The Polish Officer

New York: Random House, 1995. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Jerry Bauer (Author photograph). [6], 325, [5] pages. Alan Furst (born 1941) is an American author of historical spy novels. Furst has been called "an heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene," whom he cites along with Joseph Roth and Arthur Koestler as important influences. Most of his novels since 1988 have been set just prior to or during the Second World War and he is noted for his successful evocations of Eastern European peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944. While attending general studies courses at Columbia University, he became acquainted with Margaret Mead, for whom he later worked. Before becoming a full-time novelist, Furst worked in advertising and wrote magazine articles, most notably for Esquire, and as a columnist for the International Herald Tribune. The year 1988 saw publication of Night Soldiers—inspired by his 1984 trip to Eastern Europe on assignment for Esquire—which invigorated his career and led to a succession of related titles. His output since 1988 includes a dozen works. He is especially noted for his successful evocations of Eastern European peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944. While all his historical espionage novels are loosely connected, only The World at Night and Red Gold share a common plot. Writing in The New York Times, the novelist Justin Cartwright says that Furst, "has adopted a European sensibility." Furst lived for many years in Paris, a city that he calls "the heart of civilization" which figures significantly in all his novels. September 1939 and as Warsaw falls to Hitler's Wehrmacht, Captain Alexander de Milja is recruited by the intelligence service of the Polish underground. His mission: to transport the national gold reserve to safety, hidden on a refugee train to Bucharest. Then, in the back alleys and black-market bistros of Paris, in the tenements of Warsaw, with partisan guerrillas in the frozen forests of the Ukraine, and at Calais Harbor during an attack by British bombers, de Milja fights in the war of the shadows in a world without rules, a world of danger, treachery, and betrayal. Derived from a Kirkus review: Furst has shown that he can produce an espionage tale that goes beyond the norms of the genre. This book—hugely ambitious and masterfully written—ups the ante. For starters, the author understands, with astounding breadth of vision, what WW II was all about: murderous, megalomaniacal Nazi thugs enslaving whole populations while the free world fiddled. Captain Alexander de Milja, a Polish spy, has no time to mourn his conquered nation. He's too busy trying to wreck the German war machine (or at least slow it down) and stay alive. In doing so, he ranges from Warsaw to occupied Paris, from England to frozen Russia, always on the verge of capture, shedding names, professions, and disguises as he moves. He smuggles the Polish gold reserve out of the country on a refugee train; he's an emigre Russian poet in Paris, hobnobbing for a while with Nazis before sabotaging their invasion plans for Britain; he masquerades as a coal merchant and plots to ambush a busload of Luftwaffe pilots. There's plenty of sex, with all sorts of different women, but love for de Milja occurs strictly among the ruins. Briefly solaced in Paris by a publisher's daughter (and fellow resistance member), he considers her offer to head for Switzerland, but duty compels the sad captain to accept the next suicide mission, and the couple parts. Neither master of deception nor killing machine, de Milja comes across as a lucky soldier who gets smarter, at least in the ways of war, as the book progresses. A truly splendid novel of the wartime experience.