I heard about Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow from a visiting American whose book group had just read it. “You will love it!” she said.
As I was about to set off on a solo drive up the coast, I thought I would experiment with listening to A Gentleman in Moscow as an audiobook. I was new to Audible but I searched for author and book, bought it on my free monthly credit, connected up my phone to CarPlay and off I drove up the M1.
Rather than the book itself, the recording turned out to be an interview of less than an hour with Amor Towles. He is an American author with whom I was unfamiliar. I confess to reading mainly women authors and Australian ones at that. After listening to the author’s reading of an exquisite early scene in the book in which Count Rostov instructs Nina on the manners of a princess, I was hooked. I purchased the book.
Reading the novel over several weeks to make it last, I found myself thinking about the incidents and conversations in Moscow’s Metropole Hotel, savouring their details and the polite restraint shown by the key figure in the story, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. Confined under house arrest in the Metropole Hotel during the Russian Revolution because of his aristocratic background and spared from execution by some friends in the Politburo, Count Rostov takes the advice of his father and decides to master his circumstances rather than have them master him. He observes visitors to the hotel, strikes up a friendship with Nina, a girl confined to the hotel because of her parents who are always otherwise engaged, and enjoys a liaison with a visiting actress. At all times he employs exquisite manners and a wisdom born of much life experience.
What seems like a series of diverting incidents and encounters build skilfully to an ending which incorporates them all. It is masterful and a lesson in plot and structure. The ending was so satisfying on a number of levels I found myself thinking about it for days afterwards. His observations of life, his remembered pleasures of such things as arriving late for the opera, his humour in the face of adversity such as the removal of all labels from the hotel’s wine cellar in the interests of equality are all delivered with a lightness of touch which endears Count Rostov to the reader.
A friend lent me Towles’s earlier novel, Rules of Civility, another exploration of manners but this time of New York City in its heyday in the years prior to World War 2. I read it on the plane on my way to visit family living in New York. This book was just as pleasurable to read as A Gentleman in Moscow. In what is essentially a love story, the sassy protagonist, Katey Kontent, hassles her way to success in The Big Apple with all its glamour and sleaze. She witnesses the changes in a great city and its people. It is a story told largely in dialogue which is smart and funny.
Like A Gentleman in Moscow, Rules of Civility explores manners, this time the manners documented by George Washington in a little-known book of the same name bought and followed by the man who is the love interest in the story. It is a delight of a book, fast-paced and dry as a martini. Read it.
Read them both and revel in Amor Towles’ delight in manners and their effect on other people. A bonus of Rules of Civility is an appendix listing George Washington’s 110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation.
Title: A Gentleman in Moscow
Author: Amor Towles
Published: Penguin Random House, UK, 2016
Pages: 462
Title: Rules of Civility
Author: Amor Towles
Published: Sceptre, 2012
Pages: 324