Alan Furst's taut thriller 'Sp

By: pigshow Mood: Date: 07/28/2010 01:26:05 Music: None

The Cold War's abrupt conclusion seemed to take a good bit of the narrative wind out of the espionage genre's sails.

Partly, that had to do with the way the conflict ended -- only a handful of prescient and implacably anti-communist historians and intellectuals had foreseen that, once contained, the Soviet bloc simply would collapse under its own weight. Partly, it had to do with the loss of that forces-of-light versus forces-of-darkness dichotomy provided by the global struggle between Soviet-style Marxism and the Western democracies.

Still, humanity's triumph seemed -- superficially, at least -- popular literature's loss. The English-language espionage novel has long been a favorite of first-rate writers who wanted to engage serious questions in an entertaining way. Graham Greene, John le Carre and Eric Ambler, for example, made masterful use of the moral ambiguities arising out of the dark struggle with the East. That era clearly is over, but American writer Alan Furst has spent the last two decades breathing a fresh vitality and relevance into the espionage novel by fusing it with impeccable historical fiction.

Furst's "Spies of the Balkans" is the 11th in a kind of series -- all set in Europe during what Auden called that "low dishonest decade" that concluded with the onset of World War II. Like Furst's 2008 bestseller, "The Spies of Warsaw," this new novel is wonderfully realized -- intelligent, entertaining and ultimately thought-provoking. There's also a fine, pared-down clarity to Furst's prose, and readers may find they're a fair distance into his engrossing story before they realize just how accomplished a writer he is, and how well-suited his style is to the engrossing complexities of a good spy novel.

"Spies of the Balkans" is set primarily in the northeastern Greek city of Salonika, an ancient and famously polyglot place only recently returned to Athens' sovereignty by the second Balkan War. The action, which is propulsively nonstop, occurs over the crucial seven-month period between late 1940 and the Nazi invasion of Greece in the spring of 1941. Furst's engaging protagonist is a Replica watches "senior official" of the Salonika police, Constantine (Costa) Zannis. His personal qualities -- a rare disinterest in bribes, an unfailing discretion and a wide-ranging competence that allows him to navigate back alleys and exclusive private clubs -- have attracted the notice and patronage of the city's 80-year-old police commissioner, Vangelis.

This legendary figure of immense power and influence has come to regard Costa as a "godson" and has selected him to head a special bureau whose duties are so politically sensitive that it goes unnamed. Even Costa's rank is -- to most people he meets -- mysterious, and he simply is known to all as "a senior police official." His two assistants are the detective Saltiel, a member of Salonika's storied Sephardic Jewish community, and Sibylla, a preternaturally efficient clerk/secretary.

From the book's opening pages, Costa finds himself enmeshed in the spy wars for which the port city of Salonika was a particular hotbed. It's generally assumed that it's only a matter of time until the Axis forces push south into the Balkans, and Nazi agents are operating with growing impunity throughout the area. So, too, is British intelligence, which already has its eye on Costa from a vantage point it would spoil the plot to disclose. He's a particular catch for anybody's spymasters: An adolescence spent working in his uncle's very shady Parisian antiques business not only has amplified Costa's natural Salonikan multilingualism, it also has made
Other articles:
http://myspacestardom.com/blog/view/id_6432/title_exiles-no-more-stones-hit-no-1/
http://www.ytyy.net/bbs/Blog.asp?BlogUserName=computeres&menu=ShowBlog&BlogID=761