Furst's Finest Espionage Novel Skillfully Plies The Shadows

Kingdom of Shadows 
By Alan Furst 
Random House, 239 pp. 

Michael Kenney
The Boston Globe

   Eastern Europe and Paris in the year of "phony peace'' -- 1938, before the year of phony war -- provides the setting and the atmosphere for Alan Furst's most richly textured and, arguably, finest espionage novel. 
   "Kingdom of Shadows'' is the sixth in Furst's series of novels, which are known astonishingly little in the United States. Widely read in Europe, Furst is probably more readily available in English-language bookstores in Amsterdam and Florence than he is here. Some fans may not yet realize that Furst is an American living on Long Island. 
   Although usefully described as being a writer in the John le Carre tradition, Furst is closer in spirit to Graham Greene and Eric Ambler -- particularly the latter. Ambler also viewed Eastern Europe (in the years when the world waited, resignedly, for World War II) as an ideal setting for politically charged espionage novels. The mood was, as Furst writes, "edgy but resilient,'' where "every morning,'' the coming cataclysm "lay waiting in the newspapers.'' 
   His hero Nicholas Morath, a Hungarian expatriate in Paris, has a letter from his sister in Budapest, lamenting "all the talk of war, suicides, an incident during a performance of ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ ‘Nicholas, even at the opera.’ Duchazy, the prime minister of the moment, ‘was up to God knows what.’ Plots, conspiracies. ‘Last Tuesday, the phone rang twice after midnight.’ '' The passage is characteristic Furst, with its mingling of the political and the cultural and the sister's incredulous comment. 
   So is the scene in which Morath -- owner of a small advertising agency that provides cover for clandestine activities on behalf of Hungarians opposed to the Fascist government of Admiral Horthy -- is having lunch with his uncle, Count Polanyi, a Hungarian diplomat (and, by definition, agent) at the Brasserie Heininger. (Furst is reported to have a well-thumbed collection of prewar Paris guidebooks on his reference shelf.) 
   "The waiter returned, Polanyi ordered mussels and a choucroute royale. 
   "What's 'royale?' Morath asked. 
   'They cook the sauerkraut in champagne instead of beer.' 
   'You can taste the champagne? In sauerkraut?' 
   'An illusion. But one likes the idea of it.' '' 
   The political references are tantalizingly obscure -- to Horthy, to the prewar Polish leaders Jozef Beck and Edward Rydz-Smigly, even more obscurely described as the "children'' of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the first president of independent Poland, to to General Walter Krivitsky, the Soviet defector assassinated in Washington in 1941 - and often just plain delightful. Morath is in a taxi and the conversation turns to the day's news. "Even old J'aime Berlin is giving it to Hitler now,'' the driver says of Britain's appeasement-minded prime minister, using"the Parisian pun on Chamberlain's name with great relish.'' 
   The plot is deceptively simple, involving Morath's undercover activities: obtaining forged passports, meeting secretly with Soviet defectors, traveling to Hungary to collect funds to support an overseas opposition movement (the money is converted to gems in a marvelously drawn scene in the Antwerp diamond market). There is romance, too. First comes Morath's torrid relationship with Cara, an Argentine heiress who has "a charcoal nude of her, drawn by Pablo Picasso in 1934 at an atelier in the Montmartre, in a shimmering frame, eight inches of gold leaf'' -- another beautiful Furstian image. Later, and more softly romantic, is his liaison with Mary Day, the half-Irish, half-French artist at Morath's advertising agency, who writes ribald stories at night "on a clackety typewriter, wearing a vast, wooly sweater with its sleeves pushed up her slim wrists.'' Her story lines, such as they are, involve the passengers and crew of a cruise liner "scheming, one way or another, for a glimpse of Suzette's'' charms. And Morath "would look up from his book to see her face in odd contortions, lips pressed together in concentration, and schemed for his own glimpse, which was easy to come by when writing was done for the night.'' 
   But in Furst's novels, such matters as plot and romance are almost incidental, emerging only occasionally out of the shadows -- the reader soon realizes that it is the shadows that really interest him. As "the world on the radio drifted idly toward blood and fire,'' Furst writes, "Morath watched as people read their newspapers in the cafes. They shrugged and turned the page, and so did he. It all seemed to happen in a faraway land, where ministers arrived at railroad stations and monsters walked by night.'' It is impossible to read Furst without feeling nostalgia -- for a time and place in which you are happy not to have lived. 
   As for readers of Furst, at present they must be accounted something of a cult. The five previous novels have all been published in this country but only recently reissued in American paperbacks. He and they are just waiting to be discovered.