Graham Greene, Roll Over

A few months ago, novelist Alan Furst, in one of those New York Times "Writers on Writing" pieces, told how, on a magazine assignment to the Soviet Union back in 1983, he suddenly discovered his subject--what he calls "historical spy novels." Moscow, he wrote, "was a tense, dark city, all shadows and averted eyes...and its satellite states...were in some sense stuck in 1937." His previous novels had been acquired by the "National Library of Oblivion." So he would write about Europe in the war years and the years just preceding them.

His ability to evoke that world is stunning. Through six novels, Furst has created characters and painted a political and social landscape, a dark world of fear and uncertainty, and, behind them, the purges and camps, that's uncanny in its detail and atmospheric accuracy. It's a world that, as a German refugee who lived in, and ultimately escaped from, Nazi-occupied Belgium in 1941, I knew only too well, even as a boy of 10. Furst reimagines that world with a texture and depth I'd almost forgotten. Now with Blood of Victory, his seventh, he's done it again.

Like his other novels, this one roams across a large swath of Europe in the early years of the war, from Istanbul to St. Moritz, from Bucharest and Belgrade to Paris. And like most of the heroes of Furst's other novels--a French film director, a Jew writing for Pravda, a Hungarian-Parisian entrepreneur--its central character, this time a Russian émigré writer named I.A. Serebin, is a figure who, at the beginning, merely tries to keep his head down, pretend nothing has happened and get along. But events are in the saddle--"This terrible war," a former lover warns, "it will come for you."And, sure enough, he's soon convinced, or perhaps persuades himself, to become an homme engagé.

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