Spies of the Balkans: History intrudes August 21, 2010
Jack Batten Novelist Alan Furst. <http://media.thestar.topscms.com/images/07/51/b038cdea4a1cb4c9910e55840900.jpeg> Most historians appear to think that citizens of the Balkans have always been a little crazed. Maybe more than a little. Otto von Bismarck, the smartest German politician of the 19th century, certainly thought so. In 1898, when he was asked what would bring about warfare in modern Europe, he answered, “Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” Bismarck knew what he was talking about. On June 28, 1914, a tubercular Serbian teenager from Bosnia named Gavrilo Princip was eating a sandwich in a Sarajevo delicatessen when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire drove by in an open motorcade. Princip rushed into the street and shot Franz Ferdinand dead. The assassination, which came as the last straw in numerous European rivalries, led a few weeks later to the opening shots in the World War I. For thriller writers, the Balkans have never been easy to get a handle on. The politics and the geography are slippery. Borders keep changing and so do alliances. Each nationality has little use for every other nationality, and it’s a given that everybody shades the truth about everything. Eric Ambler, who set some of his wonderfully atmospheric World War II thrillers in the region, handled the Balkan narrative problem with an adroit piece of plot construction. In such books as The Mask of Dimitrios, he placed a small and personal mystery story on centre stage while around the edges, just off stage, the fight for the unruly and unpredictable Balkans proceeded at its own pace. For readers more engaged in the mystery — most of us — there was little danger of the war’s larger events intruding on our pleasure. The contemporary American author of bestselling thrillers, Alan Furst, takes the opposite approach. Over the course of 11 densely researched books, Furst has been tracking European history from 1933 to 1945, from Hitler’s rise in power to his suicide. At least two of the novels, Blood of Victory (2002) and the new Spies of the Balkans, deal with the Balkans, a part of the world that might have defeated a less determined author. Unlike Ambler, Furst wouldn’t dream of allowing his readers to pay anything except the closest attention to the meaning of the Balkan fighting. It’s virtually the only subject on every character’s lips. Risky love affairs occur on the peripheries of Furst plots, and puzzles over random crimes promise interesting diversions. But no matter how much readers may care about romance and murder, Furst treats these as mostly background noise. The point of the books is to answer one question: Who’s going to get the best of the crazy Serbs and Albanians and the rest of the region’s eccentrics? Furst never loses sight of the objective. In Blood of Victory, British Intelligence recruits a world-weary Russian journalist named I. A. Serebin to mess up Germany’s plans to help themselves to Romania’s oil. The mission is discussed at enormous length in many clandestine Balkan locations, but when Serebin finally gets around to carrying out his specific mission in the overall scheme, we’re not entirely sure why he bothered. Enlightened as we become about Balkan issues — Furst is never less than authoritative — we’re still wondering more than anything how Serebin’s carrying on with the delicious Marie-Galante will fare. Typical of Furst, the central figure in Spies of the Balkans is the only honest man in sight. Furst loves his heroes to be brave and resolute, guys who shake their heads at the thought of what lies ahead but never allow a small case of nerves to interfere with duty. The novels may offer plenty of bombings, shootings and killings, but the books’ optimistic and cheerful spirit, familiar from 1940s American war movies, tempers the violence. In such an atmosphere, Spies of the Balkans’ decent and gallant Costa Zannis arrives as a natural Furst hero. Zannis is a police detective in the Greek seaport of Salonika. The period of his adventures in the book covers six months from late 1940 to the spring of 1941. The Germans and Italians are producing ominous rumbling at the northern reaches of the Balkans, prepping for an eventual invasion of Greece. Croatian fascists are cozying up to Mussolini, Serbian Chetniks are arming for a freelance resistance movement, a dictator named Metaxas is making a hash of Greece and the rest of the region seems to be taking whacky pleasure in the chaos. Zannis, meanwhile, freelances a series of daring Allied missions. He establishes an escape network through the Balkans for Jews fleeing from Berlin, and he rescues a British scientist who has fallen into Nazi hands. At the same time, since all Furst heroes are tireless ladies’ men, he carries on three romances, the most risky with the wife of a powerful Greek businessman. By the time we close the book, we’ve had our fill of Balkan nuttiness, but we’re most excited about Zannis’s piece of dangerous wooing. Jack Batten is a Toronto author and freelance writer. His Whodunit appears every two weeks. http://www.thestar.com/printarticle/849545 _______________________________________________ News mailing list News@antic.org http://lists.antic.org/mailman/listinfo/news
