Seeing the Undertow
From Snowdrops, by A.D. Miller:
We went up in a mirror-walled lift to the third or fourth floor, to a room with an imposing conference table and windows overlooking the river. It was late afternoon and gloomy, but you could see how down below the ice on the river was buckling and cracking, great plates of it rubbing and jostling each other as the water shrugged it off, a vast snake sloughing off its skin. Down along the embankment the yellow and grey buildings disappeared into the dirty sky, the lights of the upper windows flashing out of the murk like low-flying UFOs.
The comparisons that A.D. Miller offers throughout Snowdrops make his fictional-but-realistic look into Russia a special one.
Often, he blends his characters into their world by placing them against the backdrop of a frozen, corrupt cityscape. Then he folds his cityscape further into itself by revealing the layers it has absorbed or those it will consume. This section above is part of the latter type.
In order to understand it further, imagine a thirties British-born man, detached largely from friends and family, soaking now in Russian culture as a lawyer for mob types, living for the moment, drinking too much, loose in his life with no plan other than chasing a woman he just met who could be “the one.”
He’s the narrator riding this “mirror-walled” elevator describing the scene of decaying Russia, and at this point in the novel, Miller is beginning to show the collapse of it all.
The narrator, Nick, sees himself here from all angles. He rises then to a point where he can see the city in kind.
In a similar way, you begin to see Nick from more angles. And you begin to see how he, this flawed figure out of his element, has started buckling and cracking in an environment that’s doing the same and always has.
Miller doesn’t shy from mentions that this Russia is not one to be trusted. In the previous hundreds of pages:
He has the narrator’s coworker ask if “the one” has taken him for all he’s worth yet.
He places Nick into night clubs, offices, meetings, taxis, and public streets where he and others must pay bribes in order to play, work, ride, live….
He lets the decay of plant and animal and man freeze under an unrelenting winter.
Miller, after all that, brings you here. He brings Nick here, overlooking the river and the buildings, each collapsing in their own ways. The serpent never stands for good things as a symbol, and in keeping with that role in the form of the river, it has taken these giant sheets of ice and thrown them against itself and the walls of the ground. It has forced away a constant — frozen matter — that the release of could have been viewed as a sign of warmer, brighter days to come if it weren’t for the torrent of movement underneath and for the man-made structures that surround it. The “yellow and grey buildings,” even to experience a warming, would never escape the dirty air. The fact that Nick sees their lights through the haze is an alien occurrence.
The undercurrent and its drab sidelines are the real constants of this place.
Miller fills this passage, and many of his others, with a movement that forces you along with the flow. You will be tied to Nick in the predicament that is his life, and the culture of all that is Russia will rush you, unrelenting, into territory no person is prepared to handle.