Blood of Victory: A Novel (Paperback)

The plot - perhaps a little labyrinthine in construction - pits Serbin - a Russian émigré writer running the Russian mission in Paris - against all the forces gathered to conspire against him.

Eventually, (a little too slowly for my liking) a way is decided to prevent the oil from falling into Nazi hands. And then the action takes off, with Furst skillfully taking us from crisis to crisis which Serbin must face. A thrilling - and prolonged - climax, set on the Danube and along its banks, has the reader turning the pages.

But did it have to take so long? No matter. Furst captures the atmosphere of a European world turned upside down, and his dramatic writing drives the reader to the climax. A pretty good read.

In "Blood of Victory," Furst creates an émigré writer who has fled Stalin's Russia and is living in a Nazis occupied Paris. He is safe but oppressed. It is 1940 and the German-Soviet Pact is still working. Occupied Paris is not a happy place.

We first encounter I.A. Serebin boarding a boat from Romania to Turkey and find one of the interesting realities in modern civilization; travel is essential. For countries to operate people must travel and so even in a dictatorship, passage is possible if the right papers can be acquired. Ultimately, Serebin is convinced to help the British attempt to block the Danube, preventing German access to the Romanian oil that is key to their remaining both militarily and industrially functional.

Seeing the world from Istanbul, Bucharest, Paris and Belgrade shortly before the 1941 German attack is a new twist on the Second World War in the tradition of Eric Ambler and other spy chroniclers.

This is an intellectual's book (I hope I have not hurt its sales with that phrase) that carries you into a world of smart, reflective people living lives as refugees, intellectuals and activists trying to accomplish something. It is your experience of their personalities and their interactions in interesting and exotic settings, not the James Bond style heroics, which carry the book.

It is worth reading for the portrait of the fight between the Iron Shirt fascist movement and the Romanian dictatorship and, in a very Ambler-like tradition, it has vivid believable scenes of street fighting and random civilian casualties that feel all too real.

"Blood of Victory" has proven Furst is worth getting to know and I have already found two more of his works for the near future