In Midnight in Europe
Furst tells the story of one year in the life of attorney Cristián
Ferrar, a Spanish émigré living in Paris, and his involvement in helping to
provide arms to a collapsing Republican Army in Spain. As a member of an
international law firm Ferrar travels from New York to Paris to Poland and
Odessa in an attempt to facilitate the movement of heavy arms and ammunition
from eastern European countries across the enemy lands to ports where these
armaments can reach the communists in Spain desperately fighting Franco and the
Nationalists.
It is a story of changing alliances, intrigues, and for
Ferrar numerous assignations, romances, and potential betrayals. Most
characters in the story don’t trust oe belive their associates and while the
battle is between the communists and the fascists we begin to understand
through Mr. Furst’s pen, that a Spanish Communist is very different than a
Russian or Parisian communist. Their political desires are very different and
often are at cross-purposes. As Mr. Ferrar and his associate and arms merchant Max
de Lyon, travel through Germany to complete an arms arrangement they are
stopped at the border at a Gestapo checkpoint and interviewed by thick necked
officer with colorless hair, a Major Schwalbe. He inquires about their reasons
for traveling in Germany. De Lyon answers quickly with their prepared story;
they are there to take photographs for their magazine and its special issue of Nudism in the Reich. This puts the
officer off his focus especially when he’s offered sample copies. Such is the
craft of Alan Furst.
The novel is a series of interconnected vignettes that tell
of people, simple working people, caught up in the growing conflict that would
eventually lead to war. A ship’s captain surviving from port to port hauling
illegal arms, a station master forced into facilitating the movement of weapons
in box cars through enemy controlled lands, and most sadly the tale of Castillo
in Madrid who paid ultimately to save the life of a beautiful woman – and spy.
The book is thick with detail and nuance, as are all of Mr.
Furst’s novels. They are the stories of one person trapped on a single page of
a war’s brutal endless manuscript where nothing is as it seems and conclusions
never come.
As with most of Alan Furst’s books it is short by today’s
novel standards at 272 pages, but is rich with color and depth.
I highly recommend it.
More Later . . . . . . . . .
