The Senility of Vladimir P

Michael Honig

Atlantic, £8.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

A COUPLE of decades hence, the aged Vladimir Putin is being nursed in a dacha 35km south-west of Moscow. He has been suffering from dementia for the last six years and has reached the stage at which he has little comprehension of what is going on around him, preferring to spend his days watching documentaries about himself and reliving old conversations with sparring partners from his past. He might forget what he’s just eaten, but Vladimir has perfect recall of the devastating putdowns he dished out to his opponents. His moments of greatest distress come when memories resurface of a long-dead Chechen, whose significance is understood only by Vladimir himself. At these times, the Putin of old re-emerges, springing judo moves on the imaginary Chechen’s disembodied head.

The dacha has a staff of 40, but no one is closer to Vladimir than his nurse, Nikolai Sheremetev. Honourable, naive Sheremetev is the only person on the payroll who doesn’t have some kind of racket going. He’s so honest and trusting that, until it’s spelt out for him, he has no idea that the cook, the housekeeper, the gardener and the security staff are all on the take in some way. He is the last hold-out against corruption, but what price Sheremetev’s scruples when his nephew has been arrested for writing a subversive blog post and the prosecutor is demanding a massive bribe to drop the charges?

As Vladimir continues to fade away, the dacha is starting to fall apart. Stepanin, the cook, is outraged by the regime imposed by the new housekeeper, Barkovskaya, as it infringes on his ill-gotten earnings, and their feud over meat suppliers results in a pit being dug in the garden and topped up daily with decomposing chickens. As time goes on, their feud will have worse repercussions than a bad smell.

The dacha is, of course, supposed to be Russia in microcosm, and the question troubling Honig’s characters is whether or not Putin himself can be blamed for the country’s culture of corruption. Was Russia always destined to be this way, they ask. Could Putin, when he took power, have nudged Russia in a different direction, towards a more democratic, transparent state? If he and his cronies had shown a little idealism rather than plundering the country and siphoning money into their bank accounts, might Russia be a better place?

Honig’s characters argue the case forcefully enough, and Vladimir himself (though Putin apologists will hate this) unrepentantly admits, in one of his imaginary conversations, to remaking Russia in his own image. But, happily, a novel that could have been weighed down by allegory, or run aground on its own didacticism, suffers neither fate. Honig has drawn on his medical background for a sadly convincing portrayal of a dementia sufferer, and the book’s elements of satire and black comedy are balanced with a lean and disciplined narrative in which the sympathetic, even admirable, protagonist Sheremetev comes up against a dilemma which has no right answer.