The man around whom Alan Furst’s new spy novel revolves is Constantine Zannis, a highly placed police official in Salonika, Greece. In late 1940, as Spies of the Balkans begins, Zannis’ specialty is discretion. He heads a new department charged with handling delicate situations. Is a politician being blackmailed by a prostitute? Call Zannis. Has a woman of some importance killed her husband and then insisted she’s glad he’s dead? “Naughty girl,” Zannis says, giving the Furst hero’s characteristic knowing shrug.
Furst has written so often about such men, the intrigue that surrounds them, and their subtle, intuitive maneuvering that he risks repeating himself. But Zannis is a younger, more vigorous version of the prototype than some. And he is Greek, which adds a whole new perspective to Furst’s view of Europe before and during World War II, given the strategic importance of Greece’s ability to resist German domination. If shades of its personal drama are by now familiar to Furst’s readers, this book’s larger and more important geography seems new.
In 1939, Greece’s prime minister, General Ioannis Metaxas, said “that the old Europe would end when the swastika flew over the Acropolis.” The Nazi flag did not rise over the Acropolis until April 1941. Spies of the Balkans is about the time in between, when people like Zannis were forced to get their bearings in an increasingly hostile world and to become rescuers to those fleeing more perilous places. Furst’s gift for exquisite calibration transports the reader back to a realm where characters like Zannis could determine the limits of their authority only by testing it to the extreme.
Zannis does not enter Spies of the Balkans as a freedom fighter. Like any of Furst’s insouciant spies in the making, he starts off with an almost casual view of the dangers mounting around him. And at first those dangers don’t make much of a dent, although Zannis is inconvenienced when his paramour of the moment, Roxanne, an Englishwoman who runs a ballet school, is suddenly summoned home. Although Zannis is extremely astute as a matter of professional necessity, he hasn’t noticed that she might also be a British spy.
By the time “an infinitely deflective Englishman” arrives, perhaps in Roxanne’s place, who calls himself Escovil and purports to be a travel writer at a time when carefree travel is a thing of the past, Zannis has become more watchful. He is made even more so by a quasi-seductive encounter with Emilia Krebs, a Jewish woman from a wealthy German family. Spies of the Balkans can be positioned in terms of time, fear and uncertainty by the facts that Emilia is openly married to a Nazi colonel, and that both of them feel that they are safer together than apart.
But Emilia is also still in a position to help other Jews escape from Germany through Greece, via a route that is increasingly vital because others have been closed. “For Europe,” says one of the many figures in this book’s large international tableau of characters, “it’s like slipping out the back door.” As a police official, Zannis has a suddenly crucial power: He can name certain individuals as wanted criminals and ask that they be extradited to Greece. But this process requires many delicate steps, and Spies of the Balkans pieces them together with Furst’s usual acuity for trans-European scheming. In the process, he incorporates enough historical background to establish how unstable Greece in general, and Salonika in particular, have been, and how age-old Balkan enmities still cast long shadows. The book is dotted with klephts, evzones, Ustashi and other fierce, exotic fighters from this region.
Furst is better at establishing Salonika’s subjugation to the Ottoman Empire than he is at making what, for him, are atypically blunt sexual innuendoes. Ordinarily, he is a writer of very few words and inversely strong impact when it comes to eroticism; here, there are times when he must strain a bit to establish Zannis’ sexual bona fides. “Strange, but it just now occurs to me that the ottoman is an extraordinary piece of furniture, ingenious,” Roxanne remarks at one louche moment. Why? “Because you can, you know, also sit on it.”
However acrobatic this dalliance may be, it’s also over very early in Spies of the Balkans. That leaves Furst time to incorporate an almost de rigueur flirtation between Zannis and the wealthy, imprisoned wife of an important man — a man so important that, if Greece falls, he will have both a ship and yacht at his disposal for purposes of making a getaway.
Her name is Demetria, and she’s not much of a match for the more effortlessly devastating women for whom Furst’s incurable romantics always fall. Or perhaps Spies of the Balkans simply has different priorities. In any case, urgent concerns about the fate of Europe easily eclipse the book’s efforts to contrive star-crossed amour.
Oddly and wonderfully, Zannis’ most tender relationship is not with a woman. He must help everyone in his extended family when the wartime crisis finally erupts. That means saying goodbye to his brave grandmother, who vows that the family will not go hungry if it can hang on to its sewing machine.
But of all the qualities that make Zannis one of Furst’s most appealing protagonists, his rapport with a four-legged family member is one of the best. By now, the ultimate grand-scale nobility of his characters may come automatically to Furst. There’s something more fresh and idiosyncratic in the way this one cannot bear to lose his dog.
China’s military launched a record number of warplane incursions around Taiwan last year as it builds its ability to launch full-scale invasion, something a former chief of Taiwan’s armed forces said Beijing could be capable of within a decade. Analysts said China’s relentless harassment had taken a toll on Taiwan’s resources, but had failed to convince them to capitulate, largely because the threat of invasion was still an empty one, for now. Xi Jinping’s (習近平) determination to annex Taiwan under what the president terms “reunification” is no secret. He has publicly and stridently promised to bring it under Communist party (CCP) control,
In Taiwan’s politics the party chair is an extremely influential position. Typically this person is the presumed presidential candidate or serving president. In the last presidential election, two of the three candidates were also leaders of their party. Only one party chair race had been planned for this year, but with the Jan. 1 resignation by the currently indicted Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) two parties are now in play. If a challenger to acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) appears we will examine that race in more depth. Currently their election is set for Feb. 15. EXTREMELY
On Sept. 27 last year, three climate activists were arrested for throwing soup over Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh at London’s National Gallery. The Just Stop Oil protest landed on international front pages. But will the action help further the activists’ cause to end fossil fuels? Scientists are beginning to find answers to this question. The number of protests more than tripled between 2006 and 2020 and researchers are working out which tactics are most likely to change public opinion, influence voting behavior, change policy or even overthrow political regimes. “We are experiencing the largest wave of protests in documented history,” says
They increasingly own everything from access to space to how we get news on Earth and now outgoing President Joe Biden warns America’s new breed of Donald Trump-allied oligarchs could gobble up US democracy itself. Biden used his farewell speech to the nation to deliver a shockingly dark message: that a nation which has always revered its entrepreneurs may now be at their mercy. “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms,” Biden said. He named no names, but his targets were clear: men like Elon Musk
RSS