Red Gold: A Novel

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$6.10
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Aug 22, 2010 21:00:14

Autumn 1941: In a shabby hotel off the place Clichy, the course of the war is about to change. German tanks are rolling toward Moscow. Stalin has issued a decree: All partisan operatives are to strike behind enemy lines—from Kiev to Brittany. Set in the back streets of Paris and deep in occupied France, Red Gold moves with quiet menace as predators from the dark edge of war—arms dealers, lawyers, spies, and assassins—emerge from the shadows of the Parisian underworld. In their midst is Jean Casson, once a well-to-do film producer, now a target of the Gestapo living on a few francs a day. As the occupation tightens, Casson is drawn into an ill-fated mission: running guns to combat units of the French Communist Party. Reprisals are brutal. At last the real resistance has begun. Red Gold masterfully re-creates the shadow world of French resistance in the darkest days of World War II.

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±1±: Best Buy Former film producer Jean Casson returns as the main character, still struggling against man's inhumanity to man, in a France that seems to have given-in to its inevitable domination by Germany. After Furst's earlier "The World At Night", where Casson first chose to rebel, he is now a more skilled agent of resistance. He is tougher and more inventive, yet still vulnerable and human. His loves are real and passionate, and his losses accepted. They come with the war.

In his 1999 novel, "Red Gold", when author Alan Furst describes this good man's descent into poverty and desperation during the horrors of Nazi occupation in Paris, we shiver in the dank and desolate hotel room with him, and we can almost taste the foul soup and moldy bread. Furst is that good a writer. His willingness to allow small victories and moments of humanity provides welcome bits of redemption.

Furst knows about war and rough living, especially for the nomads from eastern Europe, who hate the nazis and fight desperately to escape the hold of mother Russia, whether in occupied France, Bulgaria or Madrid. Through his spare and vivid descriptions of places, and of real people thrust into unbelievable conditions, we learn how it must have happened in France. How people got involved with underground movements, how they compromised their friends, and how they became other people in order to simply survive. By extension, a reader can better understand how danger, violence, compromise, greed and deceit are still happening in different theaters like Iraq and Somalia and Afghanistan.

Furst is a wonderful, inventive writer, who knows how to tell complex stories in a simple, profound way. on Sale!