Mission To Paris, like
most of Alan Furst's work, is set in the period just before the
Second World War, when Europe is about to come apart at the seams.
It's also set in Paris, which makes it a little different, as Furst
has actually dealt with Paris during the War itself. Which leads me
to think about where this stands in his oeuvre, especially since it
follows Spies Of The Balkans, which was a Richard & Judy choice and in this country his most successful novel yet
(you can read my review of that book here).
Like Balkans, Mission has a pared down plot—and oddly, considering it's set
mostly in Paris, somewhat less atmosphere than his early books.
Perhaps he, or we, know Paris too well? Its main character, unusually
for Furst, is an American of sorts, Hollywood star Frederic Stahl (to
me his name recalls Frederic March and John Stahl, both Americans who
might well have been Europeans) born in Vienna, with a Slovene
father, now loaned out by Warner Bros. to make a movie in 1938 Paris.
But the Germans are waging a deep and complicated propaganda battle
within France, trying to keep public opinion away from the idea of
preparing for war, and Stahl soon finds himself the object of the
affectionate Nazi eye, to his growing discomfort.
From there the story
proceeds along familiar lines—through a series of vignettes, set in
Paris, Berlin, Morocco, and finally Rumainia, and each ends with an
unexpected and sudden death. This is Furst's world, where even the
most commonplace of human activities can be fraught with danger, and
his stock in trade is recreating that atmosphere of unsettled
paranoia and fear.
But this book moves
onto a slightly different track in a couple of ways. It's far less
ambiguous than many of his previous novels. Furst actually sets up
any number of questions for the reader—can we trust so-and-so at
Warner Bros, him at the film company, her at the German hostess'
party-- and in every case it turns out that we can, or that we were
wrong simply to worry. This goes against the great strength of his
work, which is that we can never know what positions the people on
whom we are forced to depend have taken, and we can never know if
that means they can or can't be trusted. So in that sense, this story
is more straightforward.
It's also, as I said, less
atmospheric. The most interesting parts of Paris don't rise up from the page, they seem to
fade in the background of the story. Indeed, the best description is saved for the workings of the film
industry (there's even a sly nod to Jean Casson, a hero of previous
Furst novels). Even when he visits the wardrobe woman's modest digs,
we don't get the deeper sense of what the surroundings mean to her
that we've come to expect. Similarly, his Berlin, on Kristallnacht no
less, remains something heard off-stage, and he really seems to move
through the more exotic settings with even more dispatch.
In a more important way
it is more straightforward as well—because Stahl falls in love, and
in that sense his 'mission' to Paris has been to do what people have
done, have gone to Paris to do, forever. I said in my review of
Spies Of The Balkans that there seems to be less 'action' in each
successive Furst novel, but that appears to have allowed his love
stories to become more involved, more detailed, and I would guess
more satisfying for a wider audience. I suspect Mission To Paris will
be optioned quickly for a film which, paradoxically, might render
what I have taken to be a relatively less well-drawn atmosphere, and
convert it into a film whose atmosphere will steal the screen.
Furst's work deserves no less.
Mission To Paris by
Alan Furst
Weidenfeld &
Nicholson £18.99 ISBN 9780863922
NOTE: This review will
also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)
