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Article Excerpt
Discussed in this essay:
The Book of Spies, edited by Alan Furst. Modern Library, 2003.374 pages. $24.95.
Blood of Victory, by Alan Furst. Random House, 2003. 237 pages. $12.95.
Kingdom of Shadows, by Alan Furst. Random House, 2000. 239 pages. $11.95.
Red Gold, by Alan Furst. Random House, 1999. 258 pages. $11.95.
The World at Night, by Alan Furst. Random House, 1996. 257 pages. $11.95.
The Polish Officer, by Alan Furst. Random House, 1995. 287 pages. $11.95.
Dark Star, by Alan Furst. Random House, 2002 (1991). 437 pages. $12.95.
Night Soldiers, by Alan Furst. Random House, 2002 (1988). 456 pages. $12.95.
Are novels about history supposed to supply us with an accurate view of the past? Or is it legitimate to accept the fiction writer's realm of history--not always truthful, but nevertheless in possession of some privileged relationship to reality? Writers such as Robert Harris have artfully raised the profile of their fictions by basing them on bizarre, and often conspiratorial, premises (the possibility that the Holocaust might never have been uncovered, or that Stalin had a son), which they then try, at great expense of energy, to render credible.
The hidden world of espionage supplies some justification for a paranoid belief in a "secret" history. Novelist Alan Furst, who lives in espionage-free Sag Harbor, creates shadowy plots that cunningly describe sideshows: the smuggling, to Britain in 1938, of fortification plans for the Sudetenland's border; the attempt to stop the transport of oil from "neutral" Romania to Germany in 1940; the rescue, from Vienna, of an imprudent Jewish Hollywood exile trying to re claim his patrimony. These sideshows are depicted as they might have been understood at the time, without the distortions of hindsight. Because they appear as gestures motivated by a reasonable degree of hope, they have the power to engage us. Furst's secret, simple as it may seem, is the patient accumulation of credible historical detail.
Night Soldiers, the novel that begins Furst's seven-book series, opens with the kicking to death of a teenager on the Bulgarian bank of the Danube in 1934. The murder itself is skillfully described, but our attention is immediately drawn to one detail lurking behind the gruesomely banal scene. The stylish, newfangled headgear worn by the fascist aggressors (a grocer, a school-teacher, a local matchmaker) has, we learn, been designed and manufactured by a Jewish tailor, Levitzky, whose family performed similar tasks on behalf of previous occupying forces. Apparently untroubled by his clientele, Levitzky also happens to be "a progressive":
A reader of tracts on Palestinian repatriation, a serious student of the Talmud, a man who wore eyeglasses. Levitzky had an old book of illustrations; he thumbed through it by the light of a kerosene lamp. All Europe was represented, there were Swiss Vatican Guards, Hungarian Hussars, French Foreign Legionnaires, Italian Alpine regiments of the Great War. From the last, he selected a cap style, though he hadn't the proper materials. But Levitzky was resourceful: two layers of black drill were sewn together, then curved into a conical shape. The bill of the cap was fashioned by sewing material on both sides of a cardboard form. All that was lacking, then, was the feather, and this problem was soon solved by a visit to the ritual slaughterer, who sold the tailor an armful of long goose quills.
At first glance, this could be reportage from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Arthur Koestler, or George Orwell; it also possesses the quality of historical writing in which events are observed and reconstituted at leisure. Yet this isn't...
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