The good news for devotees of suspense novelist Alan Furst is that A Hero of France is a lot like the preceding nine or ten books in his output. Nah, why beat around the bush? In every significant way, it's exactly like them, starting with another amateurish-but-determined, fortyish-but-virile male protagonist fighting his small, possibly meaningless share of the good fight against Hitler and Mussolini.Vogue 's correspondent in Occupied Europe, Furst likes to moonlight for Bon Appétit . Like his previous avatars, Mathieu accepts women's interest as his due. But good meals make him ardent — and he knows where to find them, too. The ideal last line of any Furst novel would be "After the war was over, [Fill in the Blank] prospered as a Fodor's tour guide."The World at Night, as I recall — I figured I'd never be bored on an airline again if he only managed to stay productive. But he has stayed productive, and his reprises of the same scenario have gone from stimulating to predictable to damn near stupefying. By now, picking up a new Furst is like reliving Groundhog Day with random bits of dialogue from Casablanca tossed in. A Hero of France as his first thriller in some time that's set during the actual, y'know, war years, after multiple books so stuck on revisiting its various 1930s preludes that some readers wondered if we'd ever see 1940 again. No matter how long he keeps at this, however, I'm fairly sure we'll never see 1945. A Furst thriller set during the period when the good guys were actually winning would wreak havoc on his passion for defiant European underdogs whose despair is only held at bay by a new love interest or a timely steak-frites dinner.plenty, Mac.) Yet he's gone on obstinately repackaging the identical dark-skies-over-Europe saga, with only minute variations, for over twenty years. That's either a genuine fixation at work or evidence of serious anxiety about killing the golden goose. Most likely, it's a combination of the two. But next to Furst, an old-time spy novelist like Eric Ambler — one of his acknowledged models — was a positive riot of unpredictable variety.A Hero of France has many nice touches. Furst is never inelegant; that's one more of his vices. There's a good portrait of a well-off Parisian dilettante who's scared out of his wits by Resistance work but determined to see it through, provoking one of Mathieu's best lines: "Remember, Chantal, he's French — not so much afraid of dying as afraid of doing something wrong."Mission to Paris . Chantal isn't the only character to inspire a sense of déjà lu. From Mathieu on down, even when we haven't literally met them before — the mysterious S. Korb makes his fourth or fifth appearance in a Furst novel here, acting pointlessly cagy, as usual - - we feel like we have. Berlin Noir trilogy while Kerr wasn't looking. Typically, Broehm is built up as a formidable antagonist — "the Inspector Maigret, the Hercule Poirot, of the Hamburg police" — and introduced in enough detail to make us think his personality and C.V. will be relevant to whatever happens next. Then his one rather unimaginative operation against Mathieu doesn't work out so well, and he heads back to Hamburg, or maybe Kerr's bottom drawer. Night Soldiers and Dark Star, the paired novels that turned historical espionage into Furst's specialty, were impressive reconstructions of 1930s intrigue from the provocative perspective of agents recruited by Stalin's NKVD. Laying bare the paradoxes of one totalitarian regime at odds with its right-wing secret sharers, those early books had real surprise and a sense of moral complexity; they weren't just regurgitations of old movies and vintage magazines, retooled to look stylish and grimly authentic at once. Furst is still good at period details — that's his best gimmick — but they might as well be refrigerator magnets for all they add up to in terms of insight. He's living in his own private Disneyland.The Greatest Generation to Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, the whole phenomenon was a nostalgia O.D. in which romance and realism grew hopelessly intermingled and deglamorization became the new form of glamour.A two-time National Magazine Award winner during his stint as Esquire's "Screen" columnist, Tom Carson is currently a columnist at GQ. He is the author of Gilligan's Wake (2003), a novel .
Reviewer: Tom Carson
The Barnes & Noble Review
★ 04/25/2016
05/15/2016
★ 2016-03-17
Praise for Alan Furst —Tom Hanks —The Wall Street Journal —Vince Flynn —Los Angeles Times —The New York Times —The Boston Globe
Narrator Daniel Gerroll’s strong, cultured British voice leads us through the newest of Furst’s richly atmospheric tales of occupied Europe during the Second World War. It is spring 1941. Mathieu, leader of a Paris Resistance cell, moves British airmen shot down in raids over Nazi Germany out of danger into neutral Spain. German police and French collaborators are everywhere. The British are ungrateful and demanding. Gerroll’s pacing is excellent. His French pronunciation is faultless. Furst remains a brilliant writer with an eye for the details of domestic (and erotic) life in a world turned savage and dark. Listening to the Night Soldiers series is always deeply satisfying as ordinary people fight the darkness. F.C. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
