The sinister S. Kolb, who played a secondary but crucial role in Alan Furst’s last novel, “Dark Voyage,” could be said to move closer to center stage in “The Foreign Correspondent.” That is, he could be said to if he weren’t, in keeping with all of Furst’s characters, careful to avoid the limelight, or all light, for that matter.
The shadows are where Furst’s characters dwell. For more than a decade and a half he has been turning out a series of novels of international intrigue set in Europe before and during World War II, each one separate unto itself, though occasionally, as with S. Kolb – that’s all we know him by – a character from an earlier novel reappears.
The eight previous novels moved forward roughly chronologically – “Dark Voyage” opened in April 1941 – but “The Foreign Correspondent” jumps back to 1938-39. This time we are in Paris, where former cavalry officers drive taxis and exiled professors read gas meters – the sort of stateless persons who inhabit “Arc de Triomphe” and other novels by Erich Maria Remarque.
The author establishes the atmosphere, both climatological and literary, right at the get-go: “a gray, troubled sky at daybreak, the fall of twilight at noon, followed, at seven-thirty, by slanting rains and black umbrellas.” It rains a lot in Furst’s novels, and when it doesn’t rain, it can usually be counted on to snow, preferably spitting.
Among the émigrés is a community of Italians clandestinely producing newspapers opposing Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime for distribution throughout Italy. When one of them is killed, it appears on the surface to be the murder-suicide of a pair of lovers, but it soon becomes known as the work of Mussolini’s secret police. Carlo Weisz, a half-Italian/ half-Slav from the divided and disputed half-Italian/
half-Slav city of Trieste, takes over (secretively, of course) as the editor of the slain man’s émigré newspaper, all the while working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters.
Furst’s novels are uniformly of a high standard of writing, craftsmanship and painstaking research, but for some reason “The Foreign Correspondent” is not as gripping as most of the earlier entries. Perhaps journalism, no matter how émigré or dangerous, is simply not as exciting as a Dutch merchant captain in “Dark Voyage” being approached by mysterious figures to use his ship for mysterious purposes to aid the Allies (mysterious figures doing mysterious things loom large in all Furst novels) or a Russian émigré in “Blood of Victory” endeavoring to disrupt the flow of Rumanian oil from the Ploesti fields to Nazi Germany.
Still, there is no question that we are once again in what might be called “Furstland,” the twilight realm of desperate people in hiding or on the run, and closely bordering “Greeneland,” Graham Greene’s dim, dusty world of soured morality and languorous betrayal. Furst skillfully weaves in background political and social information about the times, garnishing this with such details as the colorful image on a Yugoslavian postage stamp or mention of now-forgotten but once-infamous personages.
Kolb captures the ethos of this world. In “Dark Voyage” he mused that “life was governed by deceit, and by power. Not the Golden Rule, the Iron Rule.” In “Foreign Correspondent,” similarly, he speaks of “Crown, Capital, and Clergy. That’s where the influence is.” When the political, business and religious leaders “want a new policy, then things change … Nations are run by oligarchies.”
Carlo is, like many of Furst’s protagonists, vaguely fortyish. He is also, Furst writes, “very lonely” – so cue that set-piece of nearly every espionage novel, the highly charged and furtively conducted sexual affair. Carlo’s lover, Christa, is a woman from his past now married to a bigwig German.
Enter Kolb, whose outline and loyalties emerge more distinctly than they did in “Dark Voyage.” Kolb works for a man named Brown, who works for or with a man named Lane, and all apparently work for British secret services.
They want to use Carlo and his émigré newspaper as a means of creating a wedge in the Mussolini-Hitler alliance. His demand in return is that they help him get Christa out of Germany, where she is under suspicion of anti-Nazi activities. And with that we are off to the races.
Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
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The Foreign Correspondent
By Alan Furst
Random House, 273 pages, $24.95
