Second thoughts on Alan Furst

In fact, for comparison's sake, let's look at another American thriller writer's use of exposition and scene-setting, a thriller writer I've chosen perfectly at random - oh, let's say - Tom Clancy. This is from Clancy's TheTeeth of the Tiger:

"The cabs in London are good." He looked up, "You know that. You've been to London."

"Some," Jack agreed. "Nice city. Nice people."

That sparkling little exchange gets to the heart of London, don't you think? You can practically see the nice people riding around the nice city in all those good cabs. I also like that "'Some,' Jack agreed."

That's so much simpler than "'Some,' Jack partly agreed."

So let's not dismiss scene-setting and exposition as minor affairs for a thriller writer. I recently picked up Blood of Victory because I'm reading a study of thrillers, and it reminded me that I still had some titles of Furst's to read. I came to him late because he didn't always write with such seemingly effortless style. Initially, his writing felt like a patently movie-ish attempt to evoke atmosphere, not create it but borrow it, remind us of it from other places. His first novel, Night Soldiers got generally excellent reviews when it came out in 1988. I was turned off by this sort of passage, though:

But nothing here was what it seemed. Even the gray stone of the buildings hid within itself a score of secret tints, to be revealed only by one momentary strand of light. At first, the tide of secrecy that rippled through the streets had made him tense and watchful, but in time he realized that in a city of clandestine passions, everyone was a spy. Amours. Fleeting or eternally renewed, tender or cruel, a single sip or an endless bacchanal.....

Did you catch that? It's not just the gray stone that has its secrets, it's the gray stone's hidden tints. Now, that's a secretive town. And that's a writer who's piling on too many metaphors, straining too much after atmosphere. He's either showing off his 'fancy' writing or he's insecure and he's forcing things.

<But Furst calmed down, gained confidence, his writing became smoky yet lean. And he began using dry, throwaway humor. In the midst of the suspense and violence, it lends a cosmopolitan feel that aids immensely in making his main characters appealing. These are sadly experienced men, often with conflicted loyalties, or they're the perennial losers in the big European wars. In Blood of Victory, Serebin's a Russian who escaped Stalin, ends up in Paris and now must elude the Gestapo. Why him? he asks. Why not? "That was, Serebin thought, glib and ingenuous, but until a better two-word history of the USSR came along, it would do."

So Serebin is another reluctant hero. He's enlisted in a plot to disrupt the flow of Romanian oil by sinking barges at a crucial point along the Danube. Like Furst's other protagonists, he's not a natural warrior or idealist, but a man who would be much happier eating good food and staying in bed with a lover (in fact, it's a lover, a French diplomat's wife, who gets Serebin involved in all this).

Even the espionage operations Furst's characters get caught up in are not the grand master plans like Overlord or Barbarossa. They're more the nuts-and-bolts clandestine efforts: smuggling weapons or people, sabotaging the enemy's materiel, trying to sway a political situation. Yet we learn from each novel - as earth-changing events overtake our protagonists - that when everything's at stake, every little thing counts. Rather than an easy nostalgia for some time of supposed moral clarity, Furst's novels give us a feel for the murk and undertow and backwash of warfare and espionage -- the "kingdom of shadows" -- and it's often the murk and backwash that are as dangerous as any army.

All of this leads to that very Furstian effect, perfectly on display in Blood of Victory: His novels are at once elegant and earthy. Somehow, magically, they're sardonic and anti-heroic -- yet also touchingly heroic.

I can't get enough of them.