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Arkady Renko long ago achieved the status of an iconic sleuth, his cynicism, melancholy and passion for the truth having earned him and his creator, Martin Cruz Smith, a large, loyal following. Cruz could be phoning it in by now and we'd still read his books because our attachment to his damaged hero is ferocious. But Cruz has never been content to write the same book over and over, and in WOLVES EAT DOGS he manages to surpass any of his previous work. The story opens when Renko is called to the scene of an apparent suicide. Pasha Ivanov, the wealthy director of NoviRus, a Moscow-based conglomerate, has jumped ten stories to his death. Renko's boss wants him to certify the suicide and move on, but a few details bother the relentless detective. For starters, the man had a shaker filled with salt in his pocket when he died and there is a mound of 50 kilos of the stuff in his closet. Arkady starts to look around, and in the process he irritates powerful people. Then Ivanov's business partner Lev Temofeyev is found in a cemetery near Chernobyl with his throat slit and his face gnawed by wolves, and Renko's annoyed boss dispatches him to The Zone of Exclusion to investigate further. Here in Chernobyl, in the shadow of Reactor 4, the book really takes off. The sealed, evacuated area around the reactor is a radioactive, surreal wasteland, a natural world in the process of mutating new life forms, just as Russia itself is in the process of mutating into its own corrosive version of a capitalist society. Images of stunted red trees, poisoned black earth, scuttled ships, abandoned farms and pervasive decay haunt the narrative in a kind of post-apocalyptic nightmare. The clicking of dosimeters measuring lethal exposure and the howling of the wolves, the only creatures that seem to thrive in the brutal world, provide an eerie soundtrack to Renko's investigations. The success of this book is that these images burn themselves into our marrow the way radiation leaks into the bones and tissues of the millions of the people who were and continue to be victims of the largest nuclear accident in human history. The most interesting people who populate this devastated area are the scientists studying the effects of radiation on the natural world, who smoke and drink and eat local mushrooms, reckless in the face of the dangers they document. There are humanitarian workers offering help to those locals, mostly old people, who refuse to leave their homes even though their risk of cancer has increased 65 times and their only medical care is offered at a folding table set up in the street. These Russian peasants continue to plant and harvest, heedless of the risk, like characters out of Tolstoy. Scavengers, like the wolves, manage to flourish by bringing the radioactive loot they plunder from abandoned buildings back to Moscow for sale with the co-operation of the corrupt militia. Arkady's investigation takes him into the lives of members of each of these groups, but in a land this lawless the investigation itself becomes almost beside the point. Renko's getting along in years, and maybe the vulnerability that comes with advancing age makes him more open to relationships, or maybe it's the brutal landscape he confronts in Chernobyl that softens him. At any rate WOLVES EAT DOGS brings us into Renko's heart in a new way. He falls in love with a woman and finds himself the accidental, but devoted, surrogate father of a young boy. When the pieces finally fall into place, the puzzle is satisfactorily solved, but it is the images of Chernobyl that linger long after the book is closed. The sense of dread at the inevitability of more nuclear catastrophe are not easy to escape. I don't know whether or not Smith intended WOLVES EAT DOGS to be a commentary on the dangers of nuclear power, but intentional or not, he got my attention. WOLVES EAT DOGS is a riveting mystery, but its landscape is unforgettable.
Reviewed by Carroll Johnson, May 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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