Furst has created this book on a broad canvas. And he succeeds in doing so without losing sight of his narrative focus. Mercier deals with an arch, international mixture of characters, all of whom share a kind of anxiety that is anything but dated. “A bad dream,” Vyborg says about tank information found in Wehrmacht journals. “They write books and articles about what they intend to do, but nobody seems to notice, or care.”
As always, but with especially great efficacy in The Spies of Warsaw, Furst asks how life can go on in the face of encroaching menace. And in the book’s uncommonly fine-tuned portrait of Mercier, it has some kind of answer.
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