Read the Novels of Alan Furst
I recommend his novels without reservation.
I discovered the novels of Alan Furst only this year and only by chance, when, on impulse, I grabbed two of his books off a shelf in the library.
I read The Foreign Correspondent (2006) and Mission to Paris (2012).
I keep a log, on a spreadsheet, of all the books I read, and I write brutally honest reactions intended only for me.
I wrote this note after reading The Foreign Correspondent:
“Wow. Great historical spy novel. I grabbed this on a shelf at the library. Can’t believe I hadn’t heard of Furst before. He’s written over a dozen, so I’m on my way to reading them. Excellent. This is a 2006 novel about 1938 Europe (France, Italy, Germany), with Carlo Weisz as journalist, hero of the resistance.”
I wrote this note after reading Mission to Paris:
“2012 novel, happens to be around the same years and in the same cities (Paris) as the previous book. This one stars a Hollywood actor sent to Paris to shoot a movie. So well done. The sentences get a little wild, but the story is so grounded and characters actually do stuff, make hard choices, and keep going. What’s interesting is how much relates to today, but also that the author grants us happy endings—or at least allows characters to escape with their lives—during the setting of WWII and German occupations, aggressions, etc.”
So I was hooked.
And I became kind of obsessed.
I have read ten of his fifteen novels already this year. I bought the rest of his novels and am forcing myself to slow down and savor them.
I am so impressed by him as a novelist because he does everything that I have come to admire in novels.
He is the only novelist I recommend without reservation.
Alan Furst (born 1941) writes tight, efficient, vibrant, humanist, exciting novels set during World War II, mainly in occupied cities, primarily Paris (Furst loves Paris), featuring regular people who heed the call to do their part for the resistance.
You get the atmosphere, the architecture, the cafes, the food, the travel, the secret identities, the romance. You get the romantic tension of Casablanca plus the disorienting action of Jason Bourne plus the historical realism of Robert Harris plus a cast of characters who are flawed, funny, scary, and human, and all conjured so deftly that they come to life in less than a paragraph.
You get the complexity of the world at that time, with allegiances shifting and countries at war on multiple fronts. You get a story that actually takes you places, that transforms the characters, and that gives you a sense of lives lived urgently and passionately, no matter the fascists in charge. You get constant tension and suspense, but Furst always gives you a light at the end of the tunnel.
Regular people attempt to do heroic things, and while they may or may not succeed, the heroes survive to fight another day.
And what you don’t get is all the exposition, summary, tedious lectures, and stiff dialogue that you might expect from a war novel or a spy novel or a thriller. So many novelists want to include every scrap of research they conducted, so they dump it all into the novel, even into the mouths of their characters, who speak like robotic narrators reading a note card. So many thrillers have filler to get to 400 pages and justify the price of the hardcover . . . or mini-essays about bureaucracy or the mountainside . . . or recaps of what happened in previous chapters, in case you put the book down for a week . . . or summaries of the previous books in the series—in other words, the boring stuff you skim or skip entirely.
Furst does not do any of this. Furst does not stop for three chapters to expo-dump background and backstory.
No, sir.
His novels are about people. His novels have focus. His novels move.
Furst synthesizes character, setting, plot, and everything else so that you can’t tease apart those elements. There’s no twenty-page explanation of the history of occupied Paris. There’s no ten-page backstory for a minor character.
No, he sticks with his main characters, and you live what they live, feel what they feel, eat what they eat, lie when they lie, and shiver when they get cold.
Furst dramatizes the experience of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
You want more about WWII? Great. Read a history book.
Better yet, read his next novel.
Furst has written fifteen spy novels, and they don’t form a series. You can read them in any order, although there are several recurrent characters and settings, so I’d suggest reading them as close as possible to the order in which he wrote them.
I’m not a WWII guy. I don’t seek out WWII novels anymore, mainly because I’ve already read a ton of them. I’ve read the satires (Catch-22), the doorstops (The Naked and the Dead), and the short stories (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen).
Why I keep reading the novels of Alan Furst, however, is that his novels are focused stories about particular people doing particular things, and you get to experience the world at that time (occupied Paris, say) the way they experienced it.
Individuals don’t live broadly in sweeping historical eras. They inhabit the twisting alleys of their own lives, and they can see only so far.
Furst keeps you aligned with the perspective of his heroes, and in Paris, Berlin, London, Lisbon, New York, Istanbul, and Warsaw, no one has the luxury to indulge in twenty pages of an internal monologue. Hard choices have to be made. Hard missions have to be undertaken. And hard consequences have to be endured.
You’ll see, when you read one of this novels, what I’m on about. You’ll get it.
Enjoy.
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