"If one was young in the 1930's," wrote Sir Isaiah Berlin, "and lived in a democracy, then, whatever one's politics, if one had human feelings at all, the faintest spark of social idealism, or any love of life whatever, one must have felt ... that all was dark and quiet, a great reaction was abroad: and little stirred, and nothing resisted." Furst amplifies this sense in his novels -- they're rooted in the uncertainties of the '30s and not the retrospective glory of the '40s. The war exists in these books more as intimation than as fact. People know that it's coming, and they choose to ignore it or to thwart it or to hasten it.

In his most startling metaphor, Furst says that the history of Europe in the '30s is that of a secret love affair between two men, "a relationship based on a deep and sympathetic understanding, a shared passion for certain ideals, a common view of the human race." The secret lovers are, of course, Hitler and Stalin. Furst continues, "Imagine that Shakespeare rewrote the final act of 'Romeo and Juliet': Now the lovers poison the wells of Verona and, in the final scene, they're all alone and living happily ever after." That fairy-tale coda is delivered like a slap.

Since the war, it has become fashionable to say either that communism was the only viable response to fascism or that communism was as bad as fascism. This last notion has been used, mainly by people more comfortable with right-wing dictatorships than left-wing ones, to deny the singularity of the Holocaust, its particular melding of the systematic and the irrational. Furst pulls off the idea of Hitler and Stalin as comrades because he isn't an ideologue. He's not pitting one against the other to make a political point, just insisting on the inconvenience of facts. Keeping one devil at bay means appeasing another and plunging into a whole new set of complications. By allowing that each system had its own distinct horrors, Furst invests even the most heroic actions with potentially terrible consequences.

Furst's writing has grown more concise, more epigrammatic over the years. Scenes are now rendered with the brevity of stray thoughts passing through an observer's mind. "Kingdom of Shadows," his most apt title, revisits his themes of compromise and appeasement in precis. Nothing here is as it seems. Nicholas Morath, the Hungarian cavalry officer hero, is ensconced in a job as an advertising agency executive. His real work is for his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi. Polanyi, a diplomat, is also the most elegant deal maker ever to grace one of Furst's novels, and possibly the most pragmatic. Working to save Hungary from Germany, Polanyi will bargain with whoever can help him, from anti-fascists to SS officers who want to topple Hitler for their own agenda. Nicholas is his uncle's legman, ferrying money, making contacts, even unwittingly providing safe passage for an assassin. There is an ugly sense of quid pro quo to some of Nicholas' missions, as he becomes the agent for his uncle's conviction that ends justify means.

It's difficult to sum up "Kingdom of Shadows," or any of Furst's far-ranging narratives, because to talk about one of his books is to talk about them all. He is writing one large book in which each new entry adds a piece to the mosaic of Europe in the years leading up to the war, as created by a partisan of the senses. The connection between the sensual pleasures his books luxuriate in and the open and covert battles he chronicles might best be explained by Cyril Connolly's remark that World War II was opposed to "every reasonable conception of what life is for, every ambition of the mind or delight of the senses." In Furst's novels the pleasures of a good meal, of lovemaking, of scratching a lounging dog on the head or just enjoying a cigarette in the bath aren't respites from the battle but victories in themselves. To come under the spell of his wonderful novels is to have those pleasures put into stark relief.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"