You know sometimes, you’re reading a book and you’re thinking, this ought to be good but somehow isn’t? That was my experience all through Gorky Park.
The book is set mostly in Moscow, where police investigator Arkady Renko is trying to work out who the three faceless bodies are, who killed them, why, and whether the KGB’s interest in the case is in his favour or not. As he pursues the case, Renko traipses around Moscow and its surroundings and encounters all manner of Russians, from high-ranking bureaucrats to Siberian runaways to honest factory men. He also copes with the dissolution of his marriage and hopes for the resolution of his love (I would say infatuation) for a young woman tangentially involved in his case.
There should be a lot to like here. The portrait of lives in Soviet Russia is rich in detail, dripping in verisimilitude. The murders at the centre of the plot seem to present a proper mystery. The thematic clash of agencies promises to enhance both. We get an authentic grasp of how the Soviet machinery works, and a doubling of the mystery: who did it and why might the KGB care? And all this is written up in well-wrought prose.
And, yet, while feeling like I was enjoying each page as I read it, I found that I couldn’t do more than 30 pages or so in a sitting. It was like trying to each huge portions of rich food. Here’s the thing, I think: Smith worked on the book for the best part of a decade, and based the Russian elements of it on a two-week trip and a whole bunch of interviews and library work. What emerges is over-stuffed and over-researched and over-written. Not any of these in a clanging bad way: the book is overall enjoyable, and you can see why it sold loads of copies. But still, it’s overdone in all those ways.
The usual, bad way in which a book manifests over-research is through the steady thud of facts about a subject being deposited in the reader’s mind. There’s a tiny bit of that here, but the problem is more like this: Smith has learnt so much about the various milieus of Soviet society that he can’t bear to miss his chance to (say) portray a homosexual relationship encouraged by and flourishing in the particular circumstances of the Soviet penal system. And so somehow the book includes all the characters and places and situations about which he’s learned. It’s all well-written and convincingly imagined and at some level impressive, but there’s just a bit too much of it, excessively digressive, there for its own sake rather than for its contribution to plot or structure. This is thrown into relief when Americans are the focal characters and when the action switches to New York; Smith can allow himself to write this without having to show everything he knows about it, because he didn’t have to learn it the same way.
Similarly, a bad over-written book is full of prose that’s been thought about too much, metaphors hammered to death, that kind of thing. Here, well, it’s the same sense of things being pushed too far, but more subtle things. Renko is almost too rich a character; he has psychological depth and nuance of implausible degree (nobody knows himself as well as Renko apparently does). Meanwhile, the murder mystery that Renko is involved with is both too mysterious and too obvious: the details are convoluted but the outline is very clear very early. Too much concentration on getting the trees just so, not enough thought about how the wood looks from afar. Finally, in the end, Smith can’t seem to decide whether to concentrate on the (intricate, clever) murder mystery, or the (intricate, clever) inter-agency conflict and intrigue lying behind it, and so does too much of both, and in the end the reader is suffocated by intricacies.
This is, in sum, a good book, but could perhaps have been really great if Smith just chilled out a little. I wonder whether in fact some of the later, less garlanded Renko novels might turn out to be better, if they were perhaps written at greater pace and and a more relaxed mind.