Blood of Victory
by Alan Furst
Random House

Alan Furst's seventh novel, "Blood of Victory," follows closely in the steps of his previous work — it's set in Europe, right before World War II. It involves spies of Central European extraction creeping through dark alleys looking for ways to stymie Hitler. Its supporting cast includes shadowy Hungarian counts, sulking French mistresses and more than a few nihilistic Russian intellectuals.

The story revolves around a plot by a loose affiliation of anti-fascists to disrupt the flow of precious Romanian oil up the Danube to Hitler; the narrative follows Serebin, an itinerant Russian poet, as he falls in with plotters. Like many thrillers, much of the action is dictated by shadowy but powerful figures who make only fleeting appearances in the action itself — like Polanyi, a Hungarian count with a recurring role in Furst's work, and Kostyka, a wealthy Russian refugee who divides his time between London and Switzerland. Serebin, for all his intelligence and charm, is just a pawn, and Furst won't let us forget it.

Furst very easily could have become mired in the details — when a writer sets a novel in late 1930s Europe, there's more than a little back story to fill in. But he keeps it light; "Blood of Victory" is impressionist history, only enough to keep the reader out of complete darkness. Nor does he overdo it on the sepia tones — the book reads like a faded photograph, but only at times. It's an improvement over even his last novel, "Kingdom of Shadows," in which finely tuned spies nevertheless took timeouts from their Gauloises for ad hoc, pedantic history lessons.

"Blood of Victory" relies heavily on the intellectual spirit of the time. Or, rather, the dispirit; Central European intellectuals knew better than anyone what was about to take place on the Continent, knew just how their world would be destroyed by fascism. None of the characters in "Blood of Victory" is particularly moral, and yet they are driven to do good by an almost existential sense of right. They're good, but they're not motivated by good, by a hope that through their actions justice might prevail. Serebin's struggle is mirrored by that of his ex-lover, Tamara, who lives outside Istanbul and is dying of tuberculosis. She resigns herself to death, but struggles against the disease all the same.

Furst's depiction of pre-World War II Europe evokes grand-strategy overtones, but the plan at the story's center is a tactical operation, one that might slow down the German war machine for a few weeks, at best. Serebin and Co. know the great risks they are taking for such a small reward, and they do so because they know there's little chance of them surviving the war anyway. "Blood of Victory" succeeds not because, like most political thrillers, it shows how a small action has great significance in the grand scheme, but because it takes an action insignificant in the grand scheme and renders it morally worthwhile.

Much of what bogs down Furst's earlier novels — plodding dialogue, poor pacing — is absent from "Blood of Victory"; Furst is obviously not a writer to rest on a few bestsellers. But Furst has yet to lose his eagerness to make sure readers know exactly what his characters are saying. Innuendo goes out the window when sentences like the following appear on every other page:

He started to speak, but she pounded him gently on the shoulder with the side of her fist. Oh, shut up. (Page 32)

Octavian met Serebin's eyes in the rearview mirror and gave him an immensely oily and conspiratorial smile. Women, always women, only women. (Page 113)

That did it, the two men started to walk away. They were very casual, just out for an evening stroll. One of them looked back over his shoulder and grinned at Serebin. We'll see you some other time. (Page 178)

The italics, it's important to note, are in the original. Furst doesn't want us to miss anything. It's not enough to spell it out — he has to do so with slanted letters. It's an understandable excess, given that his favorite settings and characters are shadowy and full of hidden import. But still, do we need to know what every push, every stare, every innuendo really means? After all, the not knowing everything is what makes it innuendo.

Furst is nevertheless fun to read, and "Blood of Victory" is his best yet. Already acclaimed as the master of the historical spy novel, Furst shows in it a capacity to go further than just gripping writing. Unlike his earlier work, it's written in a streaming, steady flow of clauses, with lots of commas and few conjunctions, a cloudy consciousness that parallels the foggy edge of war his characters inhabit. And at the rate he's going — "Kingdom of Shadows" appeared in mid-2001 — it won't be long before he's acclaimed as the master of something much larger.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)