Dark Star by Alan Furst
Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)
Readers that like espionage novels by Eric Ambler and John Le Carre will enjoy Alan Furst’s Dark Star.
The setting and time are troubled European places in the 1930s. Spain’s bitter civil war is raging between right and left and France is divided by far rightists and far leftists. Stalin’s Soviet Union is in the midst of the most intense purge run by the head of the secret police, Nikolai Yezhov (at an even five-foot-tall, called The Infernal Dwarf). Kristallnacht, known as the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom that told the world exactly what Hitler and his thugs and dopes had in mind for Jewish people in Europe.
The main character is Andre Szara, a true survivor. Born Jewish in Poland, he survived pogroms in his childhood. He then survived the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 (think Isaac Babel’s brutal Red Cavalry collection of stories). As we would expect he is unhappy parroting the party line in his job as an international correspondent. Then he is dragooned into working for the NKVD to steal military secrets from a German source.
Furst combines history and drama into a fascinating historical novel about espionage. Readers who like Steven’s spying in the Aubrey-Maturin books will definitely enjoy the large canvas Furst creates. Readers into Europe in the Dirty Thirties will also get into the convincing feeling, “Yes, that what Europe must have felt like then.” Historian Alan Bullock, who lived in Europe at the time and wrote the first biography of Hitler, calls Dark Star “a classic…. Furst brings to life better than most historians the world of fear in which so many human beings felt trapped.”
