SET in France in 1940, The World at Night continues Al an Furst's fictional recreation of the theatre of blood that was Europe just before and during the second World War. The first three books in the series, Night Soldiers, Dark Star and The Polish Officer, were not only exemplary in their attention to detail, authenticity of research and their feel for time and place, but were also extremely well written and beautifully crafted.
The same can be said of this new offering, a work that gets to the heart of a particular darkness, the miasma that falls upon a country held in the grip of an evil that passes all understanding. When the Germans marched into Paris it seemed the death knell for a whole way of life, French gaiety and insouciance extinguish under the jackpots of an occupying army. And how well Furst catches this aura of strangulated subservience, and its accompanying backlash of "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow, etc..."
The guarded hum of conversation muffled in black-out curtains; furtive feet whispering over rain-slick cobblestones; the sudden, harsh, Harry Lime-like sighting as a light is inadvertently switched on the tyre-screech of a black Citroen car in the dead of night; the creak of leather uniforms adorned with the skull insignia in fear-saturated rooms; and the all-pervasive anxiety of being spied on by family, friends, or that stranger on the corner in slouch hat and long black overcoat.
The protagonist is Jean-Claude Casson, a 41-year-old film producer, separated from his wife but still friendly with her, decidedly not the hero type, but with a stubborn streak and an old-fashioned belief in the principles of the moral fabric. Trying to accommodate the German occupation and live his life in some, kind of normal fashion, he puts his energies into rekindling an old love affair with the young actress, Citrine, and raising the necessary finance to make a film tentatively entitled Hotel Dora do.
Soon he finds the amount of compromise needed to construct pretence of normality too difficult to bear - "He would remember the evening as a certain moment, almost a freeze-frame; three men looking up at him from a table on the crowded terrasse of a restaurant, Fouquet as it happened on a warm evening. All around them, a sea of faces, the world at night - desire and cunning, love and greed, the usual. A Brueghel of Paris in the second spring of the war . . ." - and deliberately gets himself involved in an espionage episode that, unfortunately for him, goes disastrously wrong.
Furst writes a clear, limpid prose that beautifully understates the horrors he is recounting. And in Jean Casson, he paints an unforgettable portrait of a man caught up in the toils of attempting to preserve a framework of love, honour and patriotism, while at the same time paying due heed to the exigency of self-preservation.
Like Guy Crouchback in Waugh's Sword of Honoar trilogy, he is the true gentleman required to be a soldier, a sophisticated and civilised man trying to make sense of a world that has gone against the grain. Not for him Balzac's "You work in a whorehouse; don't let anyone see how much you enjoy it, and get your money up front." Casson, because of his very makeup, must be true to a code; it is the very backbone of his existence, the resonance of his life. And in the end, perhaps, that is where true heroism lies, in striving to seek, to find and, above all, not to yield. Furst, as author, teaches a stern but life-renewing lesson, and I am glad to listen to him.