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Independence Square by AD Miller review – thriller in post-Soviet Ukraine

<span>Photograph: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images

Ukrainian independence was a scenario that no one envisaged – until it became a reality. Over the subsequent decades, hopes for Ukraine’s transition to democracy have waxed and waned. What never seems to have crossed anyone’s mind is that the pathogens of its post-Soviet political system – dead-eyed cynicism, bad faith, the distorting power of big and unaccountable fortunes –would start to infect Europe and beyond.

“My country is like a small character from the beginning of the movie,” says Olesya, a Ukrainian political activist in AD Miller’s new novel. “You forget him, he is mixed up with the others, but he comes back for the end. He knows something, he is a clue, and in the end you see that he mattered after all.” Just how much Ukraine matters internationally is only now becoming clear to most of us, with goings-on in Kiev taking centre stage at the impeachment hearings of the US’s 45th president. Miller has shown eerie prescience before, in his Booker-shortlisted Snowdrops, an insightful thriller about post-Soviet Russia, but even he must be astonished at this turn of events.

The hero of Independence Square is Simon Davey, an idealistic British diplomat. When we meet him, it’s 2004, and he’s the deputy head of mission at the British embassy in Kiev. Protesters have filled Independence Square, denouncing the result of the country’s presidential elections. Readers who paid attention to Ukrainian politics at the time will remember this as the one where the opposition candidate was poisoned with dioxin in the run-up to the vote. As the incumbent resists demands for a rerun, fears grow that a Moscow-backed assault on the protesters is about to take place. Simon is trying to broker a deal to prevent bloodshed and shore up a transition to democracy.

AD Miller.
AD Miller. Photograph: Alamy

Cut forward 12 years, and Simon is back in London, travelling on the tube, during a day off from his casual employment as a minicab driver. Estranged from his daughter and ex-wife, and with his diplomatic career in tatters, he suddenly encounters Olesya, the young protester with whom he formed a close attachment in the heady days of late 2004. He pursues her with discomfiting single-mindedness, desperate to find out where she’s living and what she’s been up to.

These two strands of the novel unfold in parallel: Simon in the past, attempting to head off disaster in the square, trying to cut deals with a shady Ukrainian oligarch called Mr Kovrin; and Simon in the near-present, stripped of all his power and status and driven to understand what lay behind his downfall. The promise that we will finally understand the nature of this mystery is what draws us through the book.

At its best, Independence Square made me think of a 21st-century Graham Greene novel, an absorbing thriller informed by emotional intelligence and a deep understanding of geopolitics. There’s more than a trace of Greene in the book’s sharply drawn minor characters, its insights into the world of diplomacy and political deal-making, and the contrary pulls of duty and desire. Where the novel falls short of Greene is in its over-elaborate structure, which switches between tenses and points of view in a way that feels unnecessarily complex. My other quibble is that the final revelation about what torpedoed Simon’s career is delayed beyond the point at which a reader will find themselves guessing it – so that it lands with an “oh” rather than a “wow”.

As in the bestselling Snowdrops, Miller has a sharp eye for the pathos and absurdities of post-Soviet life: the homeless veterans in Kiev’s icy underpasses, the currency exchanges where the volatile hryvnia plunges in value as the threat of military intervention grows, “the red digits ticking over like the timer on a bomb”. The most compelling and memorable character is Kovrin, a carnivorous Ukrainian success story who seems to hold the key both to achieving a peaceful outcome in the square and to understanding what triggered the implosion of Simon’s career. Simon sees Kovrin as an unpleasant but inevitable part of Ukraine’s transition to good governance – to the “normal country” so desired by the protesters, a place of no bribes and transparent laws. Kovrin regards Simon as hopelessly naive. “You want to help, shiny armour?” he teases.

Kovrin takes great pleasure in illuminating the nature of Ukraine’s political reality to Simon. His little lectures are a chilly but clear-sighted amalgam of Marx and Machiavelli. In a similar vein, Olesya laments Simon’s inability to perceive what’s really going on. “He wants the world to be made from good and evil, and it is not, it is money against the rest.” The underlying argument of the novel is that the seemingly obscure struggles of Ukraine over the past 30 years are a portent of our own political destinies. “Money against the rest” certainly seems like a fitting epitaph for our times.

• Marcel Theroux’s The Secret Books is published by Faber. Independence Square is pubished by Harvill Secker (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.