Khristo’s spy career plays against the back drop of history – the Spanish Civil War, chic Paris of the late ‘30’s, the French Resistance and the last days of World War II. Khristo’s brother is killed by Fascist thugs and he gets recruited by Russia’s NKVD and it’s off to spy school to learn the basics. The protagonist, Khristo, a Bulgarian national, gets squeezed between the evil heavy-handed Fascists and the evil, sneaky Communists as each vie for the hearts and minds of the Eastern European countries they would eventually take turns steamrolling. I’m not sure about the rest of the series, but his one’s a corker.
Furst has written enough books about this era to choke John le Carre. If Graham Greene and Eric Ambler had a bastard child, that child would be Alan Furst.įor those of you that thought the period of European history between 1930 – 1945 (give or take a couple of weeks) hadn’t been mined for enough literary tale weaving, well, think again. From beginning to end, I really wanted to like this book, but I just never really did.
For a real WWII buff, I could imagine that Furst is tough to beat. Also, his imagination for richly detailed characters who are very much a product of their times is nothing short of amazing. It should be noted that Furst's books are intensely researched so that the fictional goings on exist on an accurate back drop of historical events (both big and small). There is so much to respect here, but I just couldn't get into the story. At first I thought this book was going to be wonderful, but in the end I only finished it out of stubbornness, long since having stopped caring what would happen. Perhaps that artistically mimics the savage randomness of war where lives are snuffed out with no warning, but in a book it just disrupts the flow of the narrative. Several times, great detail went into explaining the back story and motivations of a character that then dies and is completely and permanently removed from the story moments later. Nothing propels the story forward from one of these wonderful scenes to the next. If this were a movie, Furst would win an academy award for cinematography in a heart beat. Furst is absolutely masterful at painting a scene, creating a mood, evoking a time and place, and fleshing out incredibly varied but wholly believable characters. If I had opened randomly to any point in this book and read 3 pages, I would have thought it to be a 5 star book.
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