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Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

By Ana C. | Posted Under Book Reviews | Comments (10)

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Gorky Park is a murder mystery set in Brezhnev’s USSR. The titular Gorky Park is a real park in Moscow, where three corpses are discovered one spring. They’ve been shot and mutilated so as to preclude easy identification and, as it turns out, they’ve been hidden under the snow for several months. Chief investigator Arkady Renko is assigned to the case.

Renko is a man born to the nomeklatura, who rejects the advantages conferred on him by parentage. For reasons that remain sketchy (although I guess his father does seem like an asshole of the first water), he’s extremely skeptical of bureaucracy, which in his experience always devolves into rule by lowest common denominator. He abhors the amount of hypocrisy he’s expected to spout, so while backstabbing apparatchik flourish, Renko’s career has stalled.

Renko’s insistence on the primacy of truth is his tragic flaw, and the closer he gets to solving a case no one wants solved, the more it costs him, personally. Still he persists. Renko is in no danger of going down as one of literature’s phenomenal detectives; every revelation feels deeply earned and he goes down more wrong tracks than right ones. The mystery itself is involving and complicated enough that unraveling motivations is as interesting as figuring out what actually happened. I’m not going to spoil things by going into specifics like Wikipedia (thanks a lot, guy who gave away the end of the book in the character description, when all I wanted was to remember Recurring Marginal Character #347), but suffice it to say that in communist Russia, the mystery solves you.

(Nyet! YOU are more tired that Britney Spears’s weave. Whatever, let’s not fight.)

Reading this is in 2010, it feels like a time-capsule: a glimpse into the paranoia, disorientation, and disillusionment that dominated the Soviet 1980s. Cruz Smith has a lot to say about police states in general, but he never makes the mistake of letting it shape his story, and the picture he paints of Moscow is full of vivid detail, idiosyncrasy, and even affection. Here are shabby offices, dim apartments, cheap cigarettes, bad marriages, and Russian cold so vividly evoked that I kept wanting to crawl under a blanket.

Which is why it’s so unfortunate that the story goes totally off the rails about two-thirds of the way through. There’s a location change (to the USA!), which really took the zip out of the story. His descriptions of NY don’t live up to what he does with Moscow (of course, I’ve never been to Moscow, so maybe that’s the difference). And the ultimate answer to the mystery, when it comes, is sort of disappointing. Still, worth a read if you’re curious about the later Soviet era.


For more of Ana C.’s reviews, check out her blog, The Sugar-Coated Review.









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Comments

Good review. I agree that the finale was less dramatic than what I had expected. But if you read other Arkady Renko novels (I've read all but two), you'll find that this is not quite uncommon.

Posted by: KV at February 1, 2011 10:47 AM

I never read the book, but I loved, loved, loved the movie by Michael Apted with William Hurt, Lee Marvin and Joanna Pacula...the movie was all about faces, beautiful, beautiful faces.

Posted by: brite at February 1, 2011 11:09 AM

I read Gorky Park back in high school, when there still was a Soviet Union, so the story provided interesting insight into the mysterious USSR. Seeing this review was a bit of a blast from the past.

Posted by: tamatha at February 1, 2011 12:43 PM

Thanks for the review. A great point about the time capsule feeling.
I was stationed on a ballistic missile submarine in the early 80's and this book made it's way onboard and was an immediate hit. I'd never read a book that painted the faceless, nameless Soviet enemy as realistic, actual human beings. Renko, as a flawed tool of the state, would have fit into our crew and understood our world as we got to know his. Although we could have given him some pointers on when to dump the toxic chick.
In my personal journey, this book is a major turning point from accepting cog in the machine to a empathic human being with a world view.
Sounds corny now, but I have no illusions about my ignorance at 20.
Back to the book.

It's all about obsessions. Power, love, truth, justice, money. It's all there, personified in each character. It's difficult to explain this in detail without spoilering the whole thing.

In the relationship between Arkady and his father, his physical and intellectual revulsion at the brutality of his dad (Great Patriotic War Hero)is a factor in his refusal to use him to further his status, or even to acknowledge his existance. I saw this as a metaphor for disaffected Soviet citizens moving away from the State, but did not yet have the impetus to overthrow it.

Posted by: Dash Riprock at February 1, 2011 1:06 PM

Dash Riprock--So interesting to read about the reception this got on your sub. I was born right after this book came out, and it's been fascinating to read this and a few other books about this period. You make a good point about the father/son relationship and I think that's a pretty accurate interpretation. I guess because I'm so far out of the context this book was written in, I wanted a more character-based explanation. I would have liked to have seen more of Renko's early life, basically. It seems like many men of his generation must have had fathers like his, but not all of them turned into Renko...even with what we learn about the mother, I was left feeling like the situation could have been more fleshed out. But I'm being nitpicky!

Brite--Thanks for the recommendation; I saw that it was a movie, and was curious about it. I will put it on my netflix queue.

Posted by: Ana C at February 1, 2011 9:46 PM

I got the impression from reading "Stalin's Ghost" that Renko's mother's suicide played an important role in his relationship with his father.

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