Alan Furst's Dark Star

A post about Alan Furst’s The World at Night (1996) was this blog’s first, last November. I mentioned that I had been left a bit cold by a Furst novel I’d read earlier, The Polish Officer (1995) and, while I praised The World at Night, I didn’t rave about it.

Today I come to rave. But for the opening rave I’ll turn to Brad DeLong, whose recommendation made me pick up Dark Star (1991) in the first place:

When I talk to practically any of my undergraduates these days, I have a nearly impossible task to do when I try to convince them that the twentieth century has, after all, ended much better than it might have been. The half-full undergraduates talk of how wonderful and advanced our industrial civilization is, and how human progress to this point was nearly inevitable. The half-empty undergraduates talk about poverty in the developing world, inequality, and injustice, and seem deaf to the idea that the world we live in is much better than the world that we seemed headed for during the second quarter of this century. The Great Depression. Stalin's purges. World War II. Hitler's genocides--they have read about these, but they are not *real*, and the idea that for decades people thought that the forces headed by Stalin or by Hitler were the wave of the future (or the last chance to stop an even greater evil) does not penetrate below the surface.

So the next time I teach a course on the entire politico-economic history of the twentieth century, I think I may assign Alan Furst's novel Dark Star, for it does a better job than anything else I have read to catch the atmosphere of the days when Josef Stalin seemed to be the lesser of two evils--and it is a very fine novel besides.

DeLong continues in this vein, and it’s worth reading his whole post (or watching the videocast). But in those introductory paragraphs, he lays out Furst’s greatest achievement: to put the reader back into the utter uncertainty of mid-century, mid-war Europe, where the only things you know for sure are that danger is ahead, things are definitely going to get worse, and you shouldn’t waste your time on long-term plans. In Dark Star, Szara, a Russian journalist of Polish descent find himself being pulled deeper and deeper into work for Stalin’s intelligence arm, the NKVD, despite his grave misgivings about Stalin’s purges. Every day, it seems, brings a new choice between two evils, a new balancing between what he must do to survive and what he can’t do and still live with himself. And as despairing as Szara is, we know things are about to get worse: when he discovers that German generals and NKVD figures are meeting secretly, we know that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact lurks on the horizon.

DeLong compares reading Dark Star to seeing Casablanca for the first time. I wouldn’t go quite that far—Dark Star isn’t as glamorous and romantically captivating as Casablanca (in fact, the actual romances that feature in it are, like those in all the Furst novels I’ve read, the weakest part). It’s never going to stay in my head and heart the way that movie does. But that’s now really what Furst is after anyway: for all the excitement and adventure of the novel, he’s painting a more serious picture, both broader and deeper, that ranges comfortably all over Europe and the late 1930s, revealing, in big and small ways, how people cope with looming catastrophe.

I do, however, think Dark Star has something fascinating and important in common with Casablanca—but in the negative. Casablanca, despite being made in 1942, when the outcome of World War II was still very much in the air, exudes confidence. It’s pervaded with a sense that the Allies are going to win, and that confidence seems very real. It’s a movie to remember, and treasure, should the world ever happen to fall into similarly dark times.

Dark Star, despite being written forty-five years after the end of the war, manages the opposite. No one knows who’s going to win—if anything, it seems clear that the Nazis have the upper hand—and the Allies may just decide to fold. When Russia and Germany sign the non-aggression pact and begin dividing up Poland, it feels like the world is ending. World War II truly was an existential crisis for Western civilization, and as pundits and politicians invoke that time to justify their short-sighted anti-terror plans, it’s important that we remember that essential difference between then and now. If a novel—a page-turner of an espionage novel—helps us do that, all the better.

Greene (and a little Waugh)

[Sorry--no links tonight because I'm going out of town and need to pack. And it's late and the Internets are being slow.]

Reading about the hapless foreign correspondent in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1937) made me decide to reread Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1956) for the first time in about ten years. Doing so highlighted the contrasts between the two men’s essentially dark visions. Both are troubled by the state of the world and deeply doubt human motivations and aspirations. It would be easy to point to their shared Catholicism as the cause, but Waugh, at least, was a pessimist before he converted, as Decline and Fall (1928) demonstrates.

Even if Catholicism were at the root of their similar outlook, it wouldn’t explain the utterly different lessons the men draw from their view of the world. Waugh, it seems, thinks the world’s failures so far beyond meager human powers to ameliorate that, really, one ought to just laugh. And drink. And hope not to die of a tropical disease. Nearly all of his characters are horrible (at least up until his post-war turn to the serious, which may be to his credit as a person, but was to his detriment as a writer), and therefore there is almost no hint of guilt or responsibility. That’s not to say he’s going to let us be horrid without pointing it out, but when everyone is making the world worse, it’s hard to blame any particular person.

Greene, on the other hand, presents a world similarly flawed—and probably just as unlikely to get better—but he suffuses it with guilt. We are responsible for the terrible conditions around us, but nearly everything we try to do makes things worse. Yet knowing that we are going to fail doesn’t absolve us of the duty to try, nor of the guilt of failing. There may ultimately be redemption through suffering, but it is uncertain and, at the very least, long-deferred.

Waugh and Greene are also two of the most distinct prose stylists in English, and Greene’s language is at its best in in The Quiet American. He makes wonderful use of the past tense, turning a generally unobtrusive convention into a tool for conveying inevitability, loss, and decline. The opening paragraph, as the narrator, Fowler, waits for Pyle, the “quiet American,” gives as good a sense of Greene’s technique in The Quiet American as anything:

After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat’ he had said, “I’ll be with you at latest by ten,” and when midnight struck I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and went down into the street. A lot of old women in black trousers squatted on the landing; it was February and I suppose too hot for them in bed. One trishaw driver pedaled slowly by towards the riverfront and I could see lamps burning where they had disembarked the new American planes. There was no sign of Pyle anywhere in the long street.

Even as we’re being told, everything’s already happened. It’s over. There’s nothing we can do. The American agent has gotten himself killed by a revolution he can’t even begin to understand.

The book’s structure feeds that hopeless tone by opening with Pyle’s death and slowly doling out information and incident until we are back where we started. But despite that air of inevitability, The Quiet American is a tense book; uncertainty and danger hover over even the quotidian details of life in war-torn Vietnam . It has its flaws, certainly—ranging from the underdevelopment of Fowler’s (and Pyle’s) girlfriend, Phuong to Greene’s seeming ambivalence about Fowler’s self-assigned guilt—but it’s as exciting and thought-provoking as any of Greene’s novels.

Most of the time these days when people write about The Quiet American, they write about its portrayal of American international meddling, usually to demonstrate that America has learned little in the intervening fifty years. And though such uses diminish the book, it’s hard to disagree with the argument. Pyle, in his murderous ideological blundering, could easily report to Rumsfeld, and Pyle’s ideological mentor , York Harding, could be replaced by Kenneth Pollack, Robert Kaplan, or any of a number of others.

But I think Greene goes slightly awry in his portrayal of Pyle’s actual, destructive innocence. Though Pyle has accepted that casualties are inevitable on the road to democracy, he still believes they are intentionally minimized and that there are things we and, by extension, anyone fighting for freedom with us, will not do. When confronted with civilians murdered by his ally, General Thé, he says,

“Thé wouldn’t have done this. I’m sure he wouldn’t. Somebody deceived him. The Communists . . .”

I have trouble imagining anyone in Pyle’s position being quite so naïve—it’s hard to imagine Rumsfeld or Cheney caring enough to try to believe in their ally’s essential goodness. To that crew, if someone is on our side, their actions are, de facto, acceptable. And if they’re against us, god help them.

Though maybe Greene’s right—maybe in the mid-fifties a field operative like Pyle would have been that innocent. Or maybe the fifty intervening years of American foreign policy have made me more cynical about our intentions than even Greene was. Or maybe Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al. are simply that much worse.

Actually, that’s probably the answer. For five years running, it’s been your best bet in any question of incompetence or nastiness or corruption, or even evil. So they probably are that much worse. As Brad DeLong puts it, the Bush administration is worse than you imagine, even after you’ve taken into account that they’re worse than you imagined.