My Goodreads Review of "Snowdrops"

Snowdrops by A.D. Miller
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD. Another of my pile of Booker short-list novels and the one, so far, that I have enjoyed least. To be fair this isn't really anything to do with the quality of the writing but more to do with the timing and the subject matter. I'm happy to believe that anything that made it to the short-list is an example of good writing but in this case transporting me to a freezing, grey Moscow was not what I needed right now. Russia is a country with a remarkable history and a wonderful cultural legacy but everything I read about it these days paints a picture of an irredeemably corrupt and greedy society dominated by organised crime. This would not in itself be a bad background to the tale but unfortunately the English protagonist also seems to have a rather dysfunctional moral compass, or at least one that he can choose to ignore when it suits. Not being able to identify with any character has always been a problem for me.

Since I clearly have problems with it, perhaps I should explain the three stars (which apparently equate to "I liked it"). Firstly, the writer has spent enough time in Moscow that he clearly has the authority to paint an accurate picture of the city and its way of life, and it feels completely authentic. Secondly I find that the people live on in my mind quite vividly which is a tribute to the author's characterisation. My final problem with it though was in the narrative voice. The central conceit is that the work is in the nature of a confessional as the narrator seeks absolution for his dirty Moscow past as he embarks on a new phase of his life three months before the "big day". Clearly the recipient lady should run, run fast and leave no forwarding address. Meanwhile our hero belongs back in the corpse-filled grimy slush of the purgatory that is apparently modern Moscow. What I would have liked though is that our narrator didn't keep signalling what was coming in advance, although it seems as though it was the author's deliberate choice, perhaps to make this 1st person narrative more realistic by not artificially withholding the knowledge of how the plot unfolds, even though the character was taken in (fairly willingly) himself. Thus we get forewarning that it is the last or next-to-last time we will meet a character etc. All-in-all a fascinating and well drawn picture of Moscow and modern Russian life but not really what I wanted to be reading in a chilly, grey February, and definitely not calculated to have me ringing Aeroflot to book my flight...

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