Night Soldiers (Alan Furst, 1988)
Having witnessed the pitch perfect writing of Andor season 2, I was in desperate need of a spy-thriller fix. Neither the usual american fare where spy-man goes boom boom, nor the slick tedium of its British equivalent would do. N heard CR on TheWatch recommend Night Soldiers and passed on the message.
The plot follows a young lad Khristo Stoianev led on by the promise of communism, but most of all a desire to feel control, however little, in setting the world right. But no sooner than his training commences he realises that he has merely traded in the provincial injustices from which he has escaped for a systemic one. Once in the field, he finds himself a mere conscript in a war conducted by the whims of bureaucrats in Moscow.
The rigour is evident here and I got the sense that Furst had festooned his study with newspaper clippings, diary entries and sheaves of government records. But for all this detail, there is an economy to the writing style. The sentences are stacked neatly as if the plot is revealed only on a need to know basis. Furst isn’t concerned with nostalgia and neither does he spend time setting up each scene with a history lesson. No, he thrusts the reader and his protagonist in the middle of war and we’re forced to make sense of it as we go along. Amidst all this, it’s hard not feel a certain kinship with Khristio as we feel just as helpless and in the dark. Even when the book switches perspectives, it rarely zooms out. We’re always in the thick of it. There’s no exposition; the war is not conceptual; it is real; we meet people who protest and suffer and resist and die.
For the first two-thirds, the book maintains a certain ambivalence. It acknowledges the sincere hopes of the working class and their need for revolutionary action but balances that against a skepticism of their Russian liberators and the promise of communism. The latter is chronicled through the fatigue and disillusionment experienced by Khristio and his comrades. Furst manages to convey the essential nature of spy-craft: alienation — to be alienated from yourself, from others and from any cause except that which is prescribed by your handler.
However with the introduction of the Americans the politics of the book are laid bare. Unfortunately, Furst conflates communism with Stalinism and is too in love with idea of American valour. His Americans are charismatic, tactical even though fallible but possess an essential nobility in contrast to the ruthless, programmatic nature of the Russians (Khristio is the exceptional good Russian) thus playing into stale cold-war era tropes.
The final stretch — a thrilling climax — wraps up loose ends too neatly and undoes the work of the first three chapters. Rather than commit to its cynicism the book settles for something too saccharine. Sure, even if it is a happy ending, it isn’t hopeful. In fact, knowing what we know about America today, it feels deceptive in its soft selling of the American dream. I wish a book like this had a bitter aftertaste, something to gnaw at my conceptions of justice and challenge my belief in a righteous war.