Publisher's Weekly Review
It's no secret by now that Furst is a superlative chronicler of World War II, and his new novel is a splendid addition to an accomplished body of work that includes The Polish Officer and the bestselling Blood of Victory. His mastery of the atmosphere of that era-its brusque heroes and heroines, its sudden explosions of violence, its strange black glamour-is the fruit of tireless research and an empathetic imagination. His hero this time around is a blunt Dutch sea captain, E.M. DeHaan, whose sturdy but aging merchant vessel is pressed into service on behalf of the British Navy by the exiled Dutch naval intelligence group in London. Disguising his boat as a neutral Spanish freighter, DeHaan somberly and grudgingly takes it several times into harm's way, ferrying British commandos on a North African raid, taking munitions to the beleaguered British garrison on Crete and then, most dangerous of all, on a secret mission to Sweden's Baltic coast. The marine details are so authentic the reader can smell the oil and the brine, and the characters who come aboard and into the captain's life-a valuable Polish naval officer in exile, a Jewish refugee who becomes the ship's doctor, a Russian woman journalist fleeing the Soviets, with whom DeHaan enjoys a brief and dry-eyed romance-are sketched with concise brilliance. The book casts such a spell with its exact evocations of time, place and language that one could swear Furst was a Brit writing out of his own experience in 1941 rather than an American writing today. Agent, Amanda Urban. (Aug. 10) Forecast: Furst has been rapidly developing both his skills and his reputation as a master of that still-alluring world, and this is arguably his finest performance to date, likely to confirm old admirers and win many new ones. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
The port of Tangier, April 1941. Mediterranean evening falls, as always, subtle and slow. Clouds drift over the hill behind the port, while, down in the town, patrons of the cafes and souks are "gathering for love and business" as the light fades away. Out on the water a Spanish destroyer stands at anchor surrounded by merchant steamers, "their hulls streaked with rust, angular deck cranes hard silhouettes in the dark", among which we find the Noordendam, a tramp freighter of the Netherlands Hyperion line, "built around 1920, five thousand gross tons, some four hundred feet long and fifty-eight wide", blunt in the bow and wide in the stern. Alan Furst's novels are rich with such specifics, facts brought alive by their context, which is always the warmth of human life, a warmth that would fade from history if we allowed it to. At the same time, his characters have a strangely distanced feel, as if the huge events that surround them have overpowered their individuality, rendered it a little thin (though never less felt, never less urgent than before). You see this best in his lovers, and his scenes between lovers; but also in glimpses of people burning maps, taking leave, shrugging, committing themselves to action, watching their lives go out the window without time to comment - the very opposite to our current way of being individual. Eric Mathias DeHaan, captain of the Noordendam, is invited - ordered, he suspects, might be the more honest word - to dine with three men and a woman in the private room of a restaurant on the rue Raisuli. The woman is an artist, the men are patriots. They eat, they talk. By the end of the evening, DeHaan has been commandeered by the Dutch Navy in exile. On his way back to his ship he realises something else, which is that none of them expects to see him again. Neither he nor the Noordenstam will be doing anything as obvious as firing a gun: both of them have enlisted in naval intelligence. Painted and repainted, passed on to the British, in convoy and alone, under its own name and others, the ship's "adminstrative status" changing from depart ment to department of naval intelligence, the Noordendam takes a tour of the war. It carries commandos to Cap Bon, Tunisia; 5,000 tons of explosives to Crete. It receives orders in Algeciras, a cargo in Alexandria. Eventually it is nosing through the Baltic minefields, carrying an entire listening station designed to "write the life story" of every German submarine, from its birth in the Baltic yards to its death in the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, his emotional damage mounting quietly with the damage to his ship, DeHaan makes the transition from contemplative sea captain to Furst's favourite viewpoint character, the contemplative man of action - a man who begins by slipping through life, curious but dissociated, yet ends up engaged. In keeping with his humanity, DeHaan remains an amateur. A war comes to you. It is episodic. There isn't time to achieve the control of events that is such a feature not just of contemporary thrillers, but of contemporary character models. DeHaan is never quite sure who's shooting at him, or where from. He watches his first air raid as dreamily as if it were a fireworks display, nothing to do with him; then suddenly his ship is on fire, he's gone mysteriously deaf and he's lying on his back covered in broken glass. Love is episodic too, small amours lived out under the anxiety of observation - who knows who you're with? Who might need to know? - full of the small pains of inevitable separation, but also of a kind of matter-of-fact joy. Is this really a chance encounter? DeHaan asks himself. But afterwards he's "content to lie still, pleasantly sore, a little light-headed, as though cured of a malady he didn't know he'd had". And when he asks her the next morning about the word she whispered, in some other language, in the night, it turns out to have been "Hello". Furst's characters live in interesting times. As a consequence, this, the eighth of his addictive, beautifully humane novels, reflects the narrative curve of history, the biographical curves of real lives. By the time the Noordenstam reaches the apogee of its clandestine career at the Finland coast, it has become a kind of political reserve. Everyone's on board, from Greek deserters to half the Russian National Ballet; a Ukrainian Jew, a leftwing Spanish drunk to a burned-out spy called S Kolb and Maria Bromen, a Soviet journalist fleeing her masters. It's in her mouth that Furst puts the frail, powerful conclusion which sums up all his books: "Better to do what you want, and then what will happen will happen." His fans won't ask for more than that, and if you haven't read him yet, Dark Voyage is the place to start. M John Harrison's latest novel is Light (Gollancz). To order Dark Voyage for pounds 12.34 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-furst.1 Painted and repainted, passed on to the British, in convoy and alone, under its own name and others, the ship's "adminstrative status" changing from depart ment to department of naval intelligence, the Noordendam takes a tour of the war. It carries commandos to Cap Bon, Tunisia; 5,000 tons of explosives to Crete. It receives orders in Algeciras, a cargo in Alexandria. Eventually it is nosing through the Baltic minefields, carrying an entire listening station designed to "write the life story" of every German submarine, from its birth in the Baltic yards to its death in the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, his emotional damage mounting quietly with the damage to his ship, [Eric Mathias DeHaan] makes the transition from contemplative sea captain to [Alan Furst]'s favourite viewpoint character, the contemplative man of action - a man who begins by slipping through life, curious but dissociated, yet ends up engaged. - M John Harrison .
Kirkus Review
Back to WWII again, with another reluctant civilian pressed into service against the Nazis--but the tale is far from old hat. Will we ever stop referring to Furst's fiction (Blood of Victory, 2002, etc.) as being influenced by classic films, and by the work of Greene and le CarrÉ, and start calling other things Furstian? If his latest is any indication, that time won't be far off. It's WWII again, but instead of, say, a smoky Paris cafÉ, things start off in the sun-blasted souks of Tangier, circa 1941. E.M. DeHaan is the captain of the Dutch freighter the Noordendam, and he's been approached by his superiors to help the Allies in this little world war that's been sending plenty of his fellow ship captains to the bottom of the ocean. With absolutely no military experience or knowledge of espionage, DeHaan is asked to repaint his ship like a neutral Spanish vessel in order to ferry a contingent of British commandos over to attack an outpost of Nazis in Vichy French-held Tunisia. After the Noordendam proves successful in that operation, it's sent off to bring a load of munitions to the beleaguered Allied forces barely holding on after the surprise German paratrooper assault on Crete. Each mission is a nail-biting affair as Nazi submarines roam the seas, not to mention the two suspicious characters DeHaan had to add to his already motley and polyethnic crew: a bloodless spy with the diffident air of an accountant, and a darkly beautiful Russian journalist. Furst succeeds not just because of his artfully constructed prose, but because he's not averse to painting the war as a struggle of good against evil, yet does so without turning his characters into cartoons. Instead of a grandly plotted crusade, this war is an on-the-fly, jerry-rigged affair, making the heroism all the more astonishing. Realistic but still grand: a gripping odyssey of ordinary men in extraordinary times. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
It's taken Furst longer than it should have to attract a wide audience, but the acclaim is growing steadily now for his series of historical spy thrillers set in the early days of World War II and featuring a beguiling assortment of unlikely secret agents--Parisian filmmakers, Russian writers, Hungarian emigres. Fitting the mold perfectly is E. M. DeHaan, the captain of the Dutch tramp freighter Noordenham, a ship without a home since the Nazis invaded Holland. It's 1941 when DeHaan accepts--with that familiar Furstian sense of shrugging inevitability--his new assignment: disguised as a Spanish freighter, the Noordendam will be deployed on secret assignments for the British. So the table is set for another serving of Furst's specialty: the shadowy world of clandestine, anti-Nazi operations performed by a band of no-nonsense individualists. As always with Furst, setting conveys both mood and meaning; here, it's a series of neutral or semineutral ports of call--Tangier, Algeciras, Lisbon--that provides the shadows and infuses the action with that ambiguous uncertainty of motive in which Furst's people thrive. The difference this time is that the star of the show isn't DeHaan or his crew or the assortment of fugitives that surrounds them (imagine Peter Lorre and the usual suspects); no, the star--and the quintessential Furst hero--is a ship, the Noordendam, a tramp in every sense of the word, worked hard and forced to work harder, performing tasks it wasn't made to perform, not out of foolish idealism but because it can. --Bill Ott Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
In his eighth novel plumbing the shadowy reaches of World War II, Furst (Blood of Victory) introduces DeHaan, a taciturn Dutchman who will lead a merchant marine crew in deeds of thrilling, if unexpected, valor. Within 19 months of the war's start, enemy forces have sunk 1,596 British and other Allied vessels. In a canny campaign to reverse the losses, the Royal Navy's Intelligence Division has enlisted unarmed tramp freighters to haul bombs and other classified cargo to Allied strongholds. DeHaan, whose country has been recently occupied by the Nazis, accepts a secret commission to join the war effort. His crew includes the usual maritime flotsam and jetsam adrift in the eddies of war and one exceptional Russian femme du monde. With profound understanding of the historic panorama, Furst subtly evokes the emotional and mental highs that resided at that time, even within the most ordinary and anonymous of citizens. Fans will not be disappointed by this spare but never terse adventure tale. For every fiction collection. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/04.]-Barbara Conaty, Falls Church City, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
UNDER SPANISH FLAG In the port of Tangier, on the last day of April, 1941, the fall of the Mediterranean evening was, as always, subtle and slow. Broken cloud, the color of dark fire in the last of the sunset, drifted over the hills above the port, and streetlamps lit the quay that lined the waterfront. A white city, and steep; alleys, souks, and cafes, their patrons gathering for love and business as the light faded away. Out in the harbor, a Spanish destroyer, the Almirante Cruz, stood at anchor among the merchant steamers, hulls streaked with rust, angular deck cranes hard silhouettes in the dusk. On board the tramp freighter Noordendam, of the Netherlands Hyperion Line, the radio room was like an oven and the Egyptian radio officer, known as Mr. Ali, wore only a sleeveless undershirt and baggy silk underdrawers. He sat tilted back in his swivel chair, smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder and reading a slim, filthy novel in beautifully marbled covers. From time to time, he would remove his gold spectacles and wipe his face with a cloth, but he hardly noticed. He was used to the heat, the effect of a full day's sun on the ship's steel plate, and, come to that, used to these ports, hellholes always, Aden or Batavia, Shanghai or Tangier, and he was much absorbed in the noisy pleasures of the people in his novel. On the wireless telegraph before him, a gray wall of switches and dials, the ether crackled with static, his duty watch had less than an hour to run, and he was at peace with the world. Then, from the static, a signal. On the BAMS frequency--Broadcasting for Allied Merchant Ships--and, he thought, far out at sea. He set the book face down on the work shelf below the radio, put on the headphones, and, with delicate thumb and forefinger, adjusted the dial for the strongest reception. Q, Q, Q, Q. For this message he didn't need the BAMS codebook--not since May of 1940 he didn't. It meant I am being attacked by an enemy ship and he'd heard it all too often. Here it came again, the operator fast and heavy on the key. And again, and again. Poor man, he thought. His fellow radio operator on some battered old merchantman, tapping out his final message, his ship confronted by a surfaced submarine or an E-boat raider, the shot already across her bows or her engine room torn apart by a torpedo. What Mr. Ali could do, he did. Opened the radio logbook, noted the date and the time, and recorded the anonymous cry for help. DeHaan, captain of the Noordendam, would see it when he put the ship to bed for the night--he never failed to check the logbook before going to his cabin. If they had been at sea, Mr. Ali would have notified the captain immediately but now, in port, there was no point. Nothing they could do, nothing anyone could do. It was a big ocean, British sea power concentrated on the convoy routes, there was nobody to challenge the enemy or pick up survivors. The ship would die alone. The signal went on for a time, fifty seconds by the clock on the radio array, and likely went on longer still, perhaps sending the name of the ship and its coordinates, but the transmission disappeared, lost in the rising and falling howl of a jammed frequency. Bastards. Mr. Ali watched the clock; five minutes, six, until the jamming stopped, replaced by empty air. He was taking the headphones off when the signal returned. Once only, and weaker now, the ship's electrical system was almost gone. Q, Q, Q, Q, then silence. DeHaan, at that moment, was ashore--had just left the gangway of the harbor launch and approached a battle-scarred Citroen parked on the pier, taxi tarzan painted on its door, its Moorish driver stretched out in the back, hands clasped beneath his head, for his evening nap. DeHaan looked at his watch and decided to walk. The rue Raisuli was supposedly just beyond the Bab el Marsa, Gate of the Port, which he could see in the distance. He had been invited--ordered, he thought, that was the honest word--to a dinner given by a man called Hoek. Other than the fact that such things never happened, a perfectly normal request, so, one better go. Put on the shore uniform--double-breasted navy blazer over a soft gray shirt and dark wool trousers, and the tie, blue with a silver spaniel--and go. He walked purposefully along the quay, thanking his stars as he passed a Norwegian tanker berthed at the pier and caught the rich aroma of aviation fuel. Of all the ways he didn't want to die. DeHaan was tall, seemed tall, and lean, with strength in the arms and shoulders. Regular features: a North Sea face, gray eyes, sometimes cold, sometimes warm, with seafarer's lines webbed at the corners, and rough, fair hair, almost brown, its first gray--he'd just turned forty-one--visible in sunlight. A certain lift to this face; pride, maybe, of profession not position--good as any man, better than none. Thin lips, not far from a smile, that Dutch set of the mouth which found the world a far more eccentric, and finally amusing, place than its German versions to the east. He had big hands, appreciated by women, who'd told him about it. Surprise to DeHaan, that idea, but not unwelcome. Should he have worn his uniform? The Hyperion Line had one, plain and blue, for their captains, traditional on the first day of a voyage and never seen again, but DeHaan disliked the thing. It wasn't, to him, a real uniform, and a real uniform was what he'd wanted. In May of 1940, when the conquering Germans had stripped out the filing cabinets of the Royal Dutch Navy administration building in The Hague, they'd surely found, and just as surely refiled for their own purposes, the 1938 application of one DeHaan, Eric Mathias, virtually begging for a commission, and service on a destroyer, or a torpedo boat, or anything, really, that shot. He walked past the railway station and, a few minutes later, entered the narrow streets behind the Bab el Marsa gate--another world. Fragrant, the Maghreb. Stronger than he remembered; twenty-five years at sea, he thought, and too many ports. Fresh orange peel on the cobbled street, burning charcoal and--grilled kidney? He rather thought it was, nothing else quite smelled like that. Ancient drains, cumin, incense. And hashish, nothing else quite smelled like that. A scent encountered now and again aboard the Noordendam, but one mostly ignored it, as long as the men weren't on watch. He was himself, as it happened, not entirely innocent of such things, the stuff had been one of what Arlette called her vile little pleasures. One of many. They'd used it one night in her room in the rue Lamartine, balancing tiny morsels on a burning cigarette end in an ashtray and sucking up the smoke through a tightly rolled hundred-drachma note he'd found in his pocket. Then they'd made ferocious and wildly chaotic--Ah, this! No, this! But what about this?--love, after which he'd fallen dead asleep for ten hours then woke to make Arlette a colossal Dutch pancake swimming in butter. In the rue Raisuli, Arab music from a dozen radios, and two Spanish Guardia, in their Napoleonic leather hats, strolling along in a way that told the world they owned the street. Which, officially, they did. Tangier had been since 1906 an International Zone, a free port trading in currency, boys, and espionage. Now Spain had taken control of the city, incorporated into Spanish Morocco, which meant that Casablanca was French, ruled from Vichy, and Tangier Spanish, and neutral, and governed by Madrid. But DeHaan and everybody else knew better. It was, like Paris, one of those cities emphatically owned by the people who lived in it. And how, DeHaan wondered, did Mijnheer Hoek fit into all this? Trader? Emigre? Decadent? All three? Number 18 in the rue Raisuli turned out to be a restaurant, Al Mounia, but not the sort of restaurant where important people gave private dinners. DeHaan parted the bead curtain, stepped inside, and stood there for a moment, looking lost. This can't be right, he thought. Tile floor, bare wooden tables, a few customers, more than one reading a newspaper with dinner. Then a man he took to be the proprietor came gliding up to him, DeHaan said, "Monsieur Hoek?" and that turned out to be the magic phrase. The man clapped his hands twice and a waiter took DeHaan through the restaurant and out the back, into a courtyard bounded by tenements where life went on at full pitch; six stories of white laundry hung on lines strung across the sky, six stories of families eating dinner by open windows. From there, DeHaan was led through a damp tunnel into a second courtyard, an unlit, silent courtyard, then down an alley to a heavy, elaborately carved door. The waiter knocked and went on his way as a voice from within called out, "Entrez." Inside, a small, square room with no windows and, except for a ceiling painted as the night sky--blue background, gold dots for stars, a silver sickle moon on the horizon--there was only fabric. Carpets covered the walls and the floor, a circle of hassocks was gathered around a low table with a brass tray that occupied most of its surface. As DeHaan entered, a man seated in a wheelchair--made entirely of wood except for rubber tires on the spoked wheels--extended his hand and said, "Captain DeHaan, welcome, thank you for coming, I am Marius Hoek." Hoek had a powerful grip. In his fifties, he was pale as a ghost, with sheared fair hair and eyeglasses that went opaque, catching the light of a lamp in the corner, as he looked up at DeHaan. Rising from their hassocks to greet him, the other dinner guests: a woman in a chalk-stripe suit and a dark shirt, a man in the uniform of a Dutch naval officer, and Wim Terhouven, owner of the Netherlands Hyperion Line--his employer. DeHaan turned to Terhouven, as though for explanation, and found him much amused, all sly grin, at the prospect of the famously composed Captain DeHaan, who couldn't imagine what the hell was going on and showed it. "Hello, Eric," Terhouven said, taking DeHaan's hand in his. "The bad penny always turns up, eh?" He patted DeHaan on the shoulder, don't worry, m'boy, and said, "May I present Juffrouw, ah, Wilhelm?" Formally, DeHaan shook her hand. "Just Wilhelm will do," she said. "Everybody calls me that." She wore no makeup, had fine, delicate features, was about thirty-five years old, he guessed, with thick, honey-gold hair cut very short and parted on the side. "And," Terhouven said, "this is Commander Hendryk Leiden." Leiden was broad and bulky, bald halfway back, with a drinker's purplish nose, a sailor's wind-chapped complexion, and a full beard. "Good to meet you, Captain," he said. "Come sit down," Terhouven said. "Enjoy the walk over here?" DeHaan nodded. "It's the same restaurant?" "The private room--who says it has to be upstairs?" He laughed. "And, on the way, a taste of the real Tangier, assassins behind every door." "Well, that or couscous." Wilhelm liked the joke. "It's good, Al Mounia, a local favorite." DeHaan lowered himself onto a hassock as Terhouven poured him a glass of gin from an old-fashioned ceramic jug. "Classic stuff," he said. "They sell this in Tangier?" Terhouven snorted. He had a devil's beard and the eyes to go with it. "Not this they don't. This came across on a trawler in May of '40 and flew with me all the way from London, just for your party. Real Geneva, made in Schiedam." He tapped the label, hand-lettered and fired into the glazed surface. "My friends," Leiden said, "with your permission." He stood, glass held high, and the others, except for Hoek, followed his example. Leiden paused for a long moment, then said, "De Nederland." In one voice, they echoed his words, and DeHaan saw that Hoek, knuckles white where his hand gripped the arm of the chair, had raised himself off the seat to honor the toast. They drank next to victory, Hoek's offering, and, from Wilhelm, success in new ventures, as Terhouven caught DeHaan's eye and gave him a conspiratorial flick of the eyebrows. Then it was up to DeHaan, who'd been desperate for the right words from the moment Leiden lifted his glass. Finally, as the others turned to him in expectation, he said, quietly, "Well then, to absent friends." This was conventional and wellworn but, on that night, with those friends in a Europe held by barbed wire and searchlights, it came back to life. Terhouven said, "Amen to that," and began to refill the glasses. When he was done he said, "I propose we drink to Captain Eric DeHaan, our guest of honor, who I know you will come to appreciate as I have." DeHaan lowered his eyes, and was more than grateful when the toast had been drunk and the group returned to conversation. Terhouven told the story of his flight from London, on a Sunderland flying boat, his fellow passengers mostly men with briefcases who were rather pointedly disinclined to make conversation. A nighttime journey, hours of it, "just waiting for the Luftwaffe." But then, "the most beautiful dawn sky, somewhere off the coast of Spain, the sea turning blue beneath us." Hoek glanced at his watch. "Dinner should appear any moment now," he said. "I took the liberty of ordering--I hope you don't mind, it's better if you give them time." A good idea, it seemed, they were happy enough to wait, the table talk wandering here and there. You had to be Dutch, DeHaan thought, to know that the gin was at work. Not much to be seen on the exterior, everyone calm and thoughtful, attentive, in no hurry to take the floor. They were, after all, strangers, for the most part, together for an evening in a foreign city, who shared little more than citizenship in a conquered nation, and its corollary, a certain quiet anger common to those who cannot go home. "Years since I've been back," Hoek said to Terhouven. "Came out here in, oh, 1927. Looking for opportunity." An unvoiced naturally lingered at the end of his sentence--Holland was a trading nation which had, for centuries, used the whole world as its office, so commerce in foreign climes was something of a national commonplace. "And I found a way to buy a small brokerage, in ores and minerals, then built it up over the years. They mine lead and iron, in the south, and there's graphite, cobalt, antimony, asbestos. That's in addition to the phosphates, of course. That pays the rent." Excerpted from Dark Voyage: A Novel by Alan Furst All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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