If you plan to visit Russia, read this.
We were going to read James Salter’s The Hunters on the plane but decided that a novel about a fighter pilot shooting down enemy planes during the Korean War might not be ideal in-flight entertainment. So we took Snowdrops by A.D. Miller, a melancholy tale about an Englishman in the Wild, Wild East who is befriended by two hot Russian women on the metro.
Before long they’ve enlisted him in a scheme involving an old woman they claim is their aunt, and he knows the deal isn’t kosher but he goes along with it because he’s in love and it’s Moscow during the black gold rush.
The writing swings between sharply evocative and undistinguished (Comparisons with Graham Greene are exaggerated), but A.D. Miller, former Moscow correspondent of The Economist, is a terrific guide to that city. He walks us through a place both terrifying and fascinating (or fascinating because terrifying), a place so cold that during the winter if you take off your thick gloves in the open to answer your phone it freezes to your palm, where women under 40 are required to dress like prostitutes, and you can’t tell the gangsters from the government because they are the same guys.
We learn of the informal taxi system (You stand on the street, flag passing cars and haggle over the price), the contract-killing market (Hire a bum to do the crime cheaply, then hire a pro to dispose of the bum for 10,000 USD), apartment swaps, and snowdrops—the corpses of murder victims and suicides that emerge when the snow thaws.
Makes us want to go to Russia even more.
Snow Drops is available at National Bookstores. Paperback, Php 399.