The Polish Officer: A Novel
Author: Alan Furst
Review
From Booklist
After its dismemberment in 1939, Poland had precious few officers, but those who survived the blitzkrieg carried on the war underground or in exile. Furst creates one such man, Captain Alexander de Milja. Relying more on period detail than on the plot (which ultimately fizzles out) in depicting the tense life of a spy and the delicacy of maintaining one's cover, Furst writes like a confident crafter of the genre, as he has done previously (e.g., Dark Star, 1991). Here, Captain de Milja, whose polyglot background and fluency in languages lend him the protean ability to change his identity, runs agents in Warsaw, Paris, the Pas de Calais, and the Ukraine. In each of these places, he ducks as the Nazi tidal wave passes, resumes contact with his superiors in the Polish intelligence organization, assumes a new pose, then cautiously noses around for information about the Wehrmacht, a traitor in his own ranks. No mere drudge, de Milja manages an amorous conquest everywhere he goes, and each woman brings out another side to his world-weary demeanor. This accurate, descriptive portrait compensates for the story's abrupt suspension when de Milja joins the Ukrainian partisans. Presumably, his fate will unfold in a sequel. Gilbert Taylor --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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