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In “A Hero of France” (Random House, 234pp, $27) we return to the world Alan Furst has so successfully re-created, the world of spies and suspense, of wartime Paris and Mitteleuropa.
In the past he has written most often about the period just before war began, where there was always an undercurrent of threat, what J. B. Priestly called “an atmosphere of chilly hell.” In this volume, war has already begun, France has fallen, the Occupation is a grim reality. Paris, the City of Light, which he has called “the center of civilization,” is besmirched by Nazi jackboots and shrouded in darkness. Evil is very evident.
The hero of the novel is Mathieu (not his real name). He is the leader of a small Resistance cell that smuggles downed English airmen out of France. Members of Mathieu’s cell include Lisette, a 17-year-old girl who rides around Paris on her bicycle acting as a courier. A woman who sells religious articles acts as the post office for these messages. Two aristocratic women, Chantal and Annemarie, are also members of the cell, passionate in their love of France and incredibly courageous, as well as Daniel, a Jewish student who barely escapes capture. There is a club owner—and former arms dealer—Max de Lyon (“pronounced like the animal”), who offers a place to hide the occasional British pilot. He goes so far as to blackmail an S.S. officer to save an airman. Mathieu’s second in command is Ghislain, a professor of ethnology at the Sorbonne. They are a kind of cross section of French society, all engaged in the necessary return of English pilots to England via Spain.
Much of the suspense takes place when the principals stop at checkpoints as they travel to or from the areas where the airmen are picked up, usually a farm field. There are many close calls. On one occasion a plane cannot make it and they are forced to rely on the local farmers to shelter the Englishmen. In one transfer, an airman feigns a wound with his throat wrapped in a bandage to disguise the fact that he can’t speak a word of French. Chantal plays the role of his mother.
The suspense heats up when the S.S. hires a German policeman named Broehm, who is methodical and thorough (and creepily benevolent), to rout out Mathieu and his cell. He has some success, but I reveal no more. Broehm is a functionary, an orders taker, who never thinks about the evil in which he was enmeshed.
As always, there is an element of romance in Mr. Furst’s tale. An old girlfriend appears who is a fervent communist, and thus also takes part in the clandestine activity against the Nazi occupiers. But Mathieu, who is no communist, doesn’t entirely trust her. Mathieu is in love with a fellow resident in his hotel, Joëlle. Their meetings are passionate and tender. In order to protect her he cannot reveal that he is engaged in the Resistance. But eventually she discovers what he is doing and swears that she will be at his side whatever may befall them.
The atmosphere of occupied Paris is palpable. The wet streets reflect the moonlight. There is no other light in the evening. One could close one’s eyes and imagine the novel in cinematic black and white. Any moment Albert Camus, a Gauloises dangling from his lip, could appear, or even Humphrey Bogart might turn a corner. But when the summer came, as it did even in occupied France, there was nothing the Boche could do to hold it back.
Mr. Furst has been praised for the meticulous research that is the hallmark of his historical spy novels. And rightly so. One has no sense that this is an American writer trespassing in Simenon country. (Mr. Furst did, in fact, live in Paris for several years working as a foreign correspondent.) He sounds entirely legitimate and encourages the reader to believe him implicitly. We almost think that we can speak French. One wants to call his 14 novels a series. Many characters recur from time to time, but his books are united mostly by the general period, the atmosphere he has created, and by his soigné prose. “A Hero of France” is one of his best.
on Sep 8, 2016