An average Joe drowns in a city of fallen angels

MUMBAI: She was wearing tight, tight jeans tucked into knee-high brown leather boots, and a white blouse with one more button undone than there needed to be.” Dripping with seductive anticipation though this close-up is, slinky lines alone wouldn’t have put a gripping tale of greed and lust on the Man Booker Prize 2011 shortlist. But Snowdrops is also a psychological profile of a man’s moral retreat through the post-Communist alleys of midnoughties Moscow.On Friday, its author, Andrew Miller, The Economist’s correspondent in the Russian capital from 2004 to 2007, was at the TOI Literary Carnival to read from the book.
As an expat lawyer living in Moscow during the Russian oil boom, Nick Platt cloaks shady business deals in legal raiment. But the roubles are rolling in and Nick doesn’t mind, given the blondes, bottles and brothels of perhaps the world’s most sinful city. Then he meets Masha—the girl in the tight, tight jeans, a girl with “long tawny hair” —on the Metro, while warding off a mugger from her. And as he sinks in her quicksand femme-fatale charm, he falls away from himself.
“I guess you could tell a similar story, albeit with different details, that was set in London—or Mumbai ,” says Miller after his reading session. “Outsiders find Moscow and Mumbai compelling. Both are cities with money, ruthlessness and poverty. If there is weak rule of law, if the police and the courts are corrupt , it becomes possible to get away with things… unless the conscience becomes a much more important constraint on human behaviour.”
Miller says the basic theme of his novel is moral degradation: “How an ordinary person—not a hero, not a villain, at least to begin with—comes to behave in an unexpected , deeply reprehensible way.”
But what is it that makes “a 30-something man, at once vulnerable and depraved” surrender himself completely to corruption? Environment ? A sense of unfettered freedom in another time and place? “Part of the explanation is the circumstances the narrator finds himself in Moscow , where, like a lot of expats, he behaves as if he is living in a kind of theme park; as if his actions don’t really have consequences,” Miller says. “But mostly it is his own moral weakness and self-deceptions : he tells himself an old lie, which has been told by lots of people to themselves in lots of places; namely that, while something bad seems to be happening, he is merely doing the paperwork, and that final responsibility lies elsewhere.”
How does the book’s title relate to the theme? A snowdrop, we know, is a beautiful flower. But in Moscow slang, it is “a corpse that lies buried or hidden in the winter snows, emerging only in the thaw” .