I picked up Gorky Park at the library because I had been wanting to read Polar Star, its sequel, again.I listened to Polar Star on tape years ago on a road trip to Burning Man and it was grippingly real, gritty, rusty and bloody. Murder on a Russian fishing vessel out in the Arctic. I felt as if I had been on that ship for months after the book ended. I could see the characters in front of me, as real as my friends.I knew I must start with Gorky Park. There were a few things in Polar Star that I didn’t follow because I didn’t know how the story began. Oh my, and what a treasure. There will always be a special place in my heart for Arkady Renko. The force of his character holds this book together--I suppose like all detective novels--but in a way that goes way beyond plot. I mean, his personality is what drives the plot, largely.Only because Renko doesn’t act in accordance with what’s expected of him in his role as Moscow chief investigator does the story unfold the way it does. It’s in essence the story of a man breaking all the rules: discovering the rules of his own morality.He doesn’t simply rebel against the corrupt Russian system or the authority of superiors. He seems to be authentically trying to figure it all out, to figure himself out. He seems as mystified by his own life, by his wife leaving him, by his dead-end career, as by the murder mystery of the title.Three bodies found mutilated in Gorky Park in the middle of Moscow present a professional challenge that Arkady Renko has never had to face in his position as homicide investigator before. A KGB officer, Renko’s arch-rival and lethal enemy, shows up and tramples all over the scene, destroying evidence and making a mockery of Arkady’s authority. And at every step of the investigation into a very convoluted international crime, Arkady has to face higher-ups telling him to cover up the truth.It’s not that Arkady is such a fierce defender of the truth or that he single-handedly wants to expose corruption in the Russian justice system. It comes across that he’s as genuinely intrigued by the mystery as we are, and as determined to find out what really happened. He doesn’t care about his job, his colleagues, his wife or friends, or even his own life, in the end. He keeps waiting to be killed, and very nearly is on several occasions. Somehow he reads the subtlety of the situations well enough to save himself each time, just barely.I think it’s Renko’s intuition that’s so appealing about him. He is a fascinating character, so unexpected because he knows himself only partially. The events of this novel bring out aspects of his personality that he never knew existed, and he is constantly surprised by them.One of my favorite scenes in this fantastic book is toward the end. I’m not going to give too many details away here, I hope. After all the investigating and collecting evidence and dealing with backstabbing colleagues of the first part of the book, Arkady ends up in government custody and is questioned for a long period, several months. Watching over him is his old enemy from the KGB, who Arkady fully expects will kill him eventually.The beauty of this section is in the tiny ways we see these men becoming friends. This is the last person you’d think Arkady would ever trust. Yet we see them standing talking in the garden, one on his knees digging in the soil. Then watering the seedlings together in the heat of summer. And the most beautiful moment, when they battle a wildfire and have to make their escape from the flames, walking hand in hand through the dense smoke to reach safety.One thing I think Martin Cruz Smith does exceptionally well is to present a visual scene with all the right cues, so we see what he wants us to see, and we remember with a sense of having been there ourselves. When Arkady goes to the film set in the beginning of the book and meets Irina for the first time, the author guarantees that we won’t forget her by making her somehow magically memorable. Of course, she is seen through Arkady’s eyes. But there is nothing flat or ordinary about his characters.Another thing I like so much about this book is that all the characters know each other--really well--when the story starts, with only a few exceptions. Delving into the mystery is to unravel the intricate web of relationships that tie the characters together. Often they go back thirty years or more. This deep familiarity and experience the characters have with each other makes the story seem much more real, heavy, and the mystery all the more personal and intriguing.I loved this book, every line, and look forward to taking it back to the library and picking up the next one. Apparently there are five altogether? How could Arkady possibly stay alive that long?
Anyone not giving this the highest rating should perhaps read it again.I read Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith back when it first came out and loved it. As part of my new fitness program I’m doing a lot of brisk walking as my doctor says this will balance out the crazy amount of cycling that I do. I hate walking and running but if I have to do it I want to kill two birds. On my walks I have been listening to recorded books. Unfortunately, I haven’t found much in French and Spanish to improve my language skills. English books I got, and lots of them. I have been listening to Gorky Park on my recent walks and I have to say that I underappreciated this book the first time around. His skill as a writer is apparent in every paragraph.I don’t think the author had visited the Soviet Union before writing the novel yet he seems to totally nail the communist mentality. Maybe he served in the American military where this extreme version of kiss-ass careerism is de rigueur. The Soviet anti-hero in the book, Arkady Renko is a police investigator who almost completely against his will is forced into a murder investigation. He has no use for the communist party or its trappings of benefits and promotions for the elite. Arkady hates the system yet he is ironically the best communist in the story, right down to the shitty soviet cigarettes he smokes. The story in Gorky Park takes a backseat to the descriptions of Soviet life and the characters. But it’s not like the story is lacking at all, it’s just that the protagonist steals the show in almost every passage.There are almost countless memorable scenes in the book and one of my favorites is when Arkady visits a friend who has just purchased a new Soviet-made washing machine that he waited ten months to get. “Very highly rated,” his friend tells him to which Arkady replies, “And not in the least bourgeois.” Arkady is definitely not bourgeois, not in the least and he continues to be underwhelmed by the washer.Misha had crammed four underpants into the spin dryer. At that rate,Arkady estimated, moving laundry from the agitator tub to the spin dryer and on to thecommunal clothesline, a week's wash could be done in . . . a week. The machine is a total piece of crap and as he is showing Arkady how it works it goes haywire and is on the verge of exploding before Arkady has the sense to pull the plug. 'A little problem, love,' Misha said. 'The washer isn't quite working.''That's all right. We can still show it to people.'She seemed genuinely content. Don’t ask me why—it’s a long story—but I speed-read a chic lit novel on Sunday morning called Something Borrowed that was evidently some sort of best seller and is not a movie. This book is absolutely one of the biggest pieces of shit I have ever read. I defy anyone to point out one paragraph that has any sort of craft in the writing, and forget about the plot. The entire book reads like a run-on sentence written by a spoiled suburbanite teen, which probably isn’t far from the truth. Gorky Park is probably filed under thrillers in by librarians yet it completely transcends the genre. It was popular and, like the ridiculous chic lit novel, was made into a film but what a difference in artistic merit between these two books.
What do You think about Gorky Park (1982)?
In 1981, when Smith published Gorky Park, the Berlin Wall had yet to fall, and Glasnost wasn't yet a twinkle in Gorbachev's eye. Perhaps in that climate, nearly 40 years into the Cold War, a thriller set largely behind the Curtain, exploring how the Red half lived, was enough to titilate an audience. Because the effusive praise heaped on this one surely isn't due to the writing. Gorky Park is a messy narrative at best, a willy-nilly hodgepodge of Soviet cliches at worst. Most disappointing is the lack of mystery in this thriller, as the bad guy (who, incidentally, wears a black hat) gets identitified early on, and thereafter simply pops up with all the convenience of a jack-in-the-box bogeyman. Wildly overrated.
—Jennifer
A little bit of actual research would've been nice. I am very forgiving when it comes to getting things wrong about USSR; after all, not everyone lived there and not everyone knows the culture. I was able to forgive the misuse of names and the word comrade. I was able to forgive the fact the the author seems to think that Moscow is located at the north pole. Factories suing each other though.... come on. Who doesn't know that in communism all factories belong to the state? That would mean that the government was suing itself. Also couldn't forgive the idea that kgb would have to cover up killing people accused in treason. I had a family member die because he was a suspect. I knew many others who's family members die the same way. Trust me, kgb didn't have to cover up for any of it. Killing "traitors" and "enemies of the people" was a part of their job. The article in the teacher's newspaper in the begining of chapter 2 was also a load of cat poo. Why would a government put Stalin, who was Georgian, and Khrushchev, who was Ukrainian, in power if the policies were so racist against non-Russians? Of all the problems USSR had, racism was not one of them. In fact, racism is something USSR used in their propoganda against the US. There were movies made where they were specifically criticizing US for segregation. The "pop babies" propaganda did exist in USSR, but it wasn't to have Russians as the dominant race, it was because during WWII almost an entire generation got killed They needed to repopulate the country.
—Armada Volya
Between watching the ‘80s era Soviet spies in FX’s The Americans, and tensions running high over Russian activity in the Ukraine, it almost seems like Cold War never ended. In fact, because of a European consulting firm being brought into my workplace, I’m seeing Russians all over my building. Hopefully things don’t hit the point where I have to take to the hills and go all Red Dawn. Wolverines!!With all this red scare stuff going on, it seemed like a great to time revisit this old favorite. It’s the early ‘80s and three bodies have been found under the snow in Moscow’s Gorky Park with their fingertips removed and their faces peeled off to prevent identification. Militia chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko finds an enemy of his from the KGB on the scene showing an interest in the bodies, and that can mean nothing but trouble. As he reluctantly begins to investigate the murders and discovers that one of the bodies was an American, Renko wants nothing more than to dump the case on the KGB since he’s pretty sure they killed those people anyhow. However, Renko soon finds himself embroiled in schemes that may mean that he’s the only who gets punished for trying to be a detective in a society that doesn’t want to admit that crime exists at all.So the hook here is that it’s a mystery set in the Soviet Union, and even though that era has come and gone, it’s still incredibly interesting to get this peek behind the old Iron Curtain. Martin Cruz Smith didn’t just give us a procedural of how Soviet cops worked, he also provided a view of an entire country living under a system where covering your own ass had become an art form and logic rarely entered in to it. It’s kind of like working for a corporation only a corporation can’t ship you off to Siberia if you rock the boat too much. (Or at least they can’t yet. I probably shouldn’t give them any ideas….)Even though this has plenty of Soviet political intrigue and an international aspect to it this doesn’t feel like a spy story, and that’s mainly because of Arkady Renko. During this reread I found myself comparing Renko to one of my favorite fictional detectives, Matt Scudder, because they’re both pragmatic men who don’t see the point in fighting a system that’s inherently corrupt, but there’s a quiet streak of idealism in both that believes that some crimes have to be answered for. Renko is stubborn with a sly talent for screwing up the plans of powerful people, and there’s a great worn down but not beaten element to the character.Smith also had excellent timing when he created Renko because through the next several decades he could use his detective to give us mysteries that are also glimpses of what it’s been like for Russians through the fall of the Soviet Union and the aftermath today.
—Kemper
