Mission to Paris
Alan Furst
Mission to Paris
Frederic Stahl, a Hollywood film star, travels from Beverly Hills to the boulevards of Paris. It is a dangerous,difficult, seductive time: Europe is about to explode, and the Parisians are living every night as though it were their last. As filming progresses, Stahl is drawn into a clandestine world of foreign correspondents, embassy officials, and spies of every sort. His engagements take him from the bistros of Paris to the back alleys of Morocco; from a Hungarian castle to Kristallnacht, and the chilling heart of the Third Reich. But can he survive as German operatives track him across Paris?
3.7 out of 5 based on 7 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
272 |
| RRP |
|
| Date of Publication |
July 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-0297863922 |
| Publisher |
W&N |
| |
Frederic Stahl, a Hollywood film star, travels from Beverly Hills to the boulevards of Paris. It is a dangerous,difficult, seductive time: Europe is about to explode, and the Parisians are living every night as though it were their last. As filming progresses, Stahl is drawn into a clandestine world of foreign correspondents, embassy officials, and spies of every sort. His engagements take him from the bistros of Paris to the back alleys of Morocco; from a Hungarian castle to Kristallnacht, and the chilling heart of the Third Reich. But can he survive as German operatives track him across Paris?
The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst.
Reviews
The Guardian
John O'Connel
“Furst's high level of surface period detail is expertly deployed to make us feel as if we're stranded in the past without a guide. Nothing is needlessly explained; it just happens, quickly and thrillingly.”
08/06/2012
Read Full Review
The Independent
Sean O'Brien
“Furst is a romantic moralist working in a version of the realist tradition, and while line-for-line he beats his rivals hands down, his books do not normally invite much formal analysis. Yet with Mission to Paris he creates a satisfying hall-of-mirrors effect by writing a superior genre piece in which the life of an actor is invaded by a world whose workings we recognise from the cinema, at the same time as he is making a film whose completion becomes a matter of life and death. ”
07/07/2012
Read Full Review
The New York Times
Max Byrd
“Furst’s theme of “political warfare” — the infiltration of the media, repetition after poisonous repetition until lies become facts — has a distinctly contemporary resonance, though he bases it on the historical record … Furst is often compared to Eric Ambler and Graham Greene because of his remarkable command of the dark moral atmosphere of Europe in the 1930s ... Yet atmosphere alone wouldn’t be enough. Furst is a skillful storyteller, writing in two- or three-page scenes that instill a sense of movement and energy in an otherwise loosely episodic plot. ”
22/06/2012
Read Full Review
The Scotsman
Janet Maslin
“This being a Furst book, Stahl will be seduced by various intriguing women. And he will be seduced into espionage too. The American embassy has plans for him, as do the Nazis. Much against his will, Stahl winds up going to Berlin to judge a festival of mountain climbing films, the genre being a national favorite. Furst’s descriptions of such films and their propaganda messages are chilling but witty. So are such piquant details as the marzipan tanks and fighter planes at a festive Nazi banquet.”
07/07/2012
Read Full Review
The Spectator
Andrew Taylor
“The loyalties of Furst’s relatively straightforward characters are never in doubt for long and they tend to retain their illusions. Mission to Paris (a grimly pedestrian title) has its blemishes. It begins with a quasi-prologue that might usefully have been left on the cutting-room floor, and the prose can sometimes be clunky. But the blemishes count for very little. In Stahl, Furst has created an interesting central character who, for all his quiet glamour, works as a sort of Everyman. The novel gives a vivid sense of what it must actually have been like to live in Paris in those strange, unhappy months before the outbreak of war ...”
11/08/2012
Read Full Review
The Times
Peter Millar
“A great read for those with a wider window on the war that still looms so large in the British psyche.”
21/07/2012
Read Full Review
The Washington Post
.
“Stahl, the protagonist, is less compelling than the operators in Furst’s earlier works. He is a kind of Cary Grant-ish presence, something better than a caricature of a movie star but still a little hollow and cliched nonetheless. It does not help that the actor — ostensibly a rookie spook — seems blessed with not just a natural suaveness you might expect in a screen star but also an apparently up-to-now untapped gift for spycraft. It is easier to believe, and more entertaining to dwell on, the lesser characters, including well-drawn spies from both sides of the war.”
10/07/2012
Read Full Review