The Foreign Correspondent
By Alan Furst
(Random House, 288 pages, $24.95)
The modern era is a blessed one for reporters. Able to reach a
vast international audience and aided by stunning technology,
reporters can quickly find themselves celebrities, deadlines and
facts giving way to sensation and Vanity Fair spreads.
Those lucky enough to live and work in Western democracies —
protected by a whole host of forces that they regularly criticize
— are free to thrash away at any institution at will. The whiff of
a scoop is sufficient grounds for appearances on all sorts of
hyperventilating TV shows, hosted by understanding and ever-nodding
colleagues. Even better, if your fearless reporting happens to
target those institutions detested by the media elite, well, they
just might hand you a Pulitzer. When faced with a backlash, the
reporter can quickly deem himself a martyr and glibly accept the
wine toasts and book deals that follow.
Of course, life wasn’t always so easy. In the first half of the
20th century, meeting your deadline wasn’t always a metaphorical
proposition. Unprotected by celebrity or governments, journalists
often found themselves on the front lines in the ideological
struggle between struggling democracy and rising totalitarianism
that was tearing the European continent apart.
Offering some inducement, however, was the fact that the
beating/imprisonment/murder scenario could be preceded by plenty of
cigarettes, heiresses, and international intrigues. This sort of
trifecta remains the literary specialty of Alan Furst, whose
latest, The Foreign Correspondent, lends the trade some
respectability and even hints at something once quaintly referred
to as journalistic integrity. The novel, set in Furst’s
nicotine-laced playground of 1938 Europe, is hardly a departure
from his previous works; indeed, Furst seems unwilling to write
about anything or anytime else. It is a most welcome holding
pattern, as The Foreign Correspondent lives up to Furst’s
self-imposed high standards while making the reader long for an a
time when even jaded reporters could recognize that evil was very
real and very much on the march.
Furst’s protagonist, Reuters’ Paris correspondent and Italian
expatriate Carlo Weisz, is hardly a man of action — he recalls
fleeing his homeland after seeing coworkers bloodied by fascist
thugs. Preferring the more gentile forms of resistance, Weisz duels
with Mussolini in print as moonlighting editor of a Paris-based
broadsheet called Liberazione. It was a position he
assumed reluctantly, due to his predecessors unfortunate run-in
with a silenced revolver. Unlike those inclined to resistance by
strict ideology, Weisz’s motivations remain somewhat amorphous
throughout, best defined with some dour ribaldry:
“It’s easy for the Bolsheviks, they have their formulas
— Marx says this, Lenin says that. But, for the rest of us, it’s
not so cut-and-dried. We are fighting for the freedom of Europe,
certainly, for liberty, if you like, for justice, perhaps, and
surely against all the cazzi fasulli who want to run the
world their way. Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, take you pick, and all
the sly little men who do their work.”
Needless to say,
cazzi fasulli is not a term of
endearment. They seem to abound, however, in war-torn Spain where
the reporting corps runs 410-8 for the crimson shaded fellows. Such
revolutionary bias led the reporters of the day to ignore such
atrocities as the slaughter of hundreds of priests and fellow
revolutionaries by the Spanish “republicans” and their KGB minders,
but did result in reams of scintillating propaganda.
Spain follows Weisz home, in the form of a cavalcade of
intelligence agencies: the French Surete, Her Majesty’s
Secret Service, and Il Duce’s odious OVRA men. Furst
writes of such spooks in the way we habitually imagine them: lithe
partygoers who manipulate by day and drink port by night. Cliche
perhaps, but few write them as well as Furst, who creates a shadowy
world not populated by George Smileys but of tired and sometimes
desperate men who have faith only in their own duplicitous natures.
Those longing for the “civilized” spy game, wrenched away from us
by the base savagery of our current opponents, will welcome the
fictional representations, One doubts the social atmosphere of
Baghdad or Khandahar is comparable to Weisz’s haunts in gay
Paree.
These agents ask many things of Weisz: give us information, stop
publishing, write a book. Juggling their requests, Weisz does what
most would do: he stays alive, a challenging proposition in a
Europe already shattered by one world war and hurdling towards
another. Such advancing dread is a hallmark device of Furst, who
depresses the reader by pointing out that the assassinations and
assaults that befall his characters are only the polite sideshow to
the macro-horror.
And Weisz, a man secure in nothing but pessimism, is well aware
of that. He is graphically reminded of such approaching horror in
Berlin, where he reunites with a former lover who holds a
nation-shaking secret. They lodge in a house left by rich “ghosts,”
i.e. Jews, and walk past parades of fresh-faced Jugend
screaming for war and conquest. “These children would not
surrender,” he remarks, presciently.
A less elegantly drawn figure might scream himself hoarse at the
inanity of it all. Indeed, that would seem to be the expected
modern-day response. But Furst is fond of denying such avenues of
relief to his characters; they must beat on as best they can,
picking away at the marching injustices but powerless to stop their
momentum. Perhaps a frustrating read, but the powerless are often
faced with highly readable problems that heroes can predictably
fight through. Weisz’s dilemma is not a simple one; the choice
between ending his fight or selling his integrity poses issues
fraught with life-ending pitfalls. His choice, less political and
more emotional, is a surprising one coming from our otherwise
restrained character. Still, it provides the book with its solitary
fixture of hope.
Furst’s novels are wonderful — and The Foreign
Correspondent is no different — precisely because his
characters are so conflicted, so imperfect. Yet, these sometimes
immoral men and women are faced with a titanic evil that compels
them to act in ways atypically principled. One recalls H.L
Mencken’s lament, “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is
that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels.” Watching
the resultant spectacle stands as the crux of the reader’s
enjoyment, observing the twisting and turning as cynical characters
decide whether to stand up or slink further back. We may wish for
the great hero but, as denizens of a familiar epoch in which
society slouches into relativism and excused evil, we will take
what we can get.
