Review: 'Polish Officer' top-drawer Furst

"The Polish Officer"
By Alan Furst
Random House
Fiction
320 pages

By Adam Dunn
Special to CNN

(CNN) -- No American writer alive captures the giddy and apocalyptic avalanche of the outbreak of World War II in Europe as does Alan Furst ("Kingdom of Shadows").

"The Polish Officer," originally published in 1995 and now out in paperback, follows the ragged course of Captain Alexander de Milja, a brooding mapmaker-turned-operator for exiled Polish intelligence in the wake of the Blitzkrieg. As with all of Furst's heroes, de Milja is a gloomy interwar stoic, vaguely aristocratic, and doggedly determined.

Furst's seductive prose deftly grabs readers and drags them through the frozen hell of central Europe at the height of the Blitzkrieg, as de Milja smuggles the Polish National Reserve out of Warsaw through air attacks, fends off Ukranian hijackers in the Carpathians, dodges both the NKVD and SS in occupied Poland, then flips to an extravagant double-blind in Paris, with French and Russian mistresses completing the scene.

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Even de Milja shakes his head at the world's absurdity: "In Warsaw they were starving and freezing, heating their apartments with sticks of wood torn from crates ...," while he sits down to "Oysters on shaved ice, veal chops in the shape of a crown, sauced with Madeira and heavy cream."

Furst's novels reflect the sort of noble (and doomed) sensibility of Renoir's film "Grand Illusion," with honorable warriors desperately trying to do right in a world gone hideously wrong. He does not take liberties with history, which restrains his plots. But his writing renders that concern moot. "The Polish Officer" is a excellent introduction to the Furst canon, another terrific espionage novel from a master.