The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel | Alan Furst

The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel | Alan Furst | NOTABLE NEW WORLD WAR TWO NOVELS

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The Spies of Warsa...

	The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel Alan Furst Random House, 2008 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 68 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers? bar in the city?s factory district, he will meet with the military attaché from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw, the brilliant new novel by Alan Furst, lauded by The New York Times as ?America?s preeminent spy novelist.?

War is coming to Europe. French and German intelligence operatives are locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attaché, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn into a world of abduction, betrayal, and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys of Warsaw. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations.

Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amid an extraordinary cast of venal and dangerous characters?Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence; the mysterious and sophisticated Dr. Lapp, senior German Abwehr officer in Warsaw; Malka and Viktor Rozen, at work for the Russian secret service; and Mercier?s brutal and vindictive opponent, Major August Voss of SS counterintelligence. And there are many more, some known to Mercier as spies, some never to be revealed.

The Houston Chronicle has described Furst as ?the greatest living writer of espionage fiction.? The Spies of Warsaw is his finest novel to date?the history precise, the writing evocative and powerful, more a novel about spies than a spy novel, exciting, atmospheric, erotic, and impossible to put down.

?As close to heaven as popular fiction can get.?
?Los Angeles Times, about The Foreign Correspondent

?What gleams on the surface in Furst?s books is his vivid, precise evocation of mood, time, place, a letter-perfect re-creation of the quotidian details of World War II Europe that wraps around us like the rich fug of a wartime railway station.?
?Time

?A rich, deeply moving novel of suspense that is equal parts espionage thriller, European history and love story.?
?Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times, about Dark Star

?Some books you read. Others you live. They seep into your dreams and haunt your waking hours until eventually they seem the stuff of memory and experience. Such are the novels of Alan Furst, who uses the shadowy world of espionage to illuminate history and politics with immediacy.?
?Nancy Pate, Orlando Sentinel

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Furst is First

Furst is the best writer of thrillers in the business and The Spies of Warsaw is first-rate Furst. All of his novels are historically accurate, not only in the major events that actually occurred but in the ambiance of the setting and the psychological outlook of his fictional characters.

NOTABLE NEW WORLD WAR TWO NOVELS

I read any World War Two Novel I can get my hands on. "Spies of Warsaw was instructional,but I don't think that it is Alan Furst's best work. Just this week I picked up a book, "Stealing Trinity" by Ward Larsen, which I thought was phenonemal. I would recommend it to any World War Two buff. Or anybody intrested in hight stakes international espionage.

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Not one of Furst's best

While I enjoyed "The Spies of Warsaw", I don't believe it is as good as the two other Furst novels I have read: "Dark Star" and "Kingdom of Shadows". Once again the hero is a man of action, courage and steely character, when he needs to be. At the same time he is reflective, and very human. Once again I learned some history: the French general staff was divided, with one faction very aware of the threat of a German tank attack through the Ardennes forest; this faction included then Colonel Charles de Gaulle. Marshall Petain was the leader of the other faction which believed that the Maginot line provided safety. This is the same Marshall Petain who accepted leadership of the Vichy government 3 days after the capitulation of France.

Furst several times has his hero express sympathy for the people who would likely be victimized by the looming war. In the other novels the ominous future was there more as an undercurrent. I also believe the women in the other two novels were better developed. "Dark Star" was a more complex, harrowing novel, while "Kingdom of Shadows" had a better plot and pre-war atmosphere.

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Interesting reading, but....

I would add only that A. Furst tried to match realities of Poland but did not meet the expectations. Some names are not even taken from a real Warsaw telephone book. I do not dare to mention his stylization of Polish in some phrases; just terrible. Same with names of some real European cities and streets in Warsaw. There are still maps easy available as a reference tool. Not mentioning a common cliche: Soviet agents prosecuted by Stalin because of their Jewish roots. There were many Communist activist of Jewish origin in Stalinist Russia who collaborated actively with NKVD during the Great Purges and later on. In general, it is an entertaining reading with some historical facts. It is not Graham Greene, for sure.

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WONDERFUL START, STALE FINISH

I loved Furst's prose, sinuous, direct, filled with telling detail, and the narrative had me hooked, until the last third of the book, when the writing got flabby and the narrative fell apart so precipitously, I thought I had missed several important pages. There was no grand scheme here, and maybe that was the author's point, to show the herky-jerky nature of spying in that place in those days. But a little more artifice would have gone done nicely with this reader.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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