The opening sentence of Alan Furst's stunning new novel: "On 10th March 1938, the night train from Budapest pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after four in the morning." Immediately one is brought back to that twilight world of hushed expectancy before the second World War. Impossible to comprehend the atmosphere? Furst conveys time and place, the looking-back-over-the-shoulder trepidation, the urge to spill the beans on one's neighbour to save one's own miserable skin, the agony, the pain, the salmon-leap of fear at the midnight knock on the door, in prose that seethes with illumination.
No one can better him at the under-played, the scaled-down, the descriptive phrase that nails a feeling or an emotion into one's consciousness. By leaving out so much of the framework, he brings the image into lambent clarity. And he does it so effortlessly: like all great writers, he makes his work look easy.
Nicholas Morath is yet another in Furst's list of middle-aged, officer-gentlemen. A former Hungarian cavalry officer, he is a brave man, but one with more than a hint of fatalism about his bravery. What will be, will be, appears to be his motto. You take what you can, and you live from day to day. Now living in Paris with his young Argentinian mistress, Cara, he makes a living, however precarious, by doing quiet favours for his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi. Polanyi is a diplomat in the Hungarian legation, and is desperate to stop his country from drifting into an alliance with Nazi Germany.
Doing his uncle's work, Nicholas moves around middle and eastern Europe, forever trembling on the cusp of being exposed, caught, tortured, killed: "It was a very slow train, that left at dawn. Going east it crawled, as if it really didn't want to get there. It would go through Metz and Saarbrucken, then on to Wurzburg, where passengers could change for the train to Prague, with connections to Brno, to Kosice, and to Uzhorod." Both author and protagonist are in harmony as a whole world is created, sound becoming an awful traitorous echo, a wrong word shocking as a pistol shot, promises made and broken as pragmatism demands, and the stench from the death camps a coiling snake to confuse and strangle.
In my estimation Kingdom of Shadows is a masterpiece. Furst is here writing at the height of his powers, confident of his style, tone and content. And his evocation of that dark time of the soul, before and during the second World War, reverberates in the mind just as that famous Beethoven symphony call-sign echoed in the airwaves over Europe all those years ago.
Vincent Banville is a novelist and critic
Alan Furst is interviewed by Penelope Dening on Weekend 2