The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel

In his return to Warsaw, Alan Furst penned a work that, to me, reads more like The Polish Officer than any of his other works. The craft and protocols of the spy game, the rift in thinking (and arrogance) in the French general staff, the terrible innovations of Guderian.......... all mesh in a story that has room for a nicely choreographed romance. The only bone I have to pick is that perhaps too many of the characters somehow survive the tender mercies of pre-war Poland espionage, the Soviet purges, targeting by the Gestapo. If only the world was so kind.

I'm nuts about the work of Mr. Furst. But . . . I gave up reading this one on Page 165. His evocation of life at the time is not up to his usual, his characters aren't as interesting, his sentences aren't crafted as well as usual, and the plot, well, we don't always read him for plot. I've read most of his books more than once, but couldn't even finish this one. Either the editor was sleeping, or Mr. Furst feels he's now above the recommendations of editors, or it's an alimony novel, or something, but this piece of work is so far from his best that if it were the first novel of his that I read, I'd have never had the privilege of reading the rest of them.

Furst has done it again. His series of thrillers based on the events in Europe, Poland, the Balkans and the USSR leading up to and including World War II are must-reads in my opinion. I have read them all to date and each one offers a new perspective on this conflict. He examines the moral complexities of living in that horrific period of our history through the eyes of participants with whom we can identify, people who manage to make morally appropriate decisions under the worst of circumstances. Furst leaves me feeling optimistic about the ability of the human species to survive horrors with their goodness intact.

Alan Furst's latest,"The Spies of Warsaw", displays the same telling detail of people on the street that clarifies the plot and absorbs the reader into his complex espionage tales of pre-WW2 Europe. But alas, it is getting a little formulaic, and almost predictable which was never an earlier problem with his genre. Perhaps he has written it too soon, too quickly following his previous great successes. In "Spies of Warsaw" the aristocratic French spymaster beds the aristocratic lady of intrigue in Warsaw. Et alors? His field adventures measuring and documenting the Germans' preparations to run their tanks through the Ardennes into France,
intelligence that the hidebound French high command disastrously ignores, belabor the obvious. Furst seems to be writing under a tight deadline, and producing more of a thinner, movie script outline than his usual dense, compelling narrative. For those unfamiliar with Furst's works, though, read it for the coloration it provides - and then go read his earlier stuff.

Alan Furst and Charles McCarry are the two best spy novelists writing today. Neither of them write books with an excess of action, yet both write gripping page turners, capable of creating suspense and menace by virtue of something as commonplace as a late train. They also write books which are more than just pop fiction. Both of them have heroes who are not the best athletes or the smartest guys or the best equipped; what makes their protagonists special is their character.

Alan Furst's heroes do their best, fighting against the unspeakable evils of Naziism and Communism, as well as their own complacent bureaucracies. Furst captures the mood of Europe between the wars and his careful research of the geography and the social milieu creates the feeling, more than one finds in most other novels, that one is not only reading something that actually happened, but that it happened to the reader or to friends of the reader.

The Spies of Warsaw is Furst at his best. An aristocratic French colonel sniffs out the German plans for a blitzkreig through the Ardennes, but has trouble convincing French intelligence of the value of what he has discovered.

Perhaps it is because I have read most of Furst's books as they came out rather than all at once, but for the first time, I came to realize that all of his books are linked, that the same places, and sometimes, the same people, appear in otherwise unrelated books. The feeling you get if you read all of his books is of a small army of people fighting to stop an onrushing Holocaust. Like a city's subway system, each of his characters and novels run along their own tracks, sometimes intersecting with another, pushing on in their own missions, but all serving the same cause.

The result in enthralling and the more Furst novels that get written, the more the reader feels that he is privy to the secrets of a band of patriots, good people all, fighting to slow the inevitable.