I’ve
written here before about Martin Cruz Smith and his Arkady Renko stories. I’ve liked his other novels - Stallion Gate is one of my favorites -
but the Renko books are somehow qualitatively different. They have a flavor of science fiction,
almost, or alternative history. They are a kind of alternative history, when
you come down to it, or an alternative reality.
You
take your phone off the hook and spin the dial (this is Moscow, remember) to zero, and put a pencil in
the hole to keep it there; there’s enough electrical interference to screw up
the transmission from the tap on your line.
You take off your windshield wipers and put them in a paper bag under
the front seat; otherwise, somebody will steal them. Where is
Red Square? the fluent but non-native speaker asks, but confuses the public
space, ploshchad’, with the geometric
shape, kvadrat, and throws everybody
else into even greater confusion. The
ice sheet in Polar Star, the white
light of the horizon line in The Siberian
Dilemma, the dead zone around the containment facility in Wolves Eat Dogs; the physical
environment is a hazard. The psychic
environment no less: the ghost of Stalin stalks the Metro, an old KGB enemy is
found floating in Havana Bay, the crusading journalist Tatiana Petrovna is
thrown out of a sixth-story window, and the verdict is suicide. Renko is first cousin to Bernie Gunther,
another more-or-less honest cop trying to keep his footing on a slippery slope.
Which
brings us to “the Siberian dilemma.” If
the ice cracks underneath you, and you plunge into the frigid water of Lake Baikal,
you can drown, or you can pull yourself out, and still wet, freeze to death
immediately in the cold air. So, which
do you choose? Fatalistic as Russians can
be, the answer is that it’s better to do something,
even if that something is equally doomed.
This
would seem to define Renko’s character, character in the sense of destiny. He’s nothing if not a stubborn bastard. He survives any number of snares laid by the
more politically savvy, yet they over-complicate things. Renko isn’t devious enough, actually. He’s
easily led, but not so easily led astray.
Somebody more sophisticated would fall victim to a sophisticated device. Renko staggers across thin ice, but it
carries his weight, and a trickster wouldn’t be so lucky.
The
interesting thing about Renko is that while he’s by no means innocent in the
ways of the world, he has a certain naïve optimism. He himself would say that if you expect the
worst of people, you’ll never be disappointed, but he keeps looking to be
surprised by hope. It’s a terrific internal
tension, and it mirrors something in what we imagine to be the Russian national
political identity, the reformers vice the careerists and opportunists. Although the punch line hasn’t been written,
we’d all like to imagine ourselves surprised by hope, and it’s not a Russian failing,
alone. Aspiration is a stubborn bastard.
