I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over
at My
Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read
books that you already own.
Dark Voyage –
Alan Furst
In his eighth historical espionage thriller, Furst
departs from his usual place and time of Europe between the wars. Nor does he
focus on typical spies. In this one, the time is during WWII, April to June
1941 to be exact. The setting is at sea on a spy ship, the Dutch tramp
freighter Noordendam. The hero is a stoical captain, Erik DeHaan.
DeHaan has been recruited into naval intelligence by
three co-nationals, the owner of the Noordendam, a businessman, and a female
artist. The Noordendam is re-painted, put under the control of the British
intelligence service (which office is unclear to DeHaan), and sent out on
missions both in convoy and on its own, both as the Noordendam and the Santa
Rosa. It lands commandos in Tunisia and explosives in Crete. It skirts German defenses in the Baltic in order to transport radio equipment to listen
in on traffic to and from German submarines.
DeHaan is a classic Furstian protagonist. That is, sensitive
and professionally capable, he brings his emotional and professional
intelligence to fight, because that is what an ordinary person would do, fight
when fight we must.
The other characters are regular folks too, doing what
they can to fight in the hope that their small contribution will add to the
huge effort to eliminate the Fascist threat, whether on the left or the right.
Fleeing right extremism are Greek deserters, Spanish Republicans, and a veteran
Ukrainian Jewish spy. A female Soviet maritime reporter is fleeing the Russian
spies that want to recruit her for dirty work.
One flaw. The second half of the novel is set on the
Baltic Sea near Malmö , Sweden, in the first 20 days of June, heading up to the
Summer Solstice. Recalling how far north this setting is and the time of the
year, there is not quite 24 hours of daylight. When I lived in Riga, Latvia (1994-97),
the sun didn't set until close to 11:30 p.m. It didn't get dark until 1:00 a.m.
when it didn’t get “darkest before the dawn” kind of dark either. Then at about
1.05 a.m, it started to lighten up again. Furst does not mention one word about
this phenomenon.
The flaw is balanced by the simple fact that Furst sets
the climax in the Latvian port of Liepāja. Furst gets points in my book for
mentioning Latvia at all, much less a little-known place such as Liepāja. The
Russians and Germans wanted to occupy Latvia for the possession of Riga (a.k.a, "the Paris of Soviet Hell") and the
ice-free port of Liepāja, which the Russians wanted so secret they didn’t even
put it on maps.
Furst’s writing style tends to the run-on sentence, which
gives an efffective herky-jerkiness to the exposition. We readers never know
what going to happen next.
Other reviews of Alan Furst’s novels
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