Just Finished Reading: The Polish Officer by Alan Furst

In 1939, as the might of the German Army descends on Poland, Intelligence officer Alexander de Milja is given a new mission. He is to make his way to Paris to assist in the creation of a Polish Intelligence unit dedicated to expelling the Germans from his country. Within months France to is over run and de Milja is left behind in the confused evacuation. Left to his own devices he puts together a rag-bag collection of misfits to continue the struggle. Contacted by agents of the Polish government in exile – now based in London – de Milja is tasked to aid the fledgling French Resistance in any way he can and pass on any information to the British. When he discovers information that the Germans intend a cross-channel invasion of England he takes direct action to aid RAF attacks on the invasion staging posts. As a reward for his heroism he is sent into the belly of the beast to help the Russians fight off a German invasion of their territory. At this point he can not but wonder if he will ever see an end to the fighting or if he will live to see his country free again.

As some of you will know, Alan Furst is one of my top authors. I like to hold off reading his books so that I can savour them all the more. Unfortunately, I found to my surprise that I did not enjoy this book as much as I had been anticipating. It’s not that it’s a bad book – or at least not by any general standard. It’s just that I felt that it wasn’t up to Furst’s usually very high standards. It took me a while to get into which is unusual for his stories. Maybe it was me? I can, from time to time, almost give up on reading and sometimes need to almost force myself to turn the pages. This wasn’t one of those times but maybe I had a tinge of that feeling in the back of my mind. Whatever the issue was I just couldn’t loose myself in this particular novel. This wasn’t actually helped when I spotted what I think is an uncharacteristic mistake in historical accuracy. When describing a particularly dramatic attack on a French coastal harbour by elements of the RAF he described in gripping detail Blenheim bombers coming in at 50 feet causing havoc in the massed German invasion fleet. Now the Bristol Blenheim was one of my favourite early WW2 aircraft and I built several models of it in my childhood. I was, to say the least, ‘pumped’ by the scene he described and could see it clearly in my minds eye. Then, on page 198, he made his error. Describing the second attack on the port, this time from high level, he mentions that the craft are probably Lancaster bombers. Now most normal people would read that and move on blissfully unaware but I, as you may have noticed, am not most people. The section of the RAF attack was headed 7^th September (in 1940 that is). So the problem I had was that the first flight of a Lancaster bomber was on 9^th January 1941 and didn’t enter service with the RAF Bomber Command until early 1942. Although this certainly didn’t ruin the book for me, it did disappoint me and coloured my appreciation of the rest of the novel. Yes, I’m a pedant. I freely admit this. But this error was quite fundamental. You might even call it a schoolboy error. Either Mr Furst or his researcher did a pretty sloppy job on that one. It detracted from my enjoyment of the book and will probably affect my enjoyment of his future novels. This is a real shame as I am enjoyed his previous books immensely and still enjoyed this one too. I’m going to do my best not to read his next book looking for errors but that is now a real danger. Furst fans out there should not avoid this book. It has many, many fine attributes usually associated with his work. Just be aware that his historical accuracy halo has most definitely slipped here.