Snowdrops by A.D.Miller
Snowdrops
A. D. Miller
Atlantic Books, Paperback; 273Pages
ISBN: 978 1 84887 453 4
Price: £7.99
Janette Currie
Snowdrops: the badness that is already there, always there and very close, but which you somehow manage not to see. The sins the winter hides, sometimes for ever.
The conceit is this: Nick Platt, a lawyer on the wrong side of thirty is ‘three months away from “the big day” ’ and suddenly compelled to tell his fiancé about past indiscretions, about his time in Moscow and ‘how it ended’. Snowdrops is a pre-wedding bouquet of hitherto unspoken truths.
By the time Nick rescues the enigmatic Masha and her sister Katya from a would-be bag-thief on the Metro, he has been ‘lawyering’ in Moscow for four years and is in the final stages of a five-hundred-million-dollar property deal and involved with a ‘spook’ called the ‘Cossack’. The girls introduce Nick to their aunt, Tatiana, who lives in a sought-after city-centre apartment. They want to help her move to a contemporary flat in the suburbs, one ‘with a dishwasher’. Daily, Nick’s neighbour shares concerns for an absent friend: ‘someone has moved into his apartment’, he complains. Resolutely blinkered to the corruption around him, Nick ‘somehow manage(s) not to see’ what is going on and Miller’s finely controlled, restrained seepage of the three interconnected strands propels the book through disco-pumping night-clubs and drunkenness towards its inevitable ending.
Rightly lauded for providing an authentic, insider’s view of modern Russia, Miller is excellent at using the landscape to evoke mood and underscore his theme.
From above you could see the chaos of entangled plots on the other side of the road, and a couple of tough tethered goats, and the glint of a frozen pond somewhere in the trees. Above them the sun was shining vaguely through the milky November sky, old but strong. In April – between the thaw and the jungly green explosion of summer – or in raw mid-October, I bet the same view would have been barren and depressing. But when we stood there all the bits of old tractors and discarded refrigerators, the shoals of empty vodka bottles and dead animals that tend to litter the Russian countryside were invisible, smothered by the annual oblivion of the snow. The snow let you forget the scars and blemishes, like temporary amnesia for a bad conscience.
It’s hard to decide, though, how to read Nick. At face value he’s complicit in everything he does. Are we supposed to disbelieve him? Structured as a confessional, Nick, or, obviously, Old Nick, is more Robert Wringhim than St. Augustine. However, the moral degradation detailed in his overt, self-justifying narrative lacks the complexity of a novel like The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner where the more the narrator admits he knows the more the reader understands his self-delusion.
The main flaw is the lack of ambiguity in the first-person narration, such as when he admits that he felt, ‘every time I took the Metro, as if I was an extra in some paranoid Donald Sutherland film from the seventies’ and writes that he first imagined Masha as ‘the honey trap in a Cold War thriller’: statements which turn out to be true. His narrative, then, reinforces his perception so that we can only watch as he descends to a personal hell of his own making.
Nevertheless, Snowdrops is a strong debut novel from an established journalist and historian. In moments when Nick lifts his eyes to the wider picture we see that Russia isn’t so foreign after all. As the Cossack tells him, we are all the same: ‘ “Strong and weak, power and no power, money money money. It isn’t because of Russia. This is life. My life, Nicholas, and your life also.” ’ With ambitious scope, contemporary themes and plotting tighter than the densely packed snow-drifts piled along Moscow’s streets, it’s easy to understand why Snowdrops is shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker.
