The tattered remains of the former Soviet Union is the setting for this extravagant satire, which channels influences from Evelyn Waugh to John Kennedy O’Toole to paint an often amusing and sometimes uncomfortable picture of life in the new Russia. Misha Vanberg, aka Snack Daddy, is our hero and narrator. The corpulent Misha is a wealthy young man, the son the 1,238th richest man in Russia – having been sent to the US for his University education, where he acquired a love of hip hop and New York’s urban culture, as well as the curvy ghetto-chick Rouenna, he is back in Russia at the opening of the book, somehow neither truly Russian nor properly American. The assassination of his father by a rival mafia boss leaves him in control of his father’s money, but unable to do the one thing that would really make him happy – he can’t go back to America, because his father’s role in a murder means the US State Department won’t give him a Visa.

Lonely Misha consoles himself with his plans to set up a charity in his own name, and indulges in traditional Russian pass-times such as the consumption of extravagant quantities of vodka. During one drinking session, an acquaintance suggests a way for him to obtain a Belgian passport, which if not as good as an American Visa would certainly give him the opportunity to get out of Russia. To seal the deal, Misha must travel to the (fictional) former Soviet Republic of Absurdistan, on the Caspian Sea. It’s when he gets there that the fun really starts.

The Absurdi nation consists of two tribes with historical enmities that go back generations. When Misha arrives things seem peaceful enough, and he is embraced by families who knew his late father, who clearly scored a major victory in the national sport – screwing over the American oil companies who are there to exploit oil reserves in the Caspian. Misha installs himself in a hotel that is dominated by American oil men, whose contempt for the local population could not be more clear, and led by his sexual appetites, takes up with a young woman who is the daughter of a prominent tribal chief. Before he knows it, he has effectively taken sides in a developing civil war. The pointlessness and brutality of the war is reminiscent of the casual violence of Joseph Heller and the twisted political logic of Evelyn Waugh and even Alice in Wonderland – it starts out almost as a joke, a publicity stunt to get the world’s attention to focus on Absurdistan, but deteriorates in to something fuelled by ethnic tension and age-old hatreds, reminiscent of Bosnia and Chechnya. As the ironically titled Minister for Multiculturalism for one of the factions, Misha is hopelessly out of his depth, a true innocent abroad.

Abusrdistan is, in places, a very funny book, and in places a very dark one. Misha is a very interesting narrator, simultaneously very self-aware (he is under no illusions regarding his weight and appearance) and deeply naive when it comes to politics and the motivations of others. We get both a satirical view of how the world sees America (the author’s adopted home) and a vivid dissection of the ills of post-Soviet Russia (where the author was born); while the references to Halliburton and oil make clear the comparisons between Iraq and Absurdistan, these topical elements somehow don’t quite sit comfortably with Misha’s vividly realised inner life, and as the plot dissolves towards the end of the book, you get the feeling that an opportunity has been missed to turn a good novel in to a truly great one.

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