Mission to Paris (2013)
Alan Furst
Random House
9780812981827
* *
The spy genre and I haven’t been on particularly good terms
since a youthful foray into the novels of Ian Fleming. Although they made for
good movies and TV, I don’t think much of John le Carré or Len Deighton as
writers and, for my money, Tom Clancy was a hack. Glowing reviews of Alan Furst
sent me to Mission to Paris, but I’m
afraid I fail to see the appeal.
Mission to Paris is
set in late 1938, just after the Munich Agreement and roughly 18 months before
France fell to the Nazis and Adolf Hitler danced a jig in front of the Eifel Tower.
Paris was already awash with German agents that were officially members of the
friendship-building Comité France-Allemagne, but were in truth a third column spy ring and hit squad that disposed of troublesome enemies and double
agents. For reasons never entirely explained or made plausible, an amiable
second-tier Hollywood actor, Fredric Stahl, is dispatched to Paris to make a
joint U.S.-French movie. For even less uncertain reasons, the German high
command decides that the Austrian-born Stahl would aid their propaganda
efforts. Stahl finds the Germans repulsive and just wants to make his movie and
go back to Hollywood, but it soon becomes clear that one only refuses at one’s
own peril. What ensues is a dangerous game in which the reluctant Stahl finds
himself a pawn moved by sanguinary Nazis, German resistance fighters, and an
officially neutral American diplomatic corps that unofficially think Stahl would
make a good courier.
Really? Stahl is a charming man, but he’s an intellectual
lightweight, a social gadfly, and a man who plays dashing figures that are
quite unlike his private self. It’s hard to see why anyone would think him
useful, but we soon have him on a train to Berlin to hand out awards at a
Berlin Nazi propaganda film festival that just happens to coincide with
Kristallnacht. Furst’s novel is filled with such unlikely contrivances and
several others that border on silliness worthy of a Hollywood caper film. One of these
involves a Polish count, Janos Polanyi, and a shoot-out with Nazis that plays
like a European version of The Gang That
Couldn’t Shoot Straight. I’m not sure I buy Stahl’s romance with dowdy
German émigré Renate Steiner either.
Furst does have a good eye for detail; his descriptions of
Europe on the brink of cataclysm are quite chilling. In like fashion, Paris
comes off as if its residents are crowded into a tense speakeasy in which
everyone lives in the moment knowing that a raid is imminent. Furst’s skill at
depicting private turmoil and collective anxiety often evokes comparisons to
Graham Greene, but these are–like most reviews of this novel–grandiose and
overblown. Furst paints lush backgrounds but populates them with cardboard
figures unworthy of inhabiting such spaces. Color me underwhelmed.
Rob Weir
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