Things go better with vodka

Chris Petit enjoys Boris Starling's Vodka, a tale of monsters and metaphors set in Moscow
Vodka by Boris Starling
Buy Vodka at Public domain

by Boris Starling
503pp, HarperCollins, £12

As late as 1987, Soviet language primers presented English conversation as an arcane form of repetition few English people would recognise, mainly about weather and approximating some lost version of the language. Correspondingly, one wonders what Russians make of foreign novels portraying them as a nation of beetle-browed, soulful drunks whose hearts are exiled to some gulag of the soul. Vodka is no exception, being awash with the stuff. In Starling's book, Russian vodka is no ordinary drink. It is a philosophy, a metaphor and a stable currency, with teachers receiving their salaries in vodka, having rejected funeral accessories and lavatory paper.

Set in Moscow after the fall of communism, Vodka revolves around the privatisation of Red October, Russia's most famous distillery, selected by the government for its symbolic importance. Central to the process is a reverse Ninotchka tale, involving the seduction by all things Russian of Alice Liddell, female American banker, brought in to oversee the transfer. Her adversary and lover is the charismatic gangster leader of the distillery, a romantic Robin Hood, whose body of tattoos marks his elevated status in the criminal hierarchy. Starling's Moscow is a city of obvious contradictions in which gangsters are honourable while the real gangsters are the state criminals, the politicians and the bureaucrats. The action mirrors a local version of Monopoly where the object is to acquire as much money as possible through legal and illegal means and in the process to bankrupt your opponents and seize the entire board.

What could have been a light winter tale of sentimental education is darkened by political chaos. With the system in collapse, anarchy prevails. Mafia gangs compete for control and the troubled colonial ghosts of Afghanistan and Chechnya haunt. Ritual brutality peppers the pages (a severed head chucked like a football from a passing car), culminating with a series of child murders, which introduces an Estonian policeman and a tour of the city's collapsing sewer system (shades of The Third Man ).

Starling's preferred method of plotting is referenced rather than original, its shorthand reminiscent of a graphic novel. The beauty-and-beast romance is more interesting for Alice's growing addiction to vodka, driven less by character than the power of the central metaphor. Suspense is cumulative, with the narrative a kaleidoscope patterned by Starling's love affair with all things Russian and Moscow in particular. Enthusiasm and a quick eye achieve a Dickensian combination of sentiment and cruelty, with broad-stroke portraits of Russians conditioned by sadness, scepticism and irony while at a deeper level "horror, tragedy and drunkenness spiralled through their genes".

The detailed infrastructure - what makes a bust city work - is the real area of interest, involving an interchangeable relationship between the mafia and the party. Starling also exposes its subterranean economy, a three-tiered system involving underground businesses, unrecorded, unreported and cash only; plus a virtual economy of Soviet-era manufacturing, which shelters from market pressures by existing through barter, credit notes and subsidiaries; and finally the offshore sites where the serious money goes.

This secondary detail is what sticks in the mind. Starling notes a running battle between the sewage department and the highway authorities about excessive road grit dropping into sewers. Bullying is regarded as an alien concept in Russia because everything gets done by bullying. Canned sprats in tomato sauce are nicknamed "unmarked graves". English boarding-school headmasters are on the stump to drum up pupils and rich Russians are happy to subscribe, boarding schools being cheaper than bodyguards. In Soviet times televised vacuum-cleaner races were broadcast on International Women's Day. Channel One showing Swan Lake is always a bad omen, Tchaikovsky being the nation's harbinger of wars and coups d'état.

Vodka's ending is neat and self-consuming, descending into vampirism and alcoholic collapse, revealing the book's ambition. As the monster is seen to devour its tail, the reader realises that what is presented has been a horror story all along, with Moscow both victim and vampire. Every Russian crime is cannibalistic to some extent, notes the investigating officer gloomily, and no people feed off each other more. Monstrousness is the result, "a tale of vampires created by the old system and nurtured by the new, products of the insane society in which they lived". Where the west knew how to breed serial killers and had learned how to catch them, Moscow detectives had not. Sometimes the cannibalism investigated is actual: two drunks, after graduating to brake fluid and windscreen cleaner, had cooked up a third drunk and fed him to his brother, saying he was dog. As someone remarks earlier, there's no such thing as Russian cuisine, just things that to go well with vodka.

Chris Petit's thriller The Human Pool is published by Scribner.