can fail as an achievement if it be vivid without
being illuminating. Does the narra- tor — and does the reader — mature and extend his understanding of the Russian world as a result of this record of heat and meetings and snacks and phone-calls? For any book to be satisfactory, the detail needs to coalesce round a core; the partic- ular, if it's going to pull its weight, needs to be a running commentary on the general. There must be a figure in the carpet.
If there is a figure in this carpet it is the record of a love affair, a brush more or less in the dark with a young Russian soldier. From his encounters with this Dima the narrator learns nothing, about Dima or about Russia; he starts baffled and ends baffled. All this is touching and poignant and admirably sketched, but it is static, and there is hardly enough to Dima even to sustain curiosity. Travelling for the first time to Dima's flat, the narrator is made to descend into the fearful depths of the sub- way system, below the quaking marsh of St Petersburg, as a precondition of his visit. His feelings are well described. Now (I thought) with this 'threshold incident' the lover will be initiated into understanding the Russian nature of the city and its inhabitants. But Fallowell's narrator emerges from the underground as naive as ever: it had been just another picaresque incident. The love affair, heartbreaking to the narrator and put across to the reader full of tenderness, never had sufficient sub- stance or development to draw together into a pattern the day-to-day happenings which make up the book.
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