poland doubly threatened by its massive and belligerent neighbors, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The diplomatic community is heavily involved in spying, scrambling for information to provide an edge in what appears to be a forthcoming European war. In Mercier's case, it means that the game now goes well beyond the tacitly accepted activities of an attache': trolling for information among his counterparts, visits to "sensitive" locations and occasional clandestine scouting trips. He must obtain and run agents and that means enticing or forcing others to commit treason by any means, including subversion, entrapment, bribery and coercion. Tawdry work at best and unethical and criminal at worst.

And this is the problem. Mercier is a French aristocrat from an old family with a tradition of military service. He has an aristo's code of duty and of honorable behavior and is a wounded and decorated veteran of two wars. A soldier's life, with its primacy of duty, honor and country, is straightforward and fits him. A military progressive, Mercier shares DeGaulle's ideas, notions that are rejected by those running the French Army. So Mercier's daily actions are often distasteful and often seem futile; and he is micromanaged to boot. He has written, but not sent, a letter of resignation. Gradually Mercier realizes that he is good at the work and that his country's peril obliges him to do it, even if it is futile. Duty trumps everything and Mercier is able to perform his usual tasks and attempt some delicate and very dangerous missions of his own. His compromise is to act decently and honorably so far as duty permits. He even manages to have a private life of sorts, including a new love to fill the void left by his wife's death a few years before.

Mercier is the story's main character, but it also features all of the "spies of Warsaw." They all scramble for information, trust virtually no one, pore over casual conversations for possible hidden meanings, routinely practice deception, have trouble with the "home office" (a sometimes life-threatening matter for Nazis and Soviets) and display by their conduct the constant choices they make about their personal codes.

This book is somewhat unusual in another respect. Furst's heroes are usually ordinary people who get into spying for very personal reasons. Here the characters are all full or part time spies. But his ability to create suspense with very believable characters in believable situations is undiminished. It is a mark of Furst's skill, for example, that Mercier's slow change of mind about his work is portrayed rather than explicitly described and certainly there is danger and derring-do. This is a beautifully crafted story that works on several levels; and, like all good fiction, it says a bit about human character, capacity and foibles.