This was published in 2016, and it's Amor Towles's "wildly successful" second novel.

And it's true: Everyone raves about it. It was on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than 40 weeks. Review sites I trust recommend it (eg, World Literature Today; Strong Sense of Place; Kirkus...).

And yet I did not love it... I had every opportunity to love it. I listened to the audio-version, which was very nicely read by Nicholas Guy Smith. Life has settled down a little here, so the listening experience was fairly uninterrupted. (True, while I was listening, I didn't actually clock that all the book's chapters begin with the letter A. But as Towles himself doesn't actually know why, I don't think I missed much there.)



I also liked the premise. It's 1922, and we open with the sentencing of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel, where he has been living for the last few years. He's an aristocrat (which is obviously against him), and he voluntarily returned to Russia (to fight on whose side they're not quite sure...). But he is credited with penning a stirring pre-revolutionary call to arms, and that's what saves him. If he stays inside the hotel, he's safe. If he leaves, he'll be shot. And lest his situation be deemed too comfortable, he's moved to a little room right under the roof.

A small but cosmopolitan world is always an interesting starting-point for a novel. And it fits right into my new reading theme ("hotels"). Actually, I'd been doing hotels well before I declared it a theme (Hotel Shanghai; The Haunted Hotel; The Children; The Comedians; Hotel World; The Custom of the Country...). But now it's A Theme...

So, Towles gives us an interesting, closed-circle environment (based on a real hotel), and he sustains our interest over several decades of the Count's life (the novel closes in 1954).

Again, I didn't notice this while I was listening, but the novel adopts what Towles calls an "accordion structure", whereby the time between the chapters doubles (one day after the arrest, two days, five days, etc, until we're moving ahead by four years, eight years, and sixteen years) -- right up until the midpoint, where we reverse that sequence, and the narrative jumps forward in gaps of eight years, four years, right down to two days, one day, until -- But I won't give away the ending, except to say I found it surprising.


The Metropol's Art Nouveau facade


The location of the Metropol

Towles also offers us a delightful protagonist. Debonair, cultivated, kind-hearted, humorous, and resourceful, Count Rostov would be good company anywhere.

And our hero's philosophy, inherited from the grandfather who brought him up after the death of his parents, is one to salute. If you don't master your circumstances, they will master you. True, that... So the Count uses his wiles and intelligence and natural talents to do what he can to make his confined life more interesting.

Admittedly, there's a point at which he decides that ending it all is the best way to show who's master. But fortunately, he's interrupted in that endeavour, and lives on to do great things.

So, he can't go anywhere, but plenty of people come to him. Inter alia:

-- Nina Kulikova (the motherless daughter of a Ukrainian bureaucrat), whom he first meets when she's nine;
-- Misha, the Count's friend, who is unwise enough to talk back to the censorship machine, and finds himself in a Siberian labour camp;
-- Anna Urbanova, a movie star, and the Count's love interest;
-- Osip Glebnikov, a State Security officer who spends time with the Count because he wants to learn the ways of the (Western) world;
-- Richard Vanderwhile, an American aide-de-camp, who stays at the hotel in the mid-1940s (and proves very useful later).

Most enduringly, we have Sofia, the five-year-old daughter whom Nina leaves in the Count's care in 1938, when she goes in search of her husband after he has been arrested and banished to Siberia. Nina never returns, so Sofia becomes Rostov's ward, and we follow her progress until the end of the book.

There's lots of beautiful description, whether of music, food, or wine. There's lots of gentle humour.

And though this is not supposed to be a political novel, we're given enough detail on the changing face of Russia to know that bureaucracy, censorship, oppression, and famine have dimmed the initial noble impulses of the revolution. Sneaked (courtesy of Nina's passkey) into the Bolshevik Assemblies that take place at the hotel, the Count is perplexed by the "committees, caucuses, colloquiums, congresses, and conventions variously coming together to establish codes, set courses of action, levy complaints, and generally clamor about the world’s oldest problems in its newest nomenclature". Nina, on the other hand, was "enthralled by the Assembly’s energy and its sense of purpose". A microcosm of a much bigger divide...


Lenin speaking on Theatre Square, 1920. The Hotel Metropol can be seen towards the back of the image on the right

The hotel itself has a political subtext. When the Bolsheviks made Moscow the capital again, there was no money for governmental infrastructure. So they seized the Metropol, and used it to house various state departments. A little later, however, they started to realize that Western visitors needed to be housed somewhere prestigious if they were to come away with the right impression of the new Russia. So out go the pen-pushers, and in come uniformed bellhops, silver-service waiters, and performers of American jazz: "With its fine food, lavish entertainment, and liberal behavior, the hotel became something of an Oz in the popular imagination -- a Technicolor paradise hidden in the midst of a black and white metropolis."

The latter part of the book draws comparisons with Casablanca, another oasis in the midst of turmoil. As Towles explains, "Rick’s Cafe, run by Humphrey Bogart, [is] where everybody gathers. And for a moment, despite the fact that the second World War is unfolding around them and they’re in terrible distress as individuals, people would go there, listen to music, have a drink and something to eat, have a gamble and a romance."

And as the narrative proceeds, a suspense element is introduced. Clearly the Count is up to something, but we don't know quite what until very close to the end. Or maybe you guessed. I didn't.


I'm definitely not averse to staying at historic hotels (although, of course, it's always nice to have the option of leaving). This one is the Hotel Majapahit, Surabaya, Indonesia, where we've stayed three times, always enjoyably

***

So, there's much that's positive. Why was I not enthused in the way so many other readers were?

It's hard to put my finger on it. The best I can do is to say that it didn't sound real... For me, it was the historical equivalent of cosy crime.

True, there's the nasty hotel person who keeps files on everyone in true Soviet fashion, but otherwise, everyone's just awfully nice. The little coterie that the Count forms with the hotel concierge, chef, maitre d', and seamstress is like something out of A.A. Milne. They're all good people, helping each other to make the best of their various tough situations.

And nothing wrong with that, you might say. But it just didn't feel Russian... OK, I'm not expecting everyone to be Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky (I'm currently forging a bewildered passage through The Brothers Karamazov, in the company of Henry Eliot's book group). Clearly, novels don't have to be up there with them to count. But somehow A Gentleman in Moscow just felt too simple...



When I'm swimming against the tide like this, I always wonder if I've missed something... So it was a bit of a relief to hear my misgivings echoed here by Korby Lenker. He agrees that it's a charming book. And Rostov is a delightful character, "a man of the world, almost always composed, deferential, exquisitely polite, and fundamentally warmhearted, even toward his detractors". But as Lenker says, there's something less than three-dimensional about all the players: "Traditional Russian novels are great because they dare to look where lesser minds don't. The Russian writer pokes its characters until they do something stupid or ugly and then forgives them. It's that probing for the depths of human weakness which causes such a strong identification between the reader and, say, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov. The very American author who wrote A Gentleman in Moscow is content to keep the uglier side of human nature out of sight. The action always occurs in a flattering light, the dialogue is never not witty, but like any clever repartee, the language masks as much as it reveals."

I wonder what the origin of our experience is... It's clearly not that A Gentleman in Moscow is badly written. It isn't. It flows very easily and cleverly and enjoyably. So is it a reflection of Towles's approach?

The author loves the literature of "Russia's golden age" and the cultural flowerings of the early 20th century, and is fascinated by what he terms "the country's idiosyncratic psychology". But he admits he is "hardly a Russologist"; he doesn't speak the language; he has visited Russia only a few times.

And his way of proceeding is -- for me -- curious: "Rather than pursuing research driven projects, I like to write from areas of existing fascination. Even as young man, I was a fan of the 1920s and 1930s, eagerly reading the novels, watching the movies, and listening to the music of the era... I chose to write A Gentleman in Moscow because of my longstanding fascination with Russian literature, culture, and history. Most of the texture of the novel springs from the marriage of my imagination with that interest... Once I had finished the first draft, I did some applied research in order to fine tune details."

Which takes you so far -- but surely ONLY so far....



As always, I also have certain qualms about the mingling of fact and fiction. Towles, for example, describes an episode where an ambitious hotel worker (spurred on by animosity towards the wine-loving Rostov) decides that, in the interests of equality, all the labels should be removed from the wine bottles in the hotel's cellar, and the same price be applied to all... From now on, the only distinction will be white wine or red wine.

Asked about this scenario, Towles comments: "I’m not a research-driven writer, so I don’t really do much research in my work but I’m usually drawing on knowledge that I have. The scene in A Gentleman in Moscow with the wine is a good example. The Hotel Metropol is a real hotel and had a real wine cellar and a very famous restaurant that did high cuisine, serving both the famous and the leaders of the party throughout the Soviet era... The wine labels being removed was an invention. However, it’s true that many of the leaders of the Soviet party lived in great apartments and mansions and had a vast array of antiques seized from the nobility. To square this with their communist conscience, all these items were declared to 'belong to the people' and were labelled with a brass plaque and serial number that tallied with a large book. So, they would have all these fancy things but declare 'I own nothing'."

Yeah, but surely that's not quite the same...

And, now that the book has been serialized, this labels malarkey is busily solidifying itself into history. "The series," says reviewer Daphne Posadas, "offers more than just great entertainment -- it’s a historical representation of Russia’s transformation from the Russian Empire to the USSR... The Bolsheviks aimed to rebuild Russia from the ground up, erasing any trace of the Tsarist regime. One particularly absurd moment highlights this... The regime ordered that all wine labels be removed so that bottles could no longer be distinguished beyond 'red' or 'white.' Enjoying fine wine became a state crime." Aaaaagh...

***

So there we have it. An enjoyable book, but not a great one. Feel free, however, to disagree, and believe all the others who have really loved it.

What will stay with me, though, is the Count's resolute determination to master those circumstances... That's evergreen advice.