The Nocturne of Small Betrayals:

Doing this now, probably because of early Andor withdrawal symptoms onset. 

Tony Gilroy didn’t wander into Andor by accident. This is a writer who’s been orbiting the architecture of surveillance and moral collapse for decades. Michael Clayton, The Bourne films — Gilroy’s whole dossier is about competent men in broken systems, playing out endgames they don’t control. He doesn’t write heroes. He writes operators. That’s what makes Andor hum. Gilroy drops Star Wars into a pressure chamber built by Ambler and Greene, and strips it for parts. He gets that rebellion is about momentum, not ideals — that the weight of the system matters more than the intent of the character.

Time goes by and Gilroy is granted something rare in Hollywood — time — it becomes obvious he’s not just dabbling in the mode of Greene, Ambler, Le Carré, or Furst. He’s joining their company. The 90-minute script, for all its efficiency, is a compression algorithm. It privileges momentum over texture, clarity over contradiction. But in Andor, with hours to spend and nothing to sell but dread, Gilroy does what those novelists did: he lets rot bloom in the margins. He allows characters to loiter in their contradictions. He writes people whose competence is corroded by fatigue, whose faith is tactical at best. It’s not about saving the galaxy — it’s about getting through another meeting without turning someone in. The long arc gives him room to breathe, and what fills that space isn’t myth or catharsis, but bureaucracy, betrayal, and quiet, professional despair. Just like the good stuff.

Why Furst now? Because I’ve got maybe four episodes left of Andor Season Two, and then it’s back to the algorithmic sludge of prestige TV — safe, symmetrical, and so thoroughly test-screened it might as well be AI. I’m clutching at straws, maybe. Trying to do some highbrow copium with a stack of Alan Furst paperbacks. Except it turns out it’s not copium at all — it’s a lateral move. Furst, especially in the late novels, is pure signal. No noise. Just low-level operatives in overcoats slipping through the cracks of history, trying not to get noticed, trying not to die, trying not to care too much. It’s not comfort. It’s just fantastic.

Alan Furst is an American novelist, sure, but he doesn’t write like one. Not in that bomber-jacket, Tom Clancy, high-fructose, ordinance-pornography way. No, Furst’s imagination is definitively European, and not the Europe of Eurostar and EU technocrats. He writes from the wet cobblestones of Vichy, the train platforms at dusk, the café corners where people drink vermouth and quietly die inside. His lineage doesn’t run through Hemingway and Chandler — it cuts instead through Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, the patron saints of weary moral compromise.

I think Furst has got better with time. The early novels felt like he had the right moves, but they were slightly 1990s coloured, but the new stuff seems old and bitter, the heroism more incidental which is thoroughly enjoyable.

I say I started “Under Occupation” as a way to manage the early onset of Andor withdrawal symptoms. And it‘s working. Because if anything, Furst has aged into the role. The new novels aren’t about espionage as swashbuckling. They’re about friction. Delay. Small moves made without conviction.

It’s not that Andor copies Alan Furst. That’s the wrong architecture. In any case, Andor is doing what Furst himself was doing — running a backchannel off a longer, older transmission. If Andor is “influenced” by anything, it’s a palimpsest: Le Carré rewriting Graham Greene, who was already lifting structure and moral weight from Eric Ambler, who had one eye on the newsreels and the other on Joseph Conrad — or maybe John Bunyan, depending on how Protestant your hangover is.

You see the recursion here. Everyone’s cribbing from the guy before, but they’re not stealing plot — they’re stealing atmosphere. They’re inheriting weather systems: fog, rain, moral ambiguity. What changes is the hardware. Ambler had battered freighters and fake passports. Greene had MI6 memos and guilty priests. Le Carré had the bureaucratic sinews of Cold War drift. Furst leaned into train stations, wet boots, people who weren’t quite important enough to be watched.

Andor just updates the infrastructure. It’s railguns and orbital prisons now. The Empire does real-time surveillance. The rebels run ops off a closed-loop network. The tone, however, is grandfathered in. Nobody trusts anyone. Everyone’s already compromised. Faith is out, competence is in. This isn’t copying — it’s convergence. A genre inheritance repurposed for an age that doesn’t believe in genres anymore. Only systems.

It’s occupying the same emotional bandwidth. The same architecture of dread. The same low-grade, high-stakes murk. Just with droids.

The narrative DNA is encoded with the same bitter proteins: fear, fatigue, restraint, and the paradoxical dignity of staying human when the future is already lost. There are droids, yes, and space travel and orbital prisons — but the world they serve is lit by the same half-burnt filament bulbs that hang over Furst’s crumbling Parisian safehouses and Balkan border towns.

The rebellion isn’t a fireworks show. It’s a bookkeeping error that becomes a philosophy. It’s a thousand little lies told in the name of something better. It’s not heroism. It’s work.

And in that sense, Andor isn’t just a genre piece with gravitas. It’s the ghost of Ambler and Greene, passed through a droid’s optical sensor and broadcast in Morse.

This is what Gilroy and Furst have in common: neither writes about the people who bend history to their will. They’re more interested in the ones history brushes past, people who aren’t the main characters of history. They don’t storm barricades or end wars; they rent apartments with thin walls and wait for coded messages that may never come. They are adjacent to history — not the actors on stage, but the ones crouched in the wings, holding their breath as the play stumbles forward. They loiter near power, near catastrophe, brushing up against the dread of world events like the side of a trench coat catching fire.

These are the types who smuggle microfilm not out of idealism but because they’ve learned how to slip through cracks in the system. They don’t aspire to change the world — they’re trying to stay upright as it shifts beneath their feet. The stakes are unspeakably high, but the work is small, grubby, and often absurd: bad coffee, unreliable contacts, unmarked doors in cities that don’t forgive mistakes. You keep your head down. You lose sleep. Sometimes you fall in love with someone you shouldn’t — a border agent’s sister, a poet with a false name — and sometimes you try to leave a letter behind to explain yourself. Usually, you run out of time. And when it’s over, there’s no parade. Just a train ticket, a new alias, and a story no one wants to hear.

Andor is not just the most disciplined product of the Star Wars industrial complex, but the only one that understands that rebellion is logistics, not romance. It’s not waving a sword in the desert. It’s arguing in basements, laundering money through fake construction firms, and killing people who used to be on your side. Andor doesn’t mimic Alan Furst — it simply operates in the same terrain. It lodges itself between Eric Ambler’s gray pragmatism and Graham Greene’s Catholic guilt, in a zone where everyone is morally compromised and still showing up for work.

Nobody in Andor believes in clean victories. There’s no cavalry coming, no righteous arc. The revolution is underfunded, underinformed, and always one courier away from collapse. Surveillance is constant and granular — not poetic, but administrative. Every ally is a liability; every conversation is a risk assessment. This isn’t mythmaking — it’s management under duress. The Empire isn’t evil because it’s cruel. It’s evil because it’s functional. It scales. It audits. It delegates horror through middle management and memos.

It runs like a spreadsheet — massive, boring, structurally elegant, and utterly indifferent to the lives it nullifies. Nobody throws lightning. They just file forms. And what’s left of the resistance isn’t a rebellion in any traditional sense — it’s a tangle of deniable assets, empty safehouses, and exiles with shaky cover stories. It’s a startup that’s lost the plot, held together by shared paranoia and outdated codebooks. Every victory is provisional. Every failure, permanent. And in the meantime, the Empire just keeps printing uniforms.The resistance is less an army than a shell corporation with delusions of relevance.

And here’s where it gets interesting: there’s a resonance with Che Guevara’s Congo Diaries — not the poster-boy Che, not the romantic on the motorcycle, but the failed field commander buried in a collapsing jungle op — ironically, Diego Luna’s business partner, Gael García Bernal, already played the young idealist version in The Motorcycle Diaries. Andor skips that phase. It starts in the Congo and skips the wide-eyed phase entirely. It opens in the jungle, already lost. Already compromised.

Che arrived in Africa thinking revolution was portable — that you could drop ideology into a failing state like a firmware update and watch justice boot up. What he found instead was a logistics graveyard: undisciplined fighters, broken comms, rotting food supplies, and comrades more interested in rank than radio codes. He writes with growing despair that passion doesn’t patch malaria nets. Righteousness doesn’t make people carry water. The jungle doesn’t care what you believe.

Andor gets this. Its early jungle-set pieces don’t feel like adventure; they feel like maintenance nightmares. The rebels are cold, wet, sick, and unsure who will flinch next. The planning is bad. The morale is worse. Ideology is mostly unspoken because everyone knows it’s not enough. And that’s the point — Andor is not about the triumph of belief. It’s about the attrition of human systems. The creeping, granular failure of plans made too late with people half-trained, underfed, and increasingly unsure whether the cause is real — or just another failed export.

The world doesn’t fall because you’re righteous. It falls because nobody’s paying attention while you quietly lose. Andor is fluent in that. It knows revolutionaries are often indistinguishable from criminals, and that the most dangerous thing you can do in an authoritarian system is waste time explaining your principles. It’s not here to inspire. It’s here to demonstrate operational continuity under existential pressure. In the end, Furst’s late novels — bitter, beautiful, and twilight-lit — aren’t about winners. They’re about ghosts. So is Andor. The war is coming, yes, but the cost is already counted in the dead eyes of men who’ve made too many compromises and the women who vanished on trains bound east.

So sure, call it Star Wars. That’s the IP wrapper, the merchandising code, the decoy title printed on the front of the box. But really, Andor inhabits the same universe as Night Soldiers — not literally, but morally, atmospherically. It’s a world where nothing is clean, everyone is compromised, and courage comes in the form of small, unpaid choices made in quiet rooms. A world of dossiers, code names, whisper networks, and the sickly hum of fluorescent betrayal. You don’t win by being bold; you win by being missed. By not showing up on the right radar. By vanishing into forms, protocols, and sealed envelopes that no one bothers to open until it’s too late.

And maybe that’s the real shock: how much this world — the world of Furst and Andor — feels contemporary. How it doesn’t just mirror the past, but suggests we’re running the same operating system again. The OS of polite authoritarianism, hollow alliances, and bureaucracies so vast they function without intention. The age of the charismatic ideologue is closing again. What’s replacing it is colder, quieter — a world where systems fail not in fire, but in paperwork.

But maybe that’s not entirely bad. In these stories, clarity doesn’t come from glory; it comes from friction. From the grinding of motives, the negotiations in shadows, the refusal to give in to the logic of utility. Andor understands, as Furst does, that the grand battles are already lost. The only thing left is to decide whether you disappear on your feet or your knees. And whether you can teach someone else, before the lights go out, how to find the fuse box.