Dark Voyage

Reviews

Kirkus Reviews:

ê DARK VOYAGE

Author: Furst, Alan

Review Date: JULY 01, 2004

Publisher:Random

Pages: 288

Price (hardback): $24.95

Publication Date: 8/10/2004 0:00:00

ISBN: 1-4000-6018-4

ISBN (hardback): 1-4000-6018-4

Category: FICTION

A star is assigned to books of unusual merit, determined by the editors of Kirkus Reviews.

 

Back to WWII again, with another reluctant civilian pressed into service against the Nazis—but the tale is far from old hat.

Will we ever stop referring to Furst's fiction (Blood of Victory, 2002, etc.) as being influenced by classic films, and by the work of Greene and le Carré, and start calling other things Furstian? If his latest is any indication, that time won't be far off. It's WWII again, but instead of, say, a smoky Paris café, things start off in the sun-blasted souks of Tangier, circa 1941. E.M. DeHaan is the captain of the Dutch freighter the Noordendam, and he's been approached by his superiors to help the Allies in this little world war that's been sending plenty of his fellow ship captains to the bottom of the ocean. With absolutely no military experience or knowledge of espionage, DeHaan is asked to repaint his ship like a neutral Spanish vessel in order to ferry a contingent of British commandos over to attack an outpost of Nazis in Vichy French-held Tunisia. After the Noordendam proves successful in that operation, it's sent off to bring a load of munitions to the beleaguered Allied forces barely holding on after the surprise German paratrooper assault on Crete. Each mission is a nail-biting affair as Nazi submarines roam the seas, not to mention the two suspicious characters DeHaan had to add to his already motley and polyethnic crew: a bloodless spy with the diffident air of an accountant, and a darkly beautiful Russian journalist. Furst succeeds not just because of his artfully constructed prose, but because he's not averse to painting the war as a struggle of good against evil, yet does so without turning his characters into cartoons. Instead of a grandly plotted crusade, this war is an on-the-fly, jerry-rigged affair, making the heroism all the more astonishing.

Realistic but still grand: a gripping odyssey of ordinary men in extraordinary times.

 

It's no secret by now that Furst is a superlative chronicler of World War II, and his new novel is a splendid addition to an accomplished body of work that includes The Polish Officer and the bestselling Blood of Victory. His mastery of the atmosphere of that era-its brusque heroes and heroines, its sudden explosions of violence, its strange black glamour-is the fruit of tireless research and an empathetic imagination. His hero this time around is a blunt Dutch sea captain, E.M. DeHaan, whose sturdy but aging merchant vessel is pressed into service on behalf of the British Navy by the exiled Dutch naval intelligence group in London. Disguising his boat as a neutral Spanish freighter, DeHaan somberly and grudgingly takes it several times into harm's way, ferrying British commandos on a North African raid, taking munitions to the beleaguered British garrison on Crete and then, most dangerous of all, on a secret mission to Sweden's Baltic coast. The marine details are so authentic the reader can smell the oil and the brine, and the characters who come aboard and into the captain's life-a valuable Polish naval officer in exile, a Jewish refugee who becomes the ship's doctor, a Russian woman journalist fleeing the Soviets, with whom DeHaan enjoys a brief and dry-eyed romance-are sketched with concise brilliance. The book casts such a spell with its exact evocations of time, place and language that one could swear Furst was a Brit writing out of his own experience in 1941 rather than an American writing today.

Forecast: Furst has been rapidly developing both his skills and his reputation as a master of that still-alluring world, and this is arguably his finest performance to date, likely to confirm old admirers and win many new ones.