Gorky Park

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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?

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