Three strikes for Mr Smith

Title: Three Stations
Author: Martin Cruz Smith
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

1/5

Back in 2008, I read a fantastic article in National Geographic by Mr Smith, "Moscow Never Sleeps". In the article, he plays on the contrast between the outrageous wealth of Russia's nouveau riche and the sorrowful squalor of society's least fortunates, geographically embodied in the part of Moscow known as Three Stations.

"Three Stations", the novel, is basically that article turned into a book, minus the focus and editing, 30 times longer but many times less interesting. It's social commentary masquerading as a crime novel, and doing neither with any particular distinction.

The seventh outing for Mr Smith's Moscow police investigator, Arkady Renko, packs a surfeit of plots into its slimmish 240 pages. There's a runaway teenage prostitute, whose baby has been stolen. There's a pair of hired killers looking to bring her back to the whorehouse. A kindly teenage street gang. A murderer obsessed with ballet.

What there isn't is a coherent story line stringing all these plot points together. Characters are introduced, only to vanish for chapters on end. The abducted baby and a murdered ballerina fight for space, and as a result neither story line feels fully developed. Also missing is the coherent social commentary that marks Mr Smith's other works, including his National Geographic article.

Renko this time is almost a parody of the established character--still the only one who believes a crime has been committed, still fighting with his boss, still bemused stepdad to chess prodigy Zhenya, still hooking up with women in passionless encounters (his girlfriend of the last two books has conveniently disappeared, for reasons not immediately obvious). There are the odd glimmers of Mr Smith's trademark dark wit, but mostly this Renko feels locked in a holding pattern, like a car in a traffic jam on Moscow's ring road.

The end result is a bit like "Indiana Jones 4". Or "Blair Witch 2" or "Son of Mask". In short, a poorly-written sequel that does its best to kill whatever good memories you had of the works that came before.

If the plot is a mess, the editing is worse. Mr Smith keeps forgetting to tell us things. An old woman appears; "It was the babushka who had been suffering the crumbs of the priest"--but Mr Smith never said there was a babushka with the priest. A bad guy is nasitly disemboweled by a hero who magically appears in just the right spot--but quite how this feat is managed is never entirely clear.

"Three Station" was almost physically painful to read, especially since I have long been an enormous fan of Mr Smith and his Renko books (read my reviews of "Wolves Eat Dogs" and "Stalin's Ghost"). Read Mr Smith's earlier Renko books, especially "Wolves Eat Dogs", read the National Geographic article, but whatever you do, don't read this.

Small book with big ambitions

Title: The Art of Travel
Author: Alain de Botton
Publisher: Penguin

3/5

"Vacation" and "travel" have become so synonymous that in order to separate these words, we had to glue two others together to make "staycation". The question of why we feel this urge to spend our free time somewhere, anywhere but here, is at the heart of Alain de Botton's nerdy but entertaining book, "The Art of Travel".

Yes, nerdy. You will read few books so proudly, unashamedly in-your-face intellectual as "The Art of Travel". Mr De Botton is a social geologist, and to explain his take on questions such as why we are drawn to the exotic, to the countryside or to the monumental, he digs into the history of literature, of art and philosophy, and brings up parables drawn from the lives of Gustave Flaubert, William Wordsworth or Edmund Burke to illustrate his point.

This is a little book with big ambitions. In a series of essays on our motives for travelling, what we do when we arrive at our destination, and how it makes us feel, Mr De Botton trawls the lives and works of these classic authors and artists to try to explain first, why we are so often unhappy in our travels, and second, how we can become better travelers.

Despite such lofty goals, ponderous stuffiness is fended off--if only just--by a whimsical turn of phrase; Birds in Barbados "career through the air in matinal excitement" he says, going to to note the "democratic scruffiness [of] street furniture" in Amsterdam, and elsewhere he remarks that "man seems merely dust postponed" in the face of the bleak majesty of the Sinai.

Less successful is Mr De Botton's attempt to bolt his own travel experiences onto his exploration of universal themes. For example, he inserts an anecdote on his delight in the "neighborliness" of the u and i in the Dutch word "Uitgang" (Exit) into a description of Flaubert's travels in Egypt. In such cases, it seems a stretch to equate his experiences with the lives of the greats, or else he seems to be pushing too hard to make events fit whatever point he is trying to make.

The other limitation of Mr De Botton's work is his narrow definition of "travel". I started reading "The Art of Travel" after returning home from visiting relatives in Canada, and found it silent on the themes that mattered to me at the time, aspects of travel like "leaving loved ones behind". I finished it during a business trip to the Middle East, and again Mr De Botton had little to say to me. Mr De Botton's homilies on how to enjoy architecture or museums are nicely argued, but how about gastronomic travel? Shopping travel? "The Art of the Sightseeing Holiday" might have been a more accurate, though admittedly less catchy title.

Yet this is a book that rewards perseverance. I find myself returning again and again to Mr De Botton's themes, holding them up and examining them from each angle, trying to find what I believe. Strip away the ostentatious wordiness and awkward personal anecdotes, and you are left with some though-provoking insights, perhaps the greatest of which is that "vacations" and "travel" need not be the same.

Rather, in the words of Nietzsche, the key is to be the kind of person who "know how to manage their experiences ... who know how to make much of little". You might try starting with this little book.