Review: Furst's 'Blood' a rousing spy tale

"Blood of Victory"
By Alan Furst
Random House
Fiction
288 pages

(CNN) -- Nothing is quite as satisfying as reading the work of an author hitting full stride, and "Blood of Victory," the seventh historical espionage novel from Alan Furst, offers such satisfaction in spades.

Furst, who is widely acknowledged as a master of the genre, extrapolates his plots and characters from actual events in the turbulent 1930s and early years of World War II in Europe. His previous novel, "Kingdom of Shadows," chronicled the adventures of a Hungarian émigré caught up in an international conspiracy to assassinate Hitler in the wake of the Anschluss. His books are populated with "stateless" people and shifting borders within a doomed Europe on the eve of the inevitable showdown between Hitler and Stalin.

As the protagonist of "Blood of Victory," I.A. Serebin, puts it, "Two gangsters, one neighborhood, they fight."

Serebin is a secretary for a support organization for Russian émigrés fleeing their homeland in the wake of civil war and the rise of Bolshevism. Serebin himself is an ex-Red fighter, not to mention a half-Jewish, half-Russian aristocrat. This mixture makes him of great interest to the intelligence services of the various nations he wanders through, trying to avoid capture (and worse, deportation back to the not-so-open arms of the USSR).

Nowhere to go

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Except that in the fall of 1940, there are fewer and fewer places to run.

"Blood of Victory" opens at sea, Serebin having fled both occupied France and an increasingly unstable Romania for the comparative calm of Istanbul. Furst (who knows the value of a good opening scene) displays his signature powers of evocative recreation, illustrating a world adrift:

"On a shelf in the wardroom was a green steel radio with a wire mesh speaker at the center shaped like a daisy. It produced the transmissions of a dozen stations, which wandered on and off the air like restless cats," he writes. "Sometimes a few minutes of news on Soviet dairy production, now and then a string quartet, from somewhere on the continent. Once a shouting politician, in Serbo-Croatian, who disappeared into crackling static, then a station in Turkey, whining string instruments and a throbbing drum. To Serebin, a pleasant anarchy. Nobody owned the air above the sea."

This cacophony is the perfect backdrop for Serebin to make his evening's assignation with the sultry Marie-Galante, French diplomat's wife and much more, who will draw Serebin into a situation in which no sane Russian would want to be -- because Hitler and Stalin, ostensibly allies, are engaged in precautionary square-off maneuvers. The prize: Romania, specifically the oil fields at Ploesti, which would supply the product so vital to the German war machine (and from which the book's title is derived).

British intelligence is determined to sabotage the flow of oil to Germany, for which they must build an international network of operatives. This quick big-picture/little picture magnification serves to focus and accelerate the novel's plot, as Serebin is drawn into a web of Italian spies, Serbian saboteurs and Romanian turncoats, with a fat Hungarian spider (whom fans of "Kingdom of Shadows" will vividly recall) at its center.

Rich description

Serebin must dodge the secret police forces of half a dozen countries to place himself at the center of a violent act which will almost certainly kill him and perhaps make no real difference in the larger scheme of things. The formula is classic Furst.

As with many of Furst's protagonists, Serebin is a man torn by self-preservation and devotion to duty -- a makeup which hearkens back to an older, more classical definition of "nobility" reminiscent of De Boeldieu in Renoir's 1937 film "The Grand Illusion."

In a disintegrating world riven by mass movements at opposite ends of the political spectrum, Furst's aristocrats emerge from their soon-to-be-demolished salons to Do the Right Thing, though by questionable -- sometimes criminal -- means. They are semi-self-propelled pawns in a chess game of a world gone mad.

The author's trademark descriptive powers are in fine form in "Blood of Victory," conjuring up lost scenes of lavish receptions, exotic meals and everyday life in faraway villages long erased from the map. In so doing, Furst expertly charts the tribal fault lines which dictated the fate of millions between 1933 and 1945, and which crisscross Europe to this day.