Furst’s sixth novel follows the adventures of Nicholas Morath, an aristocratic Hungarian who has secured a French passport and lives in Furst’s favourite city, Paris, where he has a half share in an advertising company, the Agence Courtmain. His uncle, Count Janos Polanyi de Nemeszvar, also lives a very comfortable life in Paris.
In the first few pages we see Nicholas arriving, after a trip abroad, at the apartment of his South American lover, Cara, who has been wondering whether to masturbate in his absence and then asks him which role he’d like to play with her – wicked old uncle, slavemaster, ‘perhaps something from de Sade’.
Not to be outdone, on page seven the Count receives in his office the famous chanteuse Mimi Moux, at her usual hour, who strips to her underwear then kneels before him, undoes his fly and performs oral sex. Later, there is dinner – chicken soup with dumplings and cream, and a bottle of 1924 Echézeaux. Mmmm yummy.
Furst is touted as an author of spy novels, but I find his descriptions of sophisticated sex, often with role-playing and numerous positions, along with the descriptions of delicious-sounding European meals and fine wines, and the many sequences of sauntering around beautiful Paris in the sun or the rain or the snow, all go to make up a unified, sensual and imaginative whole, a sex fantasy Paris which no amount of cloak and dagger incidents in Eastern Europe can really dent.
Tourist Furst outweighs spy Furst. Thus it comes as no surprise to learn that there are several magazine articles devoted to helping tourists find the real-life settings of Furst’s Paris locations.
The Munich Crisis
The novel opens on 10 March 1938 and focuses on the gathering international crisis over the Sudetenland ie the strip of Czechoslovakia bordering Germany and Austria which had a large ethnic German population and was given to Czechoslovakia after the Great War. Once Hitler was in power (1933) he began making speeches calling, among other things, for the Sudetenland to be handed back to Germany. After he annexed Austria in March 1938, Hitler’s calls became more strident and threatening. Since both France and Britain had guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s borders, all Europe held its breath expecting war to break out at any minute.
Half way through the novel come British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s humiliating trips to Germany to meet Chancellor Hitler and try and find a way out of the impasse. On the third trip, to Munich, on 30 September 1938, Chamberlain caves in to all Hitler’s demands, namely the handing over of the entire Sudetenland to Germany, and persuades the French to acquiesce also.
It is against this backdrop that Nicholas carries out various undercover missions to Eastern Europe, which are both tense in themselves and also give the characters opportunities to comment on the international situation, what it means for them and their countries – always a fascinating aspect of Furst’s fiction. In fact, Furst’s ability to imagine himself back into the minds of educated people at the time of these events who have absolutely no idea what is going to happen next and who speculate about the changing scenarios as the situation evolves – will Hitler end up ruling all of Europe? will Britain make a separate peace with him? – is, for me, the most rewarding, the most thought-provoking aspect. of Furst’s novels.
Morath’s missions
- A trip to Antwerp, ostensibly to see a client for the agency, where he also touches base with a dressmaker who has information about German industrial output.
- A long elaborate trip to Ruthenia, an area on the borders of Hungary and Romania, to collect a thuggish villain named Pavlo and smuggle him under a false passport over the border into Hungary. After he has shot an innocent taxi driver, had a small shootout with border guards and swum the river to freedom, Morath gets him on the train to Paris where he promptly vanishes leaving the reader no idea why Morath has gone to all this effort.
- Another long journey to Czechoslovakia and into the Sudetenland, where he is shown the extensive defences the Czechs have built into the mountains to hold up the Germans attack long enough for France and Britain to come to their aid. During this trip he and his guide, Novotny, and a small village of Czechs come under prolonged attack from ethnic German (Volksdeutsch) militia, who burn down the police station and kill various Czechs. Nicholas is only able to escape when the attack withdraws the next day. He is carrying detailed sketches of the mountain defences with a view to publicising them back in the West.
- On a journey to Hungary to ask his mother to flee the country with him (she refuses) he is also tasked with collecting money from rich donors (what for is never clearly explained) but after picking up a briefcase of cash from Prince Hrubal in a castle, Nicholas is ambushed by the Siguranza, the Romanian secret police, who beat him up and throw him in a cell. After interrogation, he is being moved to another station when there is an armed attack on the railway station where he’s standing with his captors, most of whom are shot dead, as Nicholas is spirited away in a fast car, has his handcuffs cut off and is transported safely back across the border.
During these adventures, we learn a lot of background information about all sorts of aspects of East Europe, from the food, the landscape to, of course, the political issues: about the Croatian fascists – the Ustache – about the chequered attempts of the Hungarian leader Admiral Horthy to bend to the Nazi wind without completely capitulating to them, about the all-pervasive anti-semitism of Eastern Europe.
But no matter how fraught these trips, the reader can have confidence that Nicholas will always return to the warm willing body of Cara or – after her father, Señor Dionello, appears and insists she leave Paris and return to South America with him – of the next pretty girl Nicholas effortlessly seduces.
He kissed her, reached over and undid her bra, she shrugged her shoulders, he tossed it on a chair. Some time later, he hooked a finger in the waistband of her panties and slid them down her legs, slow and easy, until she pointed her feet so he could get them off. (p.44)
In the latter parts of the novel various strands come together in quite puzzling ways. The French authorities start calling Morath in for questioning about the incident in Romania. The Count suspects this is the work of his colleague in the Hungarian Legation, Sombol, and one fine day goes to his office, asks him to stop interfering and then shoots him in the head. Unbelievably, he persuades the French police that this was suicide, but nonetheless disappears shortly afterwards, missing, presumed dead.
Certainly dead enough for Nicholas to inherit his estate and wealth, to the accompaniment of various celebratory parties – a posh one among the Hungarian émigré community in Paris, and a small one for Nicholas and his new squeeze, Mary Day, a senior figure at his advertising agency, who he finds himself seducing/falling in love with, who buys him a special cream cake to celebrate his inheritance and then allows him to lick the cream off her nipples.
Not that Morath doesn’t still have various missions to undertake: one to Antwerp to a family firm of diamond traders, to convert the money he collected in the Hungary sequence form various donors: this will be converted to diamonds and smuggled to America as funds to be saved against the very rainy days which are coming.
Early in the novel Nicholas had been tasked with finding a safe apartment for a senior German officer supposedly to have romantic rendezvous in; about half way through the book the Count told him the officer is somehow linked to the Wehrmacht’s attempts to get rid of Hitler.
As we all know, these didn’t work, which might explain why Morath is called from his warm bed one night to help the landlord dispose of the body of a senior German officer – not the man it was rented for – who has apparently shot himself in the apartment.
In a later vignette, Morath reads that the man he helped smuggle out of Ruthenia in the opening scenes of the book was in fact an assassin and terrorist, involved in numerous outrages – including the assassination of an anti-German journalist in the Luxembourg Gardens – but was later arrested in Romania and found hanged in his cell.
In the final sequence, a well-known Hungarian Jewish émigré, a musician who’s made it big in Hollywood, Kolovitzky, is at one of the parties Morath attends. Next thing Morath hears, Kolovitzky has travelled to Vienna under the impression that he’s inherited several properties there. Big mistake. It’s a scam. He is arrested by the SS who demand a ransom from his family.
Kolovitsky’s family approach Morath to beg his help and so he undertakes a mission with various helpers who we have been introduced through the novel: the Russian barman Boris Balki, the Jewish fixer Rashkow, and the middlemen, Wolfi Szubl, who found the German officer his apartment.
This motley crew are involved in a Mission Impossible-style rescue of Kolovitzky from the hotel in Vienna where he’s being kept under guard (along with other Jewish hostages), which Morath manages by starting a massive fire and panicking the SS guards.
After more episodes involving fake identities and rendezvous with diplomatic cars, Kolovitzky is finally smuggled across the border into Hungary, from where he and Morath catch a train back to Paris and then – at last – Morath can get back into bed and snuggle up next to Mary Day’s lovely bottom.
Paris
Paris is a major character in the novel, in fact in most of Furst’s novels – arguably far more real and present than most of the second-string human characters.
The rain slackened, that afternoon, Paris a little triste in its afternoon drizzle but accustomed to weather in the spring season and looking forward to the adventures of the evening. (p.7)
They walked in the Palais Royal gardens after lunch. A dark afternoon, perpetual dusk, Polanyi and Morath like two ghosts in overcoats, moving slowly past the grey branches of the winter parterre. (p.14)
Morath had been eighteen years in Paris and the émigré life, with its appetising privacy, and immersion in the city, all passion, pleasure and bad philosophy, had changed the way he looked. It meant that women liked him more… (p.19)
Paris that September was tense and brooding, on the edge of war, darker than Morath had ever known it. The retour, the return to daily life after the August vacation, was usually a sweet moment in Parisian life, but not that autumn. (p.139)
Morath had always liked the Novembers of Paris. It rained, but the bistros were warm, the Seine dark, the lamps gold, the season’s love affairs still new. (p.176)
‘Monsieur Morath – Nicholas, if you don’t mind – this is Paris. If you want to fuck a camel, all it takes is a small bribe to the zookeeper. Whatever you want to do, any hole you can think of and some you can’t, it’s up in Pigalle, out in Clichy. For money, anything.’ (p.75)
This fetishising of a city, this making it into the theatre of all your darker fantasies, into a bottomless pit of depravity and corruption, reminds me of the way Len Deighton writes about Berlin in his nine Bernard Samson novels.
It would be interesting to compare and contrast the way the two writers make use of a major city – as a location and backdrop, as a place to be physically criss-crossed in the course of the hero’s adventures, and so as a kind of grid or matrix for the narrative to be woven onto, as well as a psychological fantasy world where all our – the readers’ – naughtiest thoughts can be acted out and vicariously satisfied.
For me, living in boring, workaday London, Furst’s Paris and Deighton’s Berlin sound amazing – the settings of non-stop parties, orgies, cabarets and endless intrigue and adventure. It would be interesting to know what people who actually live in those cities make of their fictional portraits. I wonder if any German critics ever reviewed Deighton’s Berlin novels, or what French critics make of Furst’s Paris.
Credit
Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst was published in 2000 by Victor Gollancz. All quotes and references are to the 2001 Phoenix paperback edition.
Related links
- Kingdom of Shadows on Amazon
- Alan Furst Wikipedia article
- Alan Furst’s website
- The Munich Crisis Wikipedia article
- Ustaše Wikipedia article
- Personal Tour: Alan Furst’s Paris
The Night Soldiers novels
1988 Night Soldiers – An epic narrative which starts with a cohort of recruits to the NKVD spy school of 1934 and then follows their fortunes across Europe, to the Spain of the Civil War, to Paris, to Prague and Switzerland, to the gulags of Siberia and the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, in a Europe beset by espionage, conspiracy, treachery and murder.
1991 Dark Star – The story of Russian Jew André Szara, foreign correspondent for Pravda, who finds himself recruited into the NKVD and entering a maze of conspiracies, based in Paris but taking him to Prague, Berlin and onto Poland – in the early parts of which he struggles to survive in the shark-infested world of espionage, to conduct a love affair with a young German woman, and to help organise a network smuggling German Jews to Palestine; then later, as Poland is invaded by Nazi Germany, finds himself on the run across Europe. (390 pages)
1995 The Polish Officer – A long, exhausting chronicle of the many adventures of Captain Alexander de Milja, Polish intelligence officer who carries out assignments in Nazi-occupied Poland and then Nazi-occupied Paris and then, finally, in freezing wintertime Poland during the German attack on Russia.
1996 The World at Night – A year in the life of French movie producer Jean Casson, commencing on the day the Germans invade in June 1940, following his ineffectual mobilisation into a film unit which almost immediately falls back from the front line, his flight, and return to normality in occupied Paris where he finds himself unwittingly caught between the conflicting claims of the Resistance, British Intelligence and the Gestapo. (304 pages)
1999 Red Gold – Sequel to the World At Night, continuing the adventures of ex-film producer Jean Casson in the underworld of occupied Paris and in various Resistance missions across France. (284 pages)
2000 Kingdom of Shadows – Hungarian exile in Paris, Nicholas Morath, undertakes various undercover missions to Eastern Europe at the bidding of his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, a kind of freelance espionage controller in the Hungarian Legation. Once more there is championship sex, fine restaurants and dinner parties in the civilised West, set against shootouts in forests, beatings by the Romanian police, and fire-fights with Sudeten Germans, in the murky East.
2003 Blood of Victory
2004 Dark Voyage
2006 The Foreign Correspondent
2008 The Spies of Warsaw
2010 Spies of the Balkans
2012 Mission to Paris
2014 Midnight in Europe
2016 A Hero in France
Books & Boots 