Thoughts on Dark Star and Night Soldiers

Twin epics, Alan Furst's Dark Star and Night Soldiers are his best and first novels, respectively. It is perhaps odd then that they are among the last of his books that I have read.

Dark Star has a singular depth of study that is not present in most of Furst's novels. Part of this stems from the uniformity of many of Furst's characters. As I wrote about Mercier, the lead in Furst's most recent novel, The Spies of Warsaw, they are largely "patriotic but jaded, resourceful but wary, cognizant of the inevitability of war but bent on preventing (or fighting) the spread of fascism." So it is with Andre Szara. He has an added layer of character, one that informs every decision in the novel: he must choose what he wants to be.

In Dark Star and Night Soldiers (and Blood of Victory), the characters must choose not just how but if they will fight. That's a major difference from most boilerplate stories about World War II, especially told from an American perspective. Tora, Tora, Tora and The Guns of Navarrone and Twelve O'Clock High have given us an idea that World War II was fought by people hell bent on winning it, leaping into the fray because, well, what else were you going to do? Not fight? Alan Furst's novels show that not fighting, or fighting unwillingly, were often the preferred or only courses of action--and that makes sense to my own jaded sensibility.

Dark Star examines Szara from many perspectives: his own sense of self-preservation, his revulsion at the Soviet Union of the mid-30s, and his terror at what Germany was becoming at the same time. He is driven through all of his actions by one secret: he possesses evidence that Joseph Stalin was a spy on Bolshevist movements for the czar. Both the information and the evidence are secret, and both are enough to have Szara killed. In the meantime, he becomes and flees his life as a spymaster in Paris, in both instances questioning his motives and his will to fight. The human drama is, as always, at least as compelling as the political one.

Night Soldiers is epic in its scope as Dark Star is in its depth. This covers the broadest time period of any of Furst's work, from 1934 through the end of the war. It also involves a cast of thousands, each tangentially influencing the lead character, Khristo Stoianev. It's all woven together with a masterful touch, and includes, unique among Furst's successive work, Americans as major plot players. Not unique among his work are their roles: one is a copywriter turned OSS operative in occupied France, another is a college-educated Jewish girl from Brooklyn who winds up fighting for Monarchists in Spain. The ways in which the world bends to put them in touch with Khristo, a Bulgarian recruited by the Soviet Union, is a miracle of plot, circumstance and time.

I have three Furst novels left to read, Red Gold, The Polish Officer and The World At Night. I'm going to save them for later this year, so I'll have something to look forward to.