BOOKS

By WALTER SHAPIRO

DARK STAR

by Alan Furst

Houghton Mifflin; 417 pages; $22.95

Imagine discovering an unscreened espionage thriller from the late 1930s, a classic black-and-white movie that captures the murky allegiances and moral ambiguity of Europe on the brink of war. All the treasured cinematic touches that convey a mood of incipient danger are present -- a dead Soviet agent in a waterfront brothel in Ostend, lonely footsteps muffled by the snow on a dark Berlin street, a worn leather satchel with a false bottom left in a Prague railway station. No, they do not make movies like that anymore. But in Dark Star, Alan Furst has replicated this idealized form, this image of Europe entwined in a web of malevolent ideology.

Furst's perfect-pitch re-creation begins with a fatally flawed protagonist: Andre Szara, 40, Pravda reporter in Europe and occasional Soviet spy, whose life goals have been reduced to a desire to outlast Stalin's purges. As the novel opens in 1937, Szara, a Russified Polish Jew, is caught in the midst of a blood feud in the Soviet secret services between his NKVD friends, mostly Jewish intellectuals, and Stalin's Georgian thugs. The fear that dominates Szara's nomadic life is palpable: a typically chilling passage is about his return to Russia aboard a Soviet freighter with a human cargo of condemned men who know that homecoming means an executioner's bullet. En route, these compromised trade representatives and diplomats "rarely slept, greedy for their remaining hours of introspection, pacing about the deck when they could stand the cold."

Szara's safety net is espionage; he becomes a full-time NKVD operative in Paris charged with maintaining ties to an imperiled Jewish industrialist in Berlin, who somehow knows how many bombers Germany is building each month. Fear not; Dark Star never becomes one of those breathless adventures that build fake suspense around schemes to stop Hitler. Plot is less important than Furst's powerful descriptive writing, particularly his account of Szara's nightmare flight across Poland in the first days of the war. What carries the book to a level beyond the cynicism of spy novels is its ability to carry us back in time. Nothing can be like watching Casablanca for the first time. But Furst comes closer than anyone has in years.