Nicholas is a British lawyer working in Russia. It’s sometime around the start of the last decade. Putin is in the full pomp of his first presidential term and it’s the golden age of the Wild East (the days of ‘tits and Kalashnikovs’ as Nicholas puts it). After meeting two young Russian women on the Metro by chance (or is it?) Nicholas finds himself falling in love with one of them. He is introduced to their ‘aunt’, a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and a living symbol of Russia’s Soviet past (with all its ambiguities). Nicholas is happy, but deep down knows that all is not as it seems… ‘Snowdrops’, by the way, are corpses which emerge, in the spring, from the snow that concealed them through the winter. It’s in the spring that Nicholas finds a lot of secrets coming out, including his own complicity in things he’d kept secret from himself.
Please don’t worry that I’ve given away too much, because Miller makes it clear from the very beginning that the story will end darkly. Nicholas narrates his own tale, which is written after he has returned to live in London and is addressed to his fiancé (whom we never meet and of whom we learn nothing). His narrative is peppered with hints of horrible things to come, even during the most pleasant incidents. ‘When I think back now’ he says, about an erotic adventure in a sauna, ‘writing this, about my lost years in Moscow, despite everything that happened and everything I did, I still look back on that night as my happiest time’.
Miller takes a big gamble with these heavy hints. They work well as a way of creating an underlying anxiety that, I imagine, must be a permanent feature of life among Moscow’s gilded mobsters. The danger with this device is that it puts the readers on our guard from the outset. We’re always wary and never have a chance to fall in love, as Nicholas does, with his mistress and with Moscow. He repeatedly describes how he fell for Masha, but to us she’s obviously pulling some kind of trick because Nicholas himself keeps on hinting as much. There’s therefore no sense of betrayal, no disillusionment for us. Nicholas just looks a bit daft when the truth, inevitably, comes out.
Miller has surrendered one of the satirist’s greatest weapons: the ability to make his reader complicit in the folly he ridicules. In Snowdrops, the retrospective narrative conceit means that we always share the perspective of the older, wiser, Nicholas. This limits the scope of the journey Miller can take us on. We’re told how exciting and seductive Moscow and Masha were, but we never feel it because we’re always suspicious. We don’t tread the same path Nicholas did because we know from the start where everything’s going to end up. Miller has traded emotional movement for an objective perspective in which everything can be seen in its true light.
This decision may owe something to Miller’s time as The Economist’s Moscow correspondent. Maybe that’s why he chooses to give us what is in effect a sort of brief on Russian life and society at a given moment in its history, exemplified by a single representative story. Miller’s journalistic experience is also evident in his style, full of short punchy sentences. Is Nicholas’ cynical, hard-bitten, journalist friend in Moscow a self-portrait? He’s certainly a bit of a cliché.
Snowdrops will, however, keep you intrigued to the end to find out just what it is that Nicholas has found himself caught up in. And, to be fair to Miller, the exact details of the denouement are capable of shocking. Even the casual manner in which everything is tied up is an eloquent comment on the state of Russia circa 2001. For those of us denied that chance to be there, it’s fascinating to get a glimpse of what was, for a while, capitalism’s contested borderland.
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