Entry tags:
As depressed as Harry Hole but a lot more fun: Arkady Renko
I read Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park for the first time as part of my "read classic spy novels" project this month, and this threw me down the rabbit hole of the rest of the Arkady Renko series. There are nine of them and I'm reading them somewhat out of order due to having started with a later one.
So basically here's how it went: I got Gorky Park and Tatiana out of the library, the latter being something like #8 in the series, because I thought I might like to start with one of his most recent books rather than going all the way back to the Cold War. On my first try, I bounced off Tatiana hard; it's a very straightforward police procedural and you know what I didn't want to read (at that time): a police procedural set in Russia! Then I started reading Gorky Park, was hooked in a few pages, and rapidly devoured all 500 or whatever pages (it's a lot of book). Then I went back and read Tatiana now that I have a preexisting fondness for Arkady Renko, and really enjoyed it, and now I'm reading the middle books in the series and having a lot of feelings about them. (At this point I've also read Havana Bay, Wolves Eat Dogs, and I'm in the middle of Stalin's Ghost.)
I feel like I lack the mental bandwidth to really talk about these books a lot. They are fantastically well-plotted; I feel like Gorky Park in particular is one of the most skillfully plotted books I've read in a while, with a beautiful marriage between plot and theme. The author is *really* good at tying plot back around to theme; another book that's especially good for this is Stalin's Ghost, which is about the literal ghost of Stalin that may or may not be appearing on a Moscow train platform, and also about the lingering aftermath of Russia's brutally bloody involvement in WWII tying into its current wars (this one's mostly about Chechnya).
The first one's an espionage book, but they're mostly murder mysteries, with espionage elements as they intersect with the larger political milieu of the time periods they're set in. The protagonist is a Ukrainian-Russian investigator who bounces around through various agencies as Russia goes through general political upheaval, he gets fired, etc. Generally, though, I just really like him; he's determined, brave, quietly sarcastic, and dead set on doing the right thing despite the fact that the entire world is stacked against him and half the time it works out terribly for him anyway. It's a fascinating window onto a world that's different from what I know (Gorky Park and Havana Bay, set in Cuba, are especially interesting for this). It's terrifically bleak and cynical at times, but never feels anti-human to me; there are a lot of really terrible or corrupt people, a lot of decent people die or end badly, Arkady gets multiple wrecking balls driven through his life, and there are times when a lot of his life is just "This could only happen to Arkady Renko, poor guy," but you really never feel like the books are specifically beating on him for being decent, or that the author feels that decency isn't something to strive for, even when being decent blows up in his face as often as it works out for him.
This series also happens to hit one of my bulletproof found family tropes. Actually, this is what ended up getting me sucked into Tatiana and then going back and reading the series starting from my best guess for where this starts happening (I overshot a bit and ended up landing on Havana Bay, but I didn't mind, it's a really good book).
Excerpts from spoilery emails that I wrote to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija and scioscribe while I was reading Havana Bay:
Early in the book, Arkady is in the middle of trying to commit a carefully planned, quiet, unobtrusive suicide using a syringe, when someone bursts into his apartment trying to murder him, Renko reflexively uses his suicide weapon on them instead of himself, and now he has a dead politically-connected assassin on his floor that is about to blow up into a major problem and no suicide weapon anymore. (Renko: "You could have just waited ten seconds!")
I really feel like is the most Arkady Renko thing that could possibly happen.
(He's not actually THAT depressed most of the time; at this point in the series, he's reeling from his wife's death, wandering around Cuba in a depressed haze while wrapped in the coat his wife gave him that he refuses to take off despite the tropical heat; he even sleeps under it. I was genuinely expecting something terrible to happen to the coat and was genuinely amazed that the coat made it to the end intact and he just quietly decides to wear it "only on special occasions." But this is another example of Martin Cruz Smith and theme; the coat is used throughout the book as a symbol both of his relationship with his wife and the barrier between him and the world, with Arkady slowly losing his need to wrap himself up in the coat all the time as he gradually comes out of his depression.)
Later on in the book, Ofelia, a local police detective who is waging a one-woman (and losing) war against police corruption on the island - she's great; I loved her - is helping Arkady hide out as a tourist in a Cuban amusement park because half of Cuba is trying to kill him at this point. Then, to her absolute horror, her mom and two adorable daughters (she's a single mother) turn out to ALSO be out for a day at the amusement park and run into them. What follows goes something like:
Mom: THIS is your new boyfriend? A Russian? What did I teach you?
Adorable daughters: :O
Mom: .... He's too thin, you need to feed him.
Ofelia: I want to die.
Arkady: No hablo espanol.
Ofelia: Good, please keep it that way.
Then they realize no one will EVER recognize him if he's having fun in an arcade with two adorable little girls (I mean, valid) so they drag him around and make him play games for a while.
These books keep surprising me with how genuinely funny and sweet they can be. Gorky Park is really good, but is not funny or particularly sweet. The whole thing with Ofelia ended on a staggeringly depressing note, but a lot of Arkady's relationships do.
Anyway, then I moved along to Wolves Eat Dogs, which is mostly about Chernobyl and Russia's relationship with Ukraine, which is a pretty intensely uncomfortable thing to read about given current events (the book is written and set in the mid-2000s), but is also where my bulletproof narrative kink kicks in.
ARKADY ACCIDENTALLY ADOPTS A STREET URCHIN.
There is no end to my love for all variations on the trope of a prickly person who doesn't see themselves as parent material accidentally finding themselves as a surrogate parent for an angry, damaged orphan. This is actually one of the few instances of it with a boy orphan that really works for me; usually I like the girl variant better. But Zhenya, the orphan, is EXACTLY what I want from this. He's a massive ball of trauma to the point where he barely even speaks; Arkady has no idea what to do with him; but they're drawn together in various ways and Zhenya is clearly growing deeply attached to him in the one-step-forward, five-steps-back way of a kid who is so profoundly traumatized that he really struggles with attachment or affection. The Arkady-and-Zhenya parts of Wolves Eat Dogs are adorable, funny, and occasionally tragic, and then Stalin's Ghost ups the ante hard when Zhenya's evil dad comes back into the picture. The Zhenya storyline continues to develop through the rest of the series, as far as I can tell.
Wolves Eat Dogs also seems to feature a turn towards Arkady's life being a little less of a dismal wreck. He still has miserable luck with girlfriends, but he has a few people in his corner now who don't die or betray him, and with Russia having stabilized a bit - at least into a semi-predictable sort of dystopia - his life isn't the constant upheaval and tightrope walk over near disaster that it was in the 80s and 90s. (I have conflicted feelings about having become addicted to a series of murder mysteries set in Russia at NOW OF ALL TIMES, but at least the books don't feel propaganda-ish to me - in either direction; Smith is pretty cynical about the US and the Western/capitalist world, too, and writes his characters' worldviews in a way that feels honest to me.)
So basically here's how it went: I got Gorky Park and Tatiana out of the library, the latter being something like #8 in the series, because I thought I might like to start with one of his most recent books rather than going all the way back to the Cold War. On my first try, I bounced off Tatiana hard; it's a very straightforward police procedural and you know what I didn't want to read (at that time): a police procedural set in Russia! Then I started reading Gorky Park, was hooked in a few pages, and rapidly devoured all 500 or whatever pages (it's a lot of book). Then I went back and read Tatiana now that I have a preexisting fondness for Arkady Renko, and really enjoyed it, and now I'm reading the middle books in the series and having a lot of feelings about them. (At this point I've also read Havana Bay, Wolves Eat Dogs, and I'm in the middle of Stalin's Ghost.)
I feel like I lack the mental bandwidth to really talk about these books a lot. They are fantastically well-plotted; I feel like Gorky Park in particular is one of the most skillfully plotted books I've read in a while, with a beautiful marriage between plot and theme. The author is *really* good at tying plot back around to theme; another book that's especially good for this is Stalin's Ghost, which is about the literal ghost of Stalin that may or may not be appearing on a Moscow train platform, and also about the lingering aftermath of Russia's brutally bloody involvement in WWII tying into its current wars (this one's mostly about Chechnya).
The first one's an espionage book, but they're mostly murder mysteries, with espionage elements as they intersect with the larger political milieu of the time periods they're set in. The protagonist is a Ukrainian-Russian investigator who bounces around through various agencies as Russia goes through general political upheaval, he gets fired, etc. Generally, though, I just really like him; he's determined, brave, quietly sarcastic, and dead set on doing the right thing despite the fact that the entire world is stacked against him and half the time it works out terribly for him anyway. It's a fascinating window onto a world that's different from what I know (Gorky Park and Havana Bay, set in Cuba, are especially interesting for this). It's terrifically bleak and cynical at times, but never feels anti-human to me; there are a lot of really terrible or corrupt people, a lot of decent people die or end badly, Arkady gets multiple wrecking balls driven through his life, and there are times when a lot of his life is just "This could only happen to Arkady Renko, poor guy," but you really never feel like the books are specifically beating on him for being decent, or that the author feels that decency isn't something to strive for, even when being decent blows up in his face as often as it works out for him.
This series also happens to hit one of my bulletproof found family tropes. Actually, this is what ended up getting me sucked into Tatiana and then going back and reading the series starting from my best guess for where this starts happening (I overshot a bit and ended up landing on Havana Bay, but I didn't mind, it's a really good book).
Excerpts from spoilery emails that I wrote to
rachelmanija and scioscribe while I was reading Havana Bay:Early in the book, Arkady is in the middle of trying to commit a carefully planned, quiet, unobtrusive suicide using a syringe, when someone bursts into his apartment trying to murder him, Renko reflexively uses his suicide weapon on them instead of himself, and now he has a dead politically-connected assassin on his floor that is about to blow up into a major problem and no suicide weapon anymore. (Renko: "You could have just waited ten seconds!")
I really feel like is the most Arkady Renko thing that could possibly happen.
(He's not actually THAT depressed most of the time; at this point in the series, he's reeling from his wife's death, wandering around Cuba in a depressed haze while wrapped in the coat his wife gave him that he refuses to take off despite the tropical heat; he even sleeps under it. I was genuinely expecting something terrible to happen to the coat and was genuinely amazed that the coat made it to the end intact and he just quietly decides to wear it "only on special occasions." But this is another example of Martin Cruz Smith and theme; the coat is used throughout the book as a symbol both of his relationship with his wife and the barrier between him and the world, with Arkady slowly losing his need to wrap himself up in the coat all the time as he gradually comes out of his depression.)
Later on in the book, Ofelia, a local police detective who is waging a one-woman (and losing) war against police corruption on the island - she's great; I loved her - is helping Arkady hide out as a tourist in a Cuban amusement park because half of Cuba is trying to kill him at this point. Then, to her absolute horror, her mom and two adorable daughters (she's a single mother) turn out to ALSO be out for a day at the amusement park and run into them. What follows goes something like:
Mom: THIS is your new boyfriend? A Russian? What did I teach you?
Adorable daughters: :O
Mom: .... He's too thin, you need to feed him.
Ofelia: I want to die.
Arkady: No hablo espanol.
Ofelia: Good, please keep it that way.
Then they realize no one will EVER recognize him if he's having fun in an arcade with two adorable little girls (I mean, valid) so they drag him around and make him play games for a while.
These books keep surprising me with how genuinely funny and sweet they can be. Gorky Park is really good, but is not funny or particularly sweet. The whole thing with Ofelia ended on a staggeringly depressing note, but a lot of Arkady's relationships do.
Anyway, then I moved along to Wolves Eat Dogs, which is mostly about Chernobyl and Russia's relationship with Ukraine, which is a pretty intensely uncomfortable thing to read about given current events (the book is written and set in the mid-2000s), but is also where my bulletproof narrative kink kicks in.
ARKADY ACCIDENTALLY ADOPTS A STREET URCHIN.
There is no end to my love for all variations on the trope of a prickly person who doesn't see themselves as parent material accidentally finding themselves as a surrogate parent for an angry, damaged orphan. This is actually one of the few instances of it with a boy orphan that really works for me; usually I like the girl variant better. But Zhenya, the orphan, is EXACTLY what I want from this. He's a massive ball of trauma to the point where he barely even speaks; Arkady has no idea what to do with him; but they're drawn together in various ways and Zhenya is clearly growing deeply attached to him in the one-step-forward, five-steps-back way of a kid who is so profoundly traumatized that he really struggles with attachment or affection. The Arkady-and-Zhenya parts of Wolves Eat Dogs are adorable, funny, and occasionally tragic, and then Stalin's Ghost ups the ante hard when Zhenya's evil dad comes back into the picture. The Zhenya storyline continues to develop through the rest of the series, as far as I can tell.
Wolves Eat Dogs also seems to feature a turn towards Arkady's life being a little less of a dismal wreck. He still has miserable luck with girlfriends, but he has a few people in his corner now who don't die or betray him, and with Russia having stabilized a bit - at least into a semi-predictable sort of dystopia - his life isn't the constant upheaval and tightrope walk over near disaster that it was in the 80s and 90s. (I have conflicted feelings about having become addicted to a series of murder mysteries set in Russia at NOW OF ALL TIMES, but at least the books don't feel propaganda-ish to me - in either direction; Smith is pretty cynical about the US and the Western/capitalist world, too, and writes his characters' worldviews in a way that feels honest to me.)
no subject
With a name like Ofelia, I was really expecting a HEA....
and with Russia having stabilized a bit - at least into a semi-predictable sort of dystopia
*laughs*
no subject
no subject
no subject
I also love that trope and it was one of the things I liked about Cherryh's Cuckoo's Egg and (although the teacher/student thing is sometimes a squick for people) her fantasy The Paladin.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Polar Star is definitely one of the ones I'll be reading in the future, although the most recent books are more of a priority for me right now; it's set off the coast of Alaska ...
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
The early books are spectacularly bleak, but I feel like the series gets less grim and depressing after Havana Bay; he actually starts getting some allies and supporters who don't die or betray him immediately. I think I would have much less positive feelings about the series overall if I hadn't happened to hit a recent book immediately after Gorky Park in which things do actually work out pretty well for him! (Though I'm honestly a little reluctant to read the most recent one because of how often this all implodes afterwards...)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Oh god. That is so good, yes! I love it too.
no subject
So glad you liked Gorki Park, and I'm seconding/thirding the film (it's aged but I think that's not a bad thing bc the country it describes doesn't exist anymore!)
And now I think I may look up the other books in that series! :) [I finally finished my Will Trent hate read. I'm always amazed by my on inability to stop hatereading/watching. So 11 books later, I still really dislike the author!!! And I can finally quit her, bc I finished the4 series...for now]