If you are interested in the history of the 1930s, then instead of consulting a big, fat soporific volume of academic conjectures, you can pick up an Alan Furst novel. You want atmosphere? Zeitgeist? Politics? Patois? Unforgettable characters? All of them blended into one story? In that case Furst is your man.
Blood of Victory, his seventh novel of the Night Soldiers series, deals with the early part of the War. The time frame of the story begins after the Fall of Paris and ends before Operation Barbarossa. The center stage of the novel is set in the cities of Europe haunted by the shadows of the Third Reich: Bucharest, Istanbul and Occupied Paris.
The title of the book refers to the lifeblood of any industrial war effort: oil. Germany needs a steady supply of oil, both to maintain their daily operations of Battle of Britain and their upcoming invasion of the Soviet Union. The chief source of oil in Europe was the Ploesti oil fields of Roumania. British Intelligence had already attempted to stop the oil export to Germany in 1939 and failed. In Autumn of 1940, they tried again.
This time the protagonist was an émigré Russian writer living in Paris, I A Serebin. He was a former Bolshevik writer in exile after the Purges of the 1930s. He had been living in Paris and was quite content with his life until the city fell to the Boche. The story begins with him in a freighter bound for Istanbul.
On board he had made a spur of the moment assignation with the wife of a Vichy diplomat. This affair leads him to meet some colorful and shadowy characters. His main intention was to visit an old flame in Istanbul who was ill with TB. Serebin was an executive of the International Russian Union, a non-partisan group that was tolerated by the Party. During his visit The IRU's Istanbul office gets bombed by NKVD. This prompts Serebin to offer his services to Count Polanyi, former Hungarian nobility, current agent of the British Secret Service.
All throughout, he continues to maintain his affair with Marie Galante, the diplomat's wife. She had been instrumental in his recruitment and she joins him in his mission to disrupt the oil flow fro Ploesti to Germany.
Serebin makes contact with a well known arms dealer who had an intelligence network in Bucharest. He and Marie Galante travels to Roumania in order to see if the network could be used to disrupt the oil production in Ploesti. They are met with mixed success at first, however political unrest intervenes as Roumania heads towards civil war. One member of the network betrays them and they have to flee back to Paris.
Serebin then mounts the planned operation by going back to Roumania using a different identity .The plan was to interrupt the river traffic on the Danube long enough that oil supply to Germany would be affected significantly. In a tug boat carrying heavy machinery, he and two river pilots cruise towards Roumania. Will he succeed in his mission? Read the book to find out!
As usual Alan Furst invokes atmosphere and the zeitgeist and the émigré experience to the full extent. The shadowy battlefields of the 1930s Europe where NKVD fights a covert war with the Gestapo is the specialty of a Furst novel. His characters are never far from the battlefield, whether in Paris, Warsaw, Moscow or Geneva. Particularly the NKVD operatives who face the dual threat of Gestapo and SD in every European city and the Chekists of Moscow, neither of whom would hesitate to kill them. The irony being that the biggest victims of Stalin's Purges were NKVD- his own intelligence apparatus in Europe.
That particular shadow of Koba and his ilk are never far from the lives of the characters in a Furst novel. Blood of Victory is no exception. Anecdotes and oblique references continue to invoke the tragedy of life in Moscow for those who aroused suspicion in the mind of the Georgian Tsar.
The action in the book is fast paced enough to keep the reader going and yet the story is not plot dependent. This is a character driven story, that of an émigré writer who deliberately chooses a covert life of action in the shadows of war. Serebin's ennui and his determination to not be a mere statistic in the war makes him a central character worth exploring. He is a man much driven by kindness and compassion for others. Not one to shirk his duty, he realizes that his ennui was merely a reflection of a lack of purpose in a life adrift. He embraces his role as espionage agent and carries out his duties to the last with dignity and determination.
Another tale of a brave soul from the twilight of the Twentieth Century.
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