A Gentleman in Moscow

A book review of a Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

This is a clever, witty, moving and interesting story that follows the fortunes of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov from 1922 to 1954. Amor has created in Alexander a witty, poetic, erudite and, at times, sharply sarcastic character who brims with style and sophistication.

Our tale starts with the appearance of our hero at an emergency committee of the people’s commissariat for internal affairs in Moscow. A trial. The committee rules against him—he ‘has succumbed irrevocably to the corruptions of his class’—and would like nothing more than to place the Count’s back against a wall and shoot him. However, he still has friends in the senior ranks of the party who value his contribution to the pre-revolutionary cause and he is spared.

His sentence, though, is that he is to reside permanently within his current residence at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. If he leaves, he will be shot. The Count feels that it could be worse, he does live in the best suite in the hotel, a residence plusher and larger than most people’s houses. However, that is not their plan. Their plan is that he resides permanently in the smallest room in the attic, where the servants were once housed.

You may be thinking that a book about a man stranded in a hotel for over 30 years can’t make for a very interesting and exciting read. However, Amor has created an imaginative and remarkable narrative that shows how rich a life can be, even within the confines of one building. Helped, of course, by the fact that the story does flow through some tumultuous periods in world and Russian history; the end of one world war, the building of a communist state, another world war and, finally, the cold war.

It is the relationships that rise and fall, the joys and the sorrows of those relationships, and the sheer vibrancy that Amor brings to these characters that makes this book shine. And that shows to me, very clearly, that the power of gripping, unputdownable fiction, regardless of how much ‘action’ the book may contain resides in the reader’s engagement with those characters. How are they feeling? Who are their loves? What do they fear? What do they want? What do you, the reader, want them to want?

This is Amor’s second published work. His first, Rules of Civility, is based in 1930’s New York. And from reading the Amazon reviews it sounds a little like ‘A Lady in New York’, rather than A Gentleman in Moscow. I’m glad that I read this first and, what with there being so many other books to read, and so little time, I shall probably move on.

Note that it is a long book, 450 pages, and I would argue a 100 pages too long. But I’m being churlish and extremely picky. Simply because there is so little else to fault.