Snowdrops
A.D. Miller
Doubleday, 2011
U.S. hardcover, first U.S. edition
ISBN 978-0-385-53344-7
272 pages; $24.95

A.D. Miller’s first novel, Snowdrops, has been shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, one of the British Commonwealth’s most prestigious writing awards. It’s a fine novel, telling a story that hasn’t been told elsewhere: what Moscow looked like, felt like, how it did business and how it was criminal in the days just after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The first person narrator, Nick Platt, is a British lawyer who has lived in Moscow for four years at the time the story starts. The book is his explanation to his fiancée about his time in Russia:

You’re always saying that I never talk about my time in Moscow or about why I left. You’re right, I’ve always made excuses, and soon you’ll understand why. But you’ve gone on asking me, and for some reason lately I keep thinking about it – I can’t stop myself. Perhaps it’s because we’re only three months away from “the big day,” and that somehow seems a sort of reckoning. I feel like I need to tell someone about Russia, even if it hurts. Also that probably you should know, since we’re going to make these promises to each other, and maybe even keep them. I think you have a right to know all of it. I thought it would be easier if I wrote it down. You won’t have to make an effort to put a brave face on things, and I won’t have to watch you.

Combined with the appearance of a corpse as the book opens – a “snowdrop,” a body hidden by the snow that becomes obvious only in the spring thaw – this is perfect foreshadowing for what follows. The reader cannot read a single page without a sense of foreboding, wondering what happened and when, who the corpse is, what Nick did (is he a murderer?), until one is in the middle of a brutally cold Moscow winter with Nick, almost helplessly acting as an accomplice to a crime or two. Nick is not a nice man, it seems, but neither is he evil; he is simply weak.

The source of his weakness is Maria Kovalenko – Masha, as she is called by her friends. In a chance meeting in the subway, Nick rescues Masha and her sister, Katya, from a purse snatcher. Nick is immediately attracted to Masha, even though their meeting is brief. He begins wondering whether she is “the one” from his first sight of her. Why? That he can’t seem to explain, though he admires her irony, he says: “She had an air that suggested she already knew how it would end, and almost wanted me to know that too.” The fact that she is beautiful certainly helps.

Masha and Katya introduce Nick to their aunt, Tatiana Vladimirovna, an old widow who is a relic of the Soviet system down to her bowl-cut hair – and especially to her lovely apartment, given to her for services to the Fatherland. Tatiana is soon to retire, and is considering moving to a smaller apartment in the country. Masha and Katya ask Nick to help Tatiana with the papers necessary to the apartment swap; and that’s where things start to get ugly.

There is a subplot involving a Cossack who seeks financing from Nick’s banking and investment clients. Just as we can tell from the beginning that Nick’s romance with Masha is doomed, we can see from the outset that the Cossack is basically a crime lord. Does Nick see this from the beginning, or is this so obvious only in retrospect? Does Nick really care? He refers to those days in Russia as a “gold rush,” a time when Russia was wide open to both capitalism and crime and the two were indistinguishable. Everything is about money. Indeed, an acquaintance of Nick’s, a reporter who fell in love with Russia and has never left, says to him, “In Russia, there are no business stories. And there are no politics stories. There are no love stories. There are only crime stories.”

The frigid Moscow winter, as Miller describes it, is an analogy to the frigid principal characters in Snowdrops. This is a dark and depressing novel, a snapshot of a time and place so foreign that it is almost past understanding. The hapless Nick is in love not only with Masha, but with the energy of this new, lawless Russia. Nick can only partake of this energy passively, sadly; he has lost who he is with the melting snow. Nick is himself a “snowdrop.”

One doesn’t exactly enjoy Snowdrops; it is too dark for that. It combines the Russian bleakness of Anton Chekhov with the English bleakness of Thomas Hardy. But one must admire Miller’s writing. The sights and especially the smells; the bite of the cold and the heat of the sauna; the food and the sex are all described sparingly, yet vividly. The plotting is strong, with the story opening up to meet the foreshadowing with precision. It is more assured than one expects a writer’s first novel to be.