I enjoyed Miller's Snowdrops when it first came out in paperback. In the years since I rather lost track of him. But he's back on familiar ground in Independence Square. Given it's about Ukrainian politics and the need to keep Russia at bay, it could have been the book of its time. Unfortunately it came out in 2020 and is about the Orange Revolution of 2004. It therefore missed the boat.
The next problem is that it's a story in two halves. One half, running chronologically, is the past tense account of events in and around the titular square. English diplomat Simon Davey encounters the young protestor Olesya Zarchenko. Both are sucked in to the circle of dodgy oligarch Kovrin. They work to avert potential geo-political catastrophe.
We all know, of course, how that works out. But in the other half of the story, which runs alternately with the above, Simon is in London fourteen years later, scratching a living driving Ubers. He sees Olesya at a Tube station and briefly considers pushing her off the platform in front of an incoming train. He doesn't. He follows her to what he thinks is her upmarket home, then onto her actual home where she shares a single room with another woman and where she and Simon reunite. What is she doing here? Who betrayed Simon to the press, thereby unleashing the wolves of the CIA?
The answer to both questions, seemingly, is Kovrin. But in fact...
I liked the more contemporary story better. It was in present tense, first person, and allowed more emotional engagement. The problem with the novel, though, is the startlingly thin nature of the story. How this is possible, given the setting and the incidental resonance since February 2022, I cannot fathom. But, fact is, Miller somehow manages to make it difficult, for this reader at any rate, to care.
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