INDEPENDENCE SQUARE
AD MILLER
Harvill Secker, 221pp, £14.99
AD Miller, former Moscow correspondent of the Economist and author of the Booker-shortlisted Snowdrops, visits for his latest novel the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. The main protagonist is a washed-up, disgraced British diplomat called Simon Davey and is set between the present day and 2004. In the
Spectator David Patrikarakos described how Davey ‘one day on the Tube, sees the cause (so he believes) of his downfall. She is a woman called Olesya whom he met years earlier during the Orange Revolution’.
Patrikarakos enjoyed
Independence Square, ‘a thriller, a political novel and a statement on our times’. And Jeremy Duns in the
Times was also full of praise: ‘AD Miller recreates the heady days of the Orange Revolution in evocative detail.’
In the Financial Times, however, Adam Lebor thought the novel’s construction unsatisfactory. ‘Its motor is the reader’s hunger to find out how Davey’s life, once so gilded, could crash so badly. But we already know nothing ends well; not Davey’s career, not Olesya’s idealism, not the Orange Revolution. After a while this triple whammy of negatives slows the story down. The ending wobbles as Davey seems set to follow a particular track; an event unfolds from which there is almost no point of return, then abruptly reverses.’
And Anthony Quinn in the Guardian thought it was perhaps ‘a pity that the story’s climax is a long philosophical argument on the benefits of self interest...you sense at this stage the journalist in Miller muscling out the novelist, offering a mini-lecture on realpolitik to bring us up to date on the sick soul of Europe.’
‘AD Miller recreates the heady days of the Orange Revolution in evocative detail’