Gorky Park (1983): adapted from the Martin Cruz Smith novel by Dennis Potter; directed by Michael Apted; starring William Hurt (Arkady Renko), Lee Marvin (Jack Osborne), Brian Dennehy (William Kirwill), Joanna Pacula (Irina Asanova), Richard Griffiths (Anton), and Ian Bannen (Iamskoy):
A perfectly respectable, big-budget adaptation of Martin Cruz Smith's first novel featuring morose Soviet detective Arkady Renko. William Hurt is physically miscast as Renko, but he does a good job with the pensive, morose part of the character.
The real problem is that as able a writer as adapter Michael Potter is (he of BBC standouts The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven, both made into problematic Hollywood adaptations themselves), he has to either jettison the lengthy descriptions of life in the late-Soviet-era Russia of the novel or use a voice-over. And the film-makers clearly decided against a voice-over. And Gorky Park really needed one. Without it, we're either shown stuff that requires context or told stuff in awkward expository sections.
Stripped of Cruz's detailed, pungent descriptions of life in late-1970's Moscow, Gorky Park becomes a generic detective thriller with an underwhelming MacGuffin. That MacGuffin was interesting in the novel; here it seems almost perfunctory, as does the identity of the killer. Yes, you will guess the identity of the killer quite easily because he's the most obvious suspect and because there really aren't any other suspects. Oh, well.
This certainly isn't a bad movie. And you do get to see a young Joanna Pacula's boobies and William Hurt's naked ass, depending on what sort of nudity spins your dial. And Brian Dennehy is so much fun as an American cop that he seems to have wandered in accidentally from the set of another, juicier movie. Lightly recommended.
Domain by James Herbert (1985): Technically, this is the third novel in Herbert's Rat Trilogy, following The Rats and Lair. But you don't need to have read the previous novels to enjoy this one -- I haven't, and there's nothing difficult to follow here.
Herbert's really great at excruciating physical horror. Domain hits the reader with two horrors for the price of one: nuclear strikes on London, England, followed by the rise of giant mutant rats from London's sewer systems. Come for the nuclear apocalypse, stay for the rats!
And boy, these rats are bad news. After an intense and detailed description of the nuclear devastation of London, Herbert follows some of the survivors into the sewers as they head towards a governmental bomb shelter disguised as a subterranean telephone relay station. Will order be restored? Hey, where did all these giant, super-intelligent rats come from?
If you enjoy scenes of visceral horror, rats, and nuclear war, then this novel is for you. It's one of the two or three strongest Herbert novels I've read. The science gets wonky at times, but hey, giant rats! Recommended.
Nightwing by Martin Cruz Smith (1977): This early Cruz novel, written before Gorky Park made him a break-out star, is a terse, thrilling account of the present-day descent of a colony of Mexican vampire bats onto the New Mexico region inhabited by the Hopi.
An Ahab-like bat researcher and a somewhat aimless, hopeless Hopi Deputy will ultimately be the only people who can save the area before, as the researcher notes, the United States is forced to remove New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona from the map.
The novel combines compelling exposition (yes, compelling exposition) on Hopi mythology, vampire bats, and Black Plague transmission with a tense, exciting disaster narrative. There's more than one ecological narrative at work here: the bats have been chased out of their natural habitat, and this makes them much, much more dangerous than they were before, while the quest to contain them, and the plague they carry, is fatally compromised by the attempts of a Navajo leader to sell oil rights to portions of Navajo and Hopi land.
Smith creates winning, sympathetic characters under pressure, and also manages the difficult feat of positing a rational, natural apocalypse which may or may not also have supernatural origins. The portrait of the Hopi people is fascinating throughout. So too the vampire bats, a predator with no fear of humanity, and with an awful lot of similarities to humanity: they come, and they strip an area bare of life both through their predation and through the diseases they carry, diseases that don't affect them because bats have the strangest mammalian immune systems on the planet.
Bats in their entirety are the most successful mammal on the planet besides humanity. Here, Smith turns them into a natural force worse than any hurricane or earthquake. They make for a terrifying antagonist, rendered in full horror but with full honors to their biological distinctiveness. When Charles Darwin first saw a vampire bat feed, he was left speechless. One feels that way for awhile after the explosive, somewhat hallucinatory finale of this novel. Highly recommended.
Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith (1989): Set in the waning days of the Soviet Union and the early days of glasnost and perestroika, Polar Star brings Smith's dogged investigator Arkady Renko back for another investigation no one really wants to succeed.
Stripped of his Party card and his status as a police officer after the events of Gorky Park (about six years before the beginning of this novel), Renko now works the "slime line" on a massive Soviet fish-processing ship, the Polar Star, currently working the Pacific fishing zones north of the Aleutian island chain.
But while gutting fish for a living has turned out to be a good way to numb Renko to his past, his past isn't done with him yet. A female crew member shows up dead in one of the nets. The Polar Star's cooperative venture with several American fishing trawlers makes the investigation more complex than it initially seems. And as Renko is the only man aboard with a background in police work, he's drafted by the Captain and the omnipresent Political Officer to investigate the death and, hopefully, rule it a suicide.
Set almost entirely on the Polar Star, the novel portrays in fascinating detail everything from the workings of industrial-size fishing boats to the crew's obsession with buying Western consumer goods during their one-day stopover in Dutch Harbour. We also get a brief tour through Soviet-era folk-singing, a twisty murder plot, and a brief exegesis on sub-hunting. Also, fish and fishing and the awful slime eels.
Renko is even more depressed and jaded than he was in Gorky Park, understandably so. But before it's all over, he'll have to resurrect the detective part of himself -- and, to some extent, the part of himself that actually wants to continue living. Highly recommended.
Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (1981): Smith's late-Cold-War thriller was a huge success in 1981, soon spawning a big-budget film adaptation starring William Hurt. It involves the efforts of Moscow homicide investigator Arkady Renko to somehow solve a triple homicide that ultimately almost no one -- not the Politburo, his superiors, or the KGB -- wants him to solve.
The novel's greatest strength is its accumulation of detail about the workings of Soviet society at the tail end of the Brehznev era. Regardless of how accurate the novel's details are, they seem accurate through their specificity and consistency and through Smith's wide-ranging depiction of everything from the philosophy of appliance-buying to the average citizen's reliance on vodka.
The middle-aged Renko is a sharply drawn character in the world-weary but noble tradition of hard-boiled detectives, and his outsider-status in his own department almost makes him a private detective rather than a cop. Burdened by family history (his mother committed suicide while his still-living father is an unrepentant former general with Stalinist leanings), Renko nonetheless doggedly pursues the truth in a situation where no one really wants to know the truth.
As a depiction of a decaying totalitarian system, Gorky Park is excellent -- the Soviet bureaucracy is a blighted wonder to behold. But the novel also takes the worst aspects of the United States to task as it winds its labyrinthine way through a conspiracy that's both much more and much less than it appears to be. Highly recommended.
