![]() ![]() That era clearly is over, but American writer Alan Furst has spent the last two decades breathing a fresh vitality and relevance into the espionage novel by fusing it with impeccable historical fiction.įurst’s “Spies of the Balkans” is the 11th in a kind of series - all set in Europe during what Auden called that “low dishonest decade” that concluded with the onset of World War II. ![]() Graham Greene, John le Carré and Eric Ambler, for example, made masterful use of the moral ambiguities arising out of the dark struggle with the East. The English-language espionage novel has long been a favorite of first-rate writers who wanted to engage serious questions in an entertaining way. Still, humanity’s triumph seemed - superficially, at least - popular literature’s loss. Partly, it had to do with the loss of that forces-of-light versus forces-of-darkness dichotomy provided by the global struggle between Soviet-style Marxism and the Western democracies. ![]() Partly, that had to do with the way the conflict ended - only a handful of prescient and implacably anti-communist historians and intellectuals had foreseen that, once contained, the Soviet bloc simply would collapse under its own weight. ![]() The Cold War’s abrupt conclusion seemed to take a good bit of the narrative wind out of the espionage genre’s sails. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |