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We’ll Always Have Paris: A Hero of France

26 Monday Jun 2017

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Review: A Hero of France, by Alan Furst
Random House, 2016. 234 pp. $27

If you’ve read any of Furst’s fourteen books, the time and place will be familiar: Paris, 1941, the City of Light under a blackout imposed by the German Occupation. It’s early spring, so America has yet to declare war, and Britain fights alone against German power at its high-water mark. Trying to strike back at the German hinterland, British bombers overfly French territory, and many don’t make it home. Consequently, increasing numbers of British airmen are parachuting into Occupied territory, and the nascent Resistance does its best to keep them out of German hands and send them to safety in neutral Spain.

German troops parade down the Champs Elysée, Paris, 1940 (courtesy Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons)

One such Resistance cell operates in Paris, under a man code-named Mathieu. Like the setting, he too is typical Furst–worldly, mature, resourceful, committed, without swagger, doing what he does because he thinks someone has to, refusing to judge those of his countrymen who want no part of it. Oh, and did I say that beautiful women find him irresistible? Many things are rationed in Furst’s Europe, but sex isn’t.

Naturally, the occupiers and their French toadies do their best to crack the Resistance. But luckily for Mathieu and his operatives, the Occupation is new enough so that the German Army and the French police undertake the counterespionage; the Gestapo remains largely in the wings. As a result, the bad guys aren’t as vicious and uncompromising as they might be, especially since many of the French contingent would rather not arrest their countrymen. The real danger lies in ordinary civilians looking to make money by informing, and they can be persistent.

Mathieu . . . saw what was indeed a strange-looking man, or, rather, a strange-looking boy, barely in his twenties. Standing at the bar and drinking a glass of wine, he had dark skin and dark eyes, wore a buttoned-up overcoat that was both much too tight and much too long, a hat with a wide, flat brim and a low crown, also flat, to which he’d added a bow tie that might once have belonged to a café waiter. With a pencil line of a mustache that traced his upper lip, he struck Mathieu as a boy dressed up to play his father.

But this guy, though dangerous, isn’t the real threat. The real threat is a German police inspector imported from Hamburg to crack the Resistance cells operating out of Paris, and he’s got people working for him who are much smarter than anyone Mathieu has come up against.

Furst moves his story rapidly, and, as always, his narrative represents the definition of “no; and furthermore.” Plans backfire thanks to inattention or nerves or plain bad luck. What I like about A Hero of France is that whatever heroism you see is of the quiet variety and seemingly more genuine for it. The narrative also gives the bad guys their due; of the several minor characters who come through clearly, the German police inspector and his chief mole stand out for me.

Furst’s trademark atmospheric descriptions are in full force too. You feel the blackout, the tension in the streets, a divided nation about to discover that when it comes to privation, they ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Furst suggests the political struggle between the Resistance and its British contacts–we won’t call them allies–and the pressures under which the French administration tries to remain intact. With equal, admirable economy, he makes a key historical point, that the British were so desperate for air crews that they sent escaped fliers back into the air. (This contrasted with subsequent American policy, which grounded escapees on the logic that they might be recognized if recaptured, compromising them and anyone who had helped them.)

All this is fine. But I still pine for Furst’s earliest works, which felt fresher, more fleshed out, and more gripping. They were also much longer. Maybe that kind of book is passé or unprofitable or un-something. But A Hero of France has tons of narrators, few of whom come alive, and, despite the “no; and furthermore,” inconvenient circumstances sometimes resolve themselves in ways they wouldn’t have in earlier books. If Furst is trying to suggest that he can do this because it’s only spring 1941, and the very, very bad guys aren’t in charge yet, I’m not buying.

Paris is Paris, and we can always have that, as Humphrey Bogart told Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. But certain things can be too familiar and leave us wanting more.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Programme Too Full: Radio Girls

29 Monday May 2017

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Review: Radio Girls, by Sarah-Jane Stratford
NAL, 2016. 367 pp. $16

Maisie Musgrave, a young woman down to her last tuppence, gets a secretarial job at the BBC, a newfangled and perhaps not entirely respectable organization in 1926. After all, what is radio, how does it work, and isn’t it improper to hear a disembodied voice? But, like the protagonist in this engaging, amusing novel, the BBC is about to spread its wings and soar. The real questions involve how bumpy the ride will be, and who will learn what along the way.

Maisie, who looks, feels, and acts like a doormat, could use a lift. Growing up in Toronto, she was bullied for much of her young life, labeled “Mousie Maisie” with no kindness, yet some accuracy. Maisie has no idea who her father was, except that his name is Edwin Musgrave, and he didn’t stay long. Her stagestruck mother, Georgina, has no use for her, and her grandparents want nothing to do with her. So she has come to London, for reasons not entirely clear, feeling somehow that England offers the roots she has never known.

Consequently, getting a job at the BBC, to Maisie a posh outfit where breeding and education matter above all, is more than a godsend–it’s a lifeline. And she clings to it with all her might, which, with experience, proves stronger than she’d ever have guessed.

The first BBC aerial, atop Selfridges, the Oxford Street department store, London, 1926 (courtesy “The Dawn of the Wireless in the U.K.”)

To me, this is the best part of Radio Girls: the coming-of-age story; a young woman learning to ask questions rather than keep the silence she’s been taught; the office politics, invariably charged with sexism; and the working of a radio institution as it invents itself. Stratford excels at all this, and the narrative clips along, as Maisie learns the city, and about life:

The [tram] ride was long and she had to stand, but she didn’t mind. The car had a rhythmic sway, the bell tinkled happily, and one never knew when a sudden screech or thrust would disrupt the song, jolting them all out of their morning meditation. It was a kind of jazz, the only kind she could afford, and so she embraced the fizz of cigarette smoke, the lingering smell of coffee, and the crinkle of newspapers that added to the hum and percussion. It wasn’t stealing to read the paper over a man’s shoulder, gleaning nuggets of the world and enjoying the smell of Palmolive shaving cream. And she watched London unfold before her.

The chief conflict lies between the BBC’s director-general, Reith, and Hilda Matheson, who runs the section called Talks, and whose protegée Maisie eventually becomes. Reith is a Puritan who hates controversy or anything his nineteenth-century mind can’t wrap itself around, which is just about everything Hilda lives for. He’d fire her, if he could, but she has powerful friends, and the Talks programs–short discussions, presentations, or debates on every conceivable topic–generate tons of fan mail and expand the BBC’s audience.

I like this story, and despite my criticisms, I think Radio Girls is worth reading. Nevertheless, Stratford adds more, and that’s where she gets into trouble. The prologue, which dangles like the useless appendage it is, suggests a thriller, and yes, that subplot emerges about two-thirds of the way through, late in the game and superfluous. To be fair, the thriller part has life to it, with a couple famous figures contributing zestful dialogue and presence. But it’s too earnest by half–a screed against Fascism–and utterly improbable, whereas the rest I believe implicitly.

Besides, I’m more interested in Maisie and her struggles than in Hilda Matheson, her boss. Stratford explains in her Author’s Note that Matheson, a real historical figure, fascinates her. I agree that Matheson’s a worthy subject, perhaps for a future novel, but dragging her connection to MI5 and the clumsy thriller resolution into Radio Girls seems a stretch, at best.

I’d have also liked to see a firmer grounding in the era. Though characters talk about the Great War and the politics of the Twenties and early Thirties, you don’t see them. Stratford conveys Maisie’s poverty with great vividness, but London has no wounded veterans holding tin cups on street corners, no smog or grit to blight the air or the soul. Reith recites the mantra of a man from his time and social class, but Radio Girls doesn’t show what he’s talking about; it’s all abstract.

Reith’s a problem in himself, like the other men in this book. They have no inner lives and no contradictions, only flat surfaces, and though Stratford offers clever observations about them, the men are simply that, observed. Though I detest their sexism and what they stand for, and I cheer for Maisie and Hilda to go onward and upward, as they both like to say, I wish Radio Girls delivered more than the obvious.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Keeping Secrets: Exposure

25 Monday Jul 2016

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Review: Exposure, by Helen Dunmore
Atlantic, 2016. 391 pp. $25

Simon Callington is a decent man, the dutiful Englishman. He’s a devoted husband and father of three, bright but not brilliant, content with modest pleasures, too self-effacing to say no when maybe he should, too slow to realize that others don’t play fair. In other words, Simon is a perfect fall guy. And since this is 1960, when Soviet spies are turning up inside the British government–in fact, his immediate superiors in the Naval Department have been “batting for the other side” for years–a fall guy can be useful.

Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby worked for British Intelligence but was actually a Soviet agent. One of the so-called Cambridge Five, men who attended that institution and spied for the USSR, Philby defected in 1963. This image comes from a 1990 Soviet postage stamp (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby worked for British Intelligence but was actually a Soviet agent. One of the so-called Cambridge Five, men who attended that institution and spied for the USSR, Philby defected in 1963. This image comes from a 1990 Soviet postage stamp (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The story all starts innocently enough. Giles Holloway, an old friend, mentor, and immediate superior, calls Simon at an inconvenient hour to have him rescue a file from a place it should never have gone. Simon agrees, only because he can’t say no to Giles, part of which goes back to their days at Cambridge, when they were lovers. But Simon will have ample time to wish he had said no, because one look at the file tells him that neither man should have seen it, and Giles’s briefcase, which Simon comes across, contains more of the same. Rather than return the file to the office, as Giles wants, Simon brings it home. From there, his life unravels.

With Exposure, Dunmore proves again why she’s among my favorite writers. She’s written a thriller as gripping as any, using Simon’s very ordinariness and decency to devastating effect. There’s no cloak-and-dagger here, no secret that will explode the universe if it falls into the wrong hands, no mole who must be uncovered before he or she compromises national security. Rather, it’s how those who act to protect national security are destroying the decency and moral compass that Simon represents, and they do so without a second thought, certain of their righteousness. So yes, the world is at stake after all, for what happens when decency and moral compass mean nothing?

Consequently, Exposure has to do with how the government Simon serves repays his loyalty, and how they hurt him, his wife, and children. Once suspicion falls on him, he has no friends, and the people he might have counted on for support, like Giles, will gladly sacrifice him to their own interests. Simon’s only ally is his wife, Lily, a woman of great resourcefulness. However, Simon refuses to tell her anything that might compromise her, and Lily, who can be difficult to reach, has a secret of her own that she won’t share.

Dunmore excels here, deriving so much tension from unwillingness or inability to communicate that at times you want to howl. But there are good reasons for it, which, typical of her fiction, come from within the characters. Lily, a German Jew by birth, grew up living “in fear before she knew why she was afraid . . . knowing that people hated her,” and though she escaped her native country, she can’t escape herself. Once Simon is arrested, Lily rebuffs her friends, believing that she mustn’t taint them, and concentrates on protecting her children as best she can.

Another thing I like is how Dunmore contrasts the offhand, charismatic Giles with his mousy, submissive underling. Early on, Giles observes:

We aren’t meant to see ourselves as others see us. In fact it would be a bloody dull world if we did, because no one would ever make a fool of himself again. We might as well accept that we’re put on this earth to make unwitting entertainment for other fellow men, and get on with doing so.

All that sounds very nice, blasé wisdom for the Cambridge common room. But without ever saying so, Dunmore shows what happens when Simon, dull as he may be in comparison with Giles, actually tries to connect with life instead of looking at it as a game. His plight may furnish entertainment for the men who want to sink him, but everyone else is in great pain.

The only false note in this portrayal concerns Simon’s sexuality. If he was homosexual at Cambridge and found it exciting, why has he given it up? He may think of it as a youthful road he no longer prefers to travel, and his marriage is plainly substantial. Yet Giles still exerts a pull over him. Also, Giles’s boss, Julian, though a master of the nasty innuendo and capable of intimidating just about anybody, seems two-dimensional. Almost every time he appears, the adjective cold sticks to him like Arctic ice on bare skin, but that doesn’t satisfy me.

The first book I reviewed for this blog was The Lie, a lyrical, heart-rending tale of rootlessness that’s still my favorite of all those I’ve written about here. Though Exposure deals with a different subject, it’s a worthy companion, and I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Deception: The Paris Winter

27 Monday Jun 2016

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Review: The Paris Winter, by Imogen Robertson
St. Martin’s, 2013. 360 pp. $26

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But Maud Heighton, the protagonist of this excellent thriller set in 1909, can’t help herself. She’s slowly starving in Paris, garden of earthly delights, while learning to become a painter at l’Académie Lafond. All Maud’s classmates are women, which keeps predatory bohemians out, but Lafond charges his female students double what he would if they were male–the image of respectability costs extra, you see.

Quai de Passy, Paris, during the flood of 1910 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Quai de Passy, Paris, during the flood of 1910 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Not that anyone of the male persuasion believes in that respectability; Maud’s brother, a lawyer back in England, disapproves of his sister’s choice to live in that sinful city, and many men freely offer their opinion that art is a masculine preserve. So as Maud’s meager funds drip away to finance her education, and as she covertly lunches on the tiny cakes served at class sessions, she’s terribly alone. She loves Paris, but it’s out of reach–and so is Maud, a proper Englishwoman who keeps her distance, living in her books and sketch pads.

In the full light of day Paris was chic and confident. The polished shops were filled with colour and temptation and on every corner was a scene worth painting. It was modern without being vulgar, tasteful without being rigid or dull. A parade of elegant originality. Only in this hour, just before dawn on a winter’s morning, did the city seem a little haggard, a little stale. . . . The streets were almost empty–only the occasional man, purple in the face and stale with smoke and drink, hailing a cab in the Place Pigalle, or the old women washing out the gutters with stiff-brushed brooms.

But Maud can’t remain impervious and aloof forever. Tanya Koltsova, a wealthy Russian classmate from Lafond’s, befriends her, determined to show her a good time and feed her enough to restore color to her cheeks. Naturally, Maud’s too proud to accept charity, but through Tanya, she learns of a situation as a lady’s companion. Sylvie Morel, a pale, blonde beauty with a sensual face who could have stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite painting by Edward Burne-Jones, is very sickly, and her older brother wants someone to coax her into the world and help her gain her strength. How perfect for Maud; it’s precisely what she needs for herself. In return for her room, board, and a princely wage, all she need do is entice Sylvie away from her sickbed, teaching her English and giving her drawing lessons.

There are complications, however. As Morel confides, Sylvie is addicted to opium, which he indulges within limits, hoping to wean her off the drug. Yet he praises Maud’s efforts to get her out and about and insists that he can see real progress.

Then a madwoman pounds on the door one day when Morel’s out–as he usually is–and forces her way into the apartment. Morel’s a thief, the woman declares, and Sylvie’s not his sister but his wife. The Morels have ruined her life, besmirched her good name. Naturally, Maud can’t believe a word and is horrified that she couldn’t ward her off; luckily, the concierge and her husband arrive in time and threw the madwoman out.

I probably don’t have to tell you that things unravel quickly from there, and that the Morels aren’t who they seem. The Paris Winter tells a gut-wrenching, dark story while exploring the theme of how money imprisons people who have too little or too much of it. I like the storytelling very much–Robertson makes skillful use of “no; and furthermore”–and most of her characters, who come from all walks of life. Tanya’s poor-little-rich-girl act wears at times, and I wish the author had given her more than a good heart, a taste for beautiful dresses, and a quest for what it means to marry for love. A worldview, maybe? But the weak link here is the Morels, who seem like sociopaths (especially Sylvie), and, as I’ve said before, I dislike thrillers or mysteries in which the villainy comes purely from psychological distortion.

Even so, I enjoyed The Paris Winter immensely.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Life Hangs on Chance: City of Secrets

26 Thursday May 2016

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Review: City of Secrets, by Stewart O’Nan
Viking, 2016. 194 pp. $22

Brand, a Latvian survivor of the Holocaust, drives a taxi in Jerusalem in 1945. But that simple statement skips over many complexities. The British are clinging to their mandate over Palestine, refusing entry to dispossessed Jews like Brand and combing the population for illegal immigrants, whom they deport. Consequently, he must live underground, so his papers, taxi, and apartment come courtesy of a revolutionary cell committed to Israeli independence, which knows him only as Jossi. Since even the possession of a weapon is a hanging offense, ferrying his comrades to clandestine rendezvous or military operations puts him in great danger.

Jerusalem, VE Day, May 8, 1945 (Courtesy Matson Photographic Service, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Jerusalem, VE Day, May 8, 1945 (Courtesy Matson Photographic Service, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Naturally, Brand becomes more than a chauffeur, about which he has mixed feelings–repugnance at violence, excitement at wielding power, pride in helping create a Jewish homeland. But as his role widens, he realizes that his cell, which he thought belonged to the Haganah, a comparatively moderate organization, has been taken over by the more violent, provocative Irgun. What holds him together is his love for Eva, a fellow Latvian and cell member, who arouses his jealousy by working as a prostitute to gain information.

From this tense, conflict-ridden premise comes a thriller of remarkable depth and breadth, especially considering how spare it is. The jacket quotes a blurb by Alan Furst, and O’Nan deserves the compliment in more than one way. Not only has he shown the same elegant economy as the best of Furst’s more recent World War II thrillers, he’s pushed the envelope. Rather than have Brand be an expert, O’Nan makes him an amateur who can’t master his risky impulses to retain human connection when the smart money says to shut up and pretend you see nothing. But how could he remain silent, when his wife, parents, grandparents, and sister were all murdered, and when he watched a friend stomped to death in a concentration camp? Brand’s confusion and ambivalence, rather than sangfroid or professional devotion, are what drive the narrative.

As with Furst, City of Secrets tastes of atmosphere:

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. . . . The very stones were secondhand, scavenged and fit back into place haphazardly, their Roman inscriptions inverted. It was the rainy season, and the walls were gray instead of golden, the souks teeming with rats. An east wind thrashed the poplars and olive trees, stirring up trash in cul-de-sacs, rattling windows. He’d lost too much weight during the war and couldn’t get warm.

When Brand goes into action, there’s tension aplenty. But the author also captures tension of a different kind, the everyday variety. Brand must wait for information, which usually comes unexpectedly and never fully enough to satisfy his curiosity. Every drive through Jerusalem means passing British roadblocks, where there’s always a chance he’ll be discovered as an illegal immigrant, or that soldiers will search his car and find what he’s not supposed to have. He craves Eva’s company, but also her love, which she denies him, and which he’s learned never to discuss. Accordingly, every move Brand makes, even if it’s to stay in his apartment, alone, ratchets up the stakes.

City of Secrets manages to suggest much about politics and hatreds without having to narrate them, an admirable part of the economy I mentioned. O’Nan conveys the bitter divisions between the Haganah and the Irgun; the British occupiers’ anti-Semitism; and the moral challenges inherent to fighting for a righteous cause. I like City of Secrets much better than a novel I reviewed on a similar subject, I Lived in Modern Times, or, for that matter, O’Nan’s West of Sunset, about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years. That was a nice novel; City of Secrets is terrific.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Cuba Libre: Night Work

09 Monday May 2016

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Review: Night Work, by David C. Taylor
Forge, 2016. 318 pp. $26

Michael Cassidy is a New York City detective who does things his way, which really pisses off a lot of people–like the Mob, the FBI, revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, Upper East Side bluebloods, and, oh, yes, his Department superiors. But what the hell, right? He’s very good at solving murders, and in 1959, that means there’s plenty of work to do. More important, it’s rumored he “has juice” or a “rabbi,” which is to say, friends in high places, not least his mobster godfather. (No, not that kind of godfather. A real one.)

Constantino Arias's photo, titled, "The Ugly American," of a tourist in Batista's Havana, 1950s (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Constantino Arias’s photo, titled, “The Ugly American,” of a tourist in Batista’s Havana, 1950s (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Nevertheless, Michael’s wiseass sense of humor pushes the wrong buttons. For instance, when the deputy chief of police demands to know whether the detective harbors “lefty” sympathies, as in, who he voted for in 1956, Michael replies, “Mickey Mantle. He had a good season. Batted three-oh-four, had thirty-nine home runs. I figured it was time for him to move up.” Naturally, that witticism doesn’t sit well.

But what’s bad (or shall we say, “inadvisable”?) for Michael is great fun for the reader. The reason Deputy Chief Clarkson wants to know his politics is because Fidel Castro, having just chased Fulgencia Batista out of Cuba, is paying an ambassadorial visit to New York. As it happens, Michael has been to Havana on police business, where, by the way, he sprang his former lover, Dylan McCue, from prison the day before her scheduled execution. Since many disaffected Cubans and their unsavory American allies (like Meyer Lansky, the mobster) would be happy to assassinate Castro, security will be tight. But will it be tight enough? And is there a Cuban connection to a murder Michael’s investigating on the Upper East Side?

Night Work is the sequel to Night Life and offers many of the same pleasures, though on a broader stage. Taylor writes about power as corrupting, and the Cuban revolution offers plenty of grist. You see it in the graft and brutalities of the Batista regime, which runs the country like a plantation, and in the revolutionaries who execute hundreds in the name of democracy, believing in slogans rather than decency. Compare these two descriptions, first, before the changing of the guard:

Havana was an occupied city, occupied by American tourists dressed in colors never found in nature. The cafés and bars were filled with afternoon drinkers having loud fun. It was an expanded version of the party on the flight over. Here none of the normal rules applied, and when you went home, anything that might smudge your conscience was forgotten, wiped clean by the ninety-mile flight across the water.

And after:

‘I was there,’ the man said and showed him his bandaged forearm proudly. He wore a madras shirt, khaki pants, and sandals, and he had a Thompson submachine gun barrel down on a strap over his shoulder. He wore the fuzzy beginnings of a beard, the new fashion in Havana. . . . .He laughed and offered Cassidy a cigar and insisted he drink from the bottle of rum he pulled from his back pocket, and when the next group of trucks entered the square, he righted his gun and fired a burst into the air.

But New York is still the novel’s core. The author depicts both the seedy corners where bagmen do their dirty work, hoping the big man will reward them, and the fifteenth-story apartments on the Upper East Side with river views, where bigoted, self-important snobs assume that messy problems are for lesser folk. I also enjoy how Taylor portrays Mephistopheles himself, J. Edgar Hoover, making a return cameo from Night Life. The New York idiom too, is always a treat, as with, “There’s a place over on Lex makes great coffee,” or “what I tell all of them come ask about my customers.” That’s writing with an observant ear.

At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll lodge the same complaints against this novel as I did its ancestor. Michael’s a male pheromone factory, and no female seems immune. He doesn’t even have to try, though in this book, one beauty actually ditches him for Paul Newman, if that says anything. Michael does have advanced chemistry going with Dylan, a KGB agent, and I believe that relationship, though I’m less sure about the way she keeps showing up at unexpected moments. It serves the story, which is extremely well plotted, the murder mystery in particular, but, as with some of the derring-do, I have my doubts.

That said, Night Work is enormously entertaining. Even better, the characters all believe in something, which gives depth to what, in other hands, might be merely a colorful, suspenseful novel.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Aquarius Rising: Pompeii

30 Monday Nov 2015

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Review: Pompeii, by Robert Harris
Random House, 2005. 278 pp. $15

About halfway through this ingenious novel set in late August, 79 C.E., the corrupt villain tells the incorruptible hero, “Here’s a piece of advice for you, my friend: there’s no safer investment than property in Pompeii.”

"Vesuvius from Portici," by Joseph Wright of Derby, eighteenth century (Public domain, courtesy Titanic News Channel).

Vesuvius from Portici, by Joseph Wright, 18th-century English painter (Public domain, courtesy Titanic News Channel).

The reader cringes at the irony, but neither party to this conversation realizes that within days–hours–Vesuvius will erupt and bury the town in pumice, ash, and molten rock. It’s testament to Harris’s skill that he fashions a much-storied historical event almost two millennia old into an edge-of-your-seat thriller, despite certain elements common to the genre and therefore predictable. How does he do it? By going against the grain.

Harris could have focused on the victims, playing on their ignorance, innocence, and tragedy. There’s nothing wrong with that–we can all imagine unseen terrors striking us down–but Harris goes the other way. He shows the Pompeiians at their worst, whether the scheming politicians, the astonishingly greedy villain, his feckless friends and relations, or the townspeople, brutal, superstitious, and quick to anger.

This setup gives the author wider scope. Not only does he ratchet up the tension over whether the evil will perish along with the good, his premise opens several roads to explore. One is the thirst for money (a metaphor of double meaning here). Another compares nature’s cruelty to the human variety; to no surprise, nature comes out the better, because its ravages imply no intent. But that proposition, which (a) has implications for what civilization means; and (b) suggests a random universe, troubles these Romans. As rulers of the known world, they assume their moral superiority and humanity, while as polytheists, they worry about offending capricious gods, so that there’s no such thing as a random act. However, not all Romans in this novel accept these common beliefs. Pliny the Elder, in these pages a vivid, significant character, sets higher store by observation than what Vulcan may or may not be up to beneath Vesuvius.

So does the protagonist, Marcus Attilius. He’s a newly appointed aquarius, or engineer, who serves the Aqua Augusta, the aqueduct that supplies the region with water. Attilius possesses several virtues on which ancient Romans prided themselves: honesty, courage, willingness to work hard for the common good, and the energy to sweat the details. Coming from a long line of aquarii, he discounts Vulcan’s wrath as the reason for a mysterious break in the Aqua Augusta and its pervasive odor of sulfur. But whatever the cause, it’s his job to repair the aqueduct and solve the mystery before the public realizes their water supply has failed.

Trouble is, Ampliatus, the real estate magnate full of sage investment advice, has been building splendid baths in Pompeii, and he sees a large, illegal fortune to be made in water. (As a former slave who works rather too hard to enrich himself and burnish his reputation, he’s aptly named, for ampliatus means “to widen,” “to enlarge,” or “to glorify”.) He quickly recognizes that Attilius will oppose him and takes steps to have him removed. Nobody will be surprised to hear that Ampliatus has a daughter, Corelia, whose beauty, sensitivity, and generous heart smite the stoic engineer between the eyes. Harris does tweak that cliché, though, loosening up his priggish protagonist as the novel proceeds, a nice touch. But Vesuvius, naturally, will have the last word over all petty, human affairs, which makes a normal engineering project a very tense activity.

Harris has also researched his ground, to great effect. The houses feel lived in, the streets vibrant, and, important to a story like this, the engineering worthy of awe. I learned that the aqueduct builders sloped their pipelines a small, precise distance every hundred yards–roughly, the thickness of a human finger. Any less, and the water remained stagnant; any more, and the current destroyed the masonry. What a metaphor for the business of state or survival–a hair’s breadth off, and life ends, history changes.

Like An Officer and a Spy, Harris’s superb novel about the Dreyfus Affair (reviewed March 9), Pompeii hews to events as they happened, yet still astonishes. If you read historical thrillers sparingly and prefer a deeper, more complex novel, try An Officer and a Spy first. But both will reward you.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Less Is More: The Wilson Deception

22 Thursday Oct 2015

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Review: The Wilson Deception, by David O. Stewart
Kensington, 2015. 266 pp. $25

As I mentioned in my review of Robert Goddard’s novel, The Ways of the World (August 30), I’ve always wanted to read a first-rate thriller about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. So when The Wilson Deception crossed my path, I grabbed it.

That bad news is that this book isn’t what I’m looking for. Melodrama afflicts The Wilson Deception with a high fever, which, in its delirium, spawns a very far-fetched plot, full of talking heads of state repeating commonplace information, and whose French is sometimes less than grammatical. Even the novel’s protagonist, Major James Fraser, an army doctor, feels like a cardboard cutout who’ll topple in the slightest breeze off the Seine. Tending horribly wounded men has left its mark, but the narrative says so more than it shows him feeling it. He’s estranged from his wife and adult daughter, but that too feels handed out rather than enacted, and when the women arrive in Paris, the chance for reconciliation unfolds with little process. It’s not earned.

However, the good news is that the talking heads include the likes of Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and David Lloyd George, with Lawrence of Arabia trying unsuccessfully to lobby them. As a historian of that era, I’m a sucker for Clemenceau in particular, and Stewart has a good time letting the French premier unleash his witticisms. For instance, when a would-be assassin wounds him, he tells American visitors to his sickroom:

Yes, it was a shameful episode. A Frenchman stands not ten feet from me and fires seven times. Yet he hits me only once. Who will respect French marksmanship? Our honor is forever stained. It will cause men in Berlin to think about invading France again. . . . Of course, men in Berlin need very little encouragement to think such thoughts.

Stewart also tries to turn Robert Lansing from a footnote into a person, and I like that too, or at least the attempt. Lansing became secretary of state in 1915 when William Jennings Bryan resigned, and he should have been the chief negotiator in Paris. But Wilson, who had never let Lansing do his job–the president even typed his own diplomatic notes–wasn’t about to unchain him now, given Wilson’s oversized ego and the chance to act on the world stage. The novel captures Lansing’s frustration at being pushed aside, which gives the supposedly dry-as-dust lawyer the chance to fire off his own bons mots: “Wilson’s had such a charmed political life that he’s afflicted with the optimism of the consistently fortunate.”

Robert Lansing, Wilson's second secretary of state (Courtesy Library of Congress).

Robert Lansing, Wilson’s second secretary of state (Courtesy Library of Congress).

However, the author hasn’t decided where the story lies. Lansing offers possibilities, but he’s there only because of his nephews, Allen and John Foster Dulles (whose relationship to Lansing was news to me, and piqued my historian’s interest). Since Allen would later direct the CIA, for which he seems to have been practicing, he serves Stewart’s purpose, in a way. But dragging him in requires a connection to the negotiations, which covers acres of ground, the promontory of which seems to be Lawrence’s attempts to create an Arab state in the Middle East. Linking these pieces would be a stretch in any narrative, but that’s only half the trouble.

Remember Fraser, the army-doctor protagonist? He, as an influenza expert, is called in to examine Wilson and winds up trying to clear a young African-American soldier from a trumped-up charge of desertion. So there’s yet another complication or three. The friendship between Fraser and the soldier’s father, who shows up in Paris for a conference on race, is never explained and seems unlikely, though it does lend a counterpoint to Wilson’s bigotry, on full display here.

Consequently, The Wilson Deception fights itself, with too many threads tugging the reader’s attention. I’ve always thought the conference provides plenty of drama, with even minor figures looming larger than life, as with Lawrence. If they’re the story, why shoehorn in a separate, unbelievable plot? Or, if Fraser really is the story, put the leaders in the background, just within the periphery, and devote full attention to the medical man and the young soldier he’s trying to protect.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Defenestration and Other Sports: Night Life

06 Monday Apr 2015

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Review: Night Life, by David C. Taylor
Forge, 2015. 332 pp. $26

I have to like Michael Cassidy, a New York detective who throws a cop out a third-story window–the guy needed it–and who, in 1954, at the height of the McCarthy witch hunts, tells Roy Cohn to stick it. For those of you whose grandmothers didn’t wish Roy Cohn a lingering death from throat cancer, as mine did, and have therefore never heard of him, he was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s legal counsel. So within the first ten pages of Night Life, I was already enrolled in the Michael Cassidy fan club and having a good time.

The Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954. McCarthy stands at right; Joseph Welch, opposing counsel, seated, left. (Courtesy U. S. Senate Historical Office)

The Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954. McCarthy stands at right; Joseph Welch, Army counsel, seated, left. (Courtesy U. S. Senate Historical Office)

Cassidy defies expectations in several ways. First, he’s not of Irish ancestry, no matter what the name suggests, and how his father got that name figures in the story. Second, Michael comes from a comfortable, middle-class background (his father’s a successful Broadway producer) and appreciates jazz and modern art. Third, though he’s uptown by birth, there isn’t a pickpocket, madam, or hood he doesn’t know in Hell’s Kitchen or the meat-packing district, and he has a tolerant, persuasive way with them that nets him bits of information.

And that’s what Cassidy needs, because a Broadway dancer has been found tortured to death. Normally, nobody would care. But for some reason, the FBI (“the Feebles”), the CIA, and the Mafia are all interested, and they have ways of declaring their curiosity or punishing those who talk out of turn. Meanwhile, a tough, beautiful woman moves into the apartment downstairs from Michael’s, just the cure for his lonely, broken heart, a person with whom he can share his bed and his troubles.

I like how Taylor portrays his characters, including Michael’s father and siblings–the family scenes are terrific–the theater folk, the political figures (McCarthy, Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover), Michael’s building superintendent, the police. They seem alive to me, and they make the novel hum, even more than the constant reversals or conflicting evidence that Michael must sift through. Best of all, to this transplanted New Yorker, the city feels alive too, in its speech, sights, and smells. I’m so tired of reading about New York from authors who don’t know the place. Taylor does:

A bearded man in a white robe stood on a milk crate at the corner of 49th and tried to interest the hurrying people in the fast-approaching end of the world. The clatter and bong of pinball machines and the whoops of players at the shooting games rattled out the open door of the arcade on 47th. Just past it was a discount store that had been GOING OUT OF BUSINE$$$$ for six years. It sold cheap portable radios, Japanese cameras, World War II surplus equipment, and knives that couldn’t hold an edge at ROCK BOTTOM PRICE$$$$$.

Night Life does suffer from stereotypes, though. Nearly every woman in this book, Cassidy’s sister included, is gorgeous, and she’s just about the only one who doesn’t want to take his clothes off. Michael performs many feats of derring-do, some of which are less than believable, particularly toward the end. Yeah, this stuff belongs to the genre; but still.

Most dubiously, he has dreams that predict danger–correctly, as it turns out. Taylor handles the clairvoyance well enough so that you don’t hear wind chimes or spooky music, yet for a cop who has his feet firmly planted in the grit, it doesn’t quite add up. The ending, too, stretches credulity in a couple ways, not least a loose end–a dangerous loose end–left untied.

Even so, Night Life is just too lively to dismiss. When Michael catches one of the Feebles rifling his desk and tells him to buzz off, the Feeble asks, “Got something to hide, Detective?” To which our man replies, “Pictures of your sister from when I worked Vice.”

Got to love it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Decent Guy Struggling Against Evil: Midnight in Europe

09 Monday Feb 2015

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Review: Midnight in Europe, by Alan Furst
Random House, 2014. 251 pp. $27

Reading Alan Furst’s pre-World War II spy fiction is like eating pastry from the hand of a master chef: You savor it, enjoying the many flavored layers, and sigh when you’re done. Midnight in Europe, his fourteenth effort, is no exception, though whether the flavors meld well or leave as strong or lingering an aftertaste as previous novels is another matter.

Cristián Ferrar is a typical Furst protagonist–brilliant, handsome, escaped from his native country (Spain, in this case), well connected, attracts interesting women, appreciates the good things in life (so must spend a lot of time in Paris), and holds strong principles without having to shout them from the rooftops. A decent man, in other words; but December 1937 will test any European’s sense of decency, not least in Spain, where Franco’s Fascist troops are winning a civil war in which mercy and justice have no meaning.

Bomb damage, Spain, 1937. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

Bomb damage, Spain, 1937. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

The Republican forces resisting Franco lack both unity and weapons. Ferrar can do nothing about the political mess strangling his country, but, as a lawyer with a respected firm of international scope, he may know people who might just possibly be willing and able to run guns to the Republicans. However, this is worse than risky business. Hitler and Mussolini are actively supporting Franco, which means the Gestapo will be watching; and even Stalin, who grudgingly supplies the Republicans, won’t let anyone else do so, which means the NKVD will unleash its hit men on nominal allies. Will the democracies help? Don’t even ask. As one character observes, “Europe is a nice neighborhood with a mad dog. Just now the dog is biting Spain, and nobody else in the neighborhood wants to get bitten, so they look away.”

Rueful political irony, a Furst specialty, is a particular pleasure of Midnight in Europe. A Macedonian underworld figure “spent his teenage years fighting Bulgarian bandits. After that, being a gangster was easy.” A scrappy Polish dockworker in Gdansk, upset that German agents are muscling into the waterfront, complains that he hasn’t punched a German “in days.”

Another Furst trademark is atmosphere you can practically eat with a spoon:

 

Parisians found themselves restless and vaguely melancholy for no evident reason, an annual malady accompanying the nameless season that fell between winter and spring. The streets were quiet–only dog walkers beneath shiny umbrellas and the occasional couple with nowhere to be alone. In the cafés, newspapers on their wooden dowels went unread, as though the patrons refused to read them until they produced better news. A change of government was in the air, though nobody believed it would change anything but itself.

Even so, Midnight in Europe, the thirteenth Furst novel I’ve read, seems too gentle to be a thriller. The only scenes that truly gripped me were those toward the beginning, in Spain, and a couple toward the end. I wish the author had set more of the story in Spain, territory that, if I remember correctly, he hasn’t revisited since a large, breathtaking swath of his first novel, Night Soldiers. Romance moves Ferrar almost as much as politics, and that’s fine, but he just isn’t tested enough, either on the street or in his heart. You sense he can get out of any trouble he gets into, and that nobody he trusts will ever turn on him.

Some years back, a literary agent told me that to sell well, American authors must write thrillers that have American or British protagonists. American readers, he said, won’t buy them otherwise–at least not in large numbers–whereas Europeans don’t trust Americans to get European characters right. Furst has been bucking this trend for years, though Mission to Paris had a European-American protagonist, and Midnight in Europe has scenes in New York.

So I wonder whether market forces (or perceptions of them) have influenced his latest output. His books have generally gotten shorter, softer, and less complex. (Oddly, that relative simplicity doesn’t stop the text of Midnight in Europe from identifying characters when they reappear, as if the reader might have forgotten who they are. This is so out of character for Furst that I suspect an intrusive editorial hand.) In fairness, basing fiction on the dread before the storm is no easy task. Even more ambitious, the latest novels feature spies who aren’t professionals but have volunteered or been coerced into it. Furst clearly admires that scheme and an author who made good use of it, Eric Ambler. (Check out Journey into Fear sometime, and you’ll see what I mean.) But it doesn’t always click.

By all means, if you’re a Furst fan, read Midnight in Europe. But if you’re just starting out with him, try Mission to Paris, which I find the best of the last half-dozen titles. And if you’re in for a longer, wilder ride, try Night Soldiers (and its long, fascinating section on the training of an NKVD agent) or Dark Star.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.